Best of Idil Biret

The Turkish pianist Idil Biret celebrated her 75th birthday in November 2016. To approach and honor this milestone, her own label (IBA), distributed by the now-venerable Naxos, has been releasing a series of comprehensive sets traversing her entire career. The word comprehensive is not used lightly; in this set alone, the ninth in the series, we hear performances from her earliest radio broadcasts in 1949 to July of 2016, allowing Biret's changing approaches to these composers' works full documentation and exploration; it's quite a journey, and I have heard no other pianist that has made the complex but still intuitively simple interpretive decisions Biret has made. With these enduring compositions as multisided sculptures to be reexamined, the set constitutes a voyage through the developing art of a child prodigy. It goes a long way toward answering questions about where the preternaturally gifted interpreter goes when convention and career opportunity become subservient to artistic pursuit. May it be an example to those embarking on a similar journey. (Prof. Marc Medwin)