Beethoven wrote sympathetically for the cello throughout his career, from the ardent, lyrical voice of the Op.1 piano trios onwards, and he rarely subjugated the instrument to its basso continuo role still prevalent in the works of Mozart and Haydn. He never contemplated a cello concerto, but his five sonatas, plus sets of crowd-pleasing variations on popular themes by Handel and Mozart, have attracted the great cellists of every era. However, the record catalogue boasts comparatively few period-instrument accounts, made according to the performing principles and bowing of Beethoven’s day, and so this new Brilliant Classics set promises a new and refreshing perspective on some perennially audacious masterpieces. The Op.5 Sonatas are intended to astound as well as to innovate. For the first time in the history of the cello repertoire, both instruments were invested with equal importance. The piano writing is scarcely less bold and quick-thinking, requiring both musicians to turn on a sixpence from soloist to accompanist and back again, emulating the more equal dialogue of a string quartet. Formal novelty is also in evidence, in the expanded slow introductions and then in the four-movement structures of Op.69 and Op.102 No.1. In every way the last sonatas belong to Beethoven’s late period: posing questions to listeners as well as performers with every bar, transcending the limits of the instruments to sing and shout, contemplate and argue. The partnership of Mario Testori and Costantino Mastroprimiano is an experienced one, with a well-received Brilliant Classics album (95023) of late-Classical sonatas by Hummel, Moscheles and Ries to its credit. The pianist also contributes an enlightening booklet essay to this valuable contribution to the Beethoven anniversary year.

Pianist Charles Foreman made his debut in 1972 with the Chicago Civic Orchestra conducted by David Gilbert, playing the Brahms B-flat Concerto. Since then, he has won prizes in Canadian and U.S. piano competitions, received two Canada Council grants for study and performance in Europe, performed over 30 times with orchestras, and played over 750 solo and chamber recitals in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, and the U.S. Praised for his superb musicianship, his formidable technique, his vast repertoire, and his imaginative programming, Foreman has created several recital series, concluding Canada’s first complete cycle of the solo piano works of Chopin in March, 2009. He completed his first cycle of the thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas in 2005, to sold-out houses and standing ovations, a series he repeated from February, 2015 to May, 2016. In 2001, Foreman concluded his two-season “Sounds of a Century” project, ten recitals of twentieth-century piano music, one for each decade. On this release he presents works by Beethoven.

With this awaited release of Beethoven’s magnificent 9th symphony, the TACET cycle of Beethoven symphonies on SACD is complete. The inspiration behind this performance is Friedrich Schiller’s quote, “All men will be brothers.” Whether that means a utopia or an illusion, conductor Wojciech Rajski attempts to make this a reality with his Polish Chamber Philharmonic and the Schola Cantorum Gedanensis choir. The soloists featured on this recording hail from all corners of the globe, and include Bomi Lee from Korea, Agnieszka Rehlis and Krystian Adam Krzeszowiak from Poland, and Tareq Nazmi from Egypt. Of this stereo version, Remy Franck writes in Pizzicato: “…there is no false solemnity here, just happy, untroubled upbeat joy…” between the incredible interpretation and the remarkable sound quality, this release is a must-have for any reference collection.

The Beethoven year is about to begin and the first contributions by various artists to the anniversary are already being published The focus will be on the evergreens that will attract the attention of the public As a versatile and extremely productive artist, Beethoven has also created a number of works that are virtually unknown today This extensive 9 album edition is dedicated exactly to these works and its tracklisting reads like a sparkling treasure chest Rarely heard arias in various languages, Contredanses, minuets, Ländlers the Piano Concerto No 0 music for a knight's ballet, fun loving and sometimes not entirely youth free canons Over 10 ½ hours full of works by Ludwig van Beethoven, which were written throughout his life and cast a new, unusual glance on his musical oeuvre and his perhaps sometimes not so serious character.

Idil Biret’s nineteen volume Beethoven Edition consisting of the thirty two sonatas, five concertos, the Choral Fantasy and the piano transcriptions of the nine symphonies (by Franz Liszt) was recorded in fifty two days during a long period which spread over of twenty three years. In the spring of 1985 when Jacques Leiser, then Idil Biret’s agent in the USA, introduced Biret to Michel Devos, an independent producer in Belgium, she could not have imagined that this would lead to a recording odyssey lasting over twenty years. When Devos suggested an LP with the Liszt transcriptions of two Beethoven symphonies, Idil, who had earlier recorded other Liszt transcriptions, agreed immediately. When these recordings were found to be of exceptionally high quality by EMI, Idil Biret was asked to record all the nine symphonies which gained universal acclaim. When she performed the nine symphonies in four concerts during one week at the Montpellier Festival in France in July 1986, this was announced as “The Event of the Festival.” After an interval of eight years, in the midst of a busy period of recording the works of Brahms, Chopin and Rachmaninov for Naxos in Heidelberg, Biret went back to Brussels in 1994 to record three sonatas of Beethoven to test how these would sound in the same location where the symphonies were recorded. The decision was then made in 2001 to record all the remaining sonatas and to release them together with the nine symphonies. With one or two sessions a year where a number of sonatas were recorded in each, the work was completed in 2008. All the works of Beethoven for piano and orchestra including the Choral Fantasy were also recorded in January/February of 2008 with the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antoni Wit, the music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic.

In his first decade in Vienna, Beethoven seems to have been preoccupied with music for wind instruments. The best-known example is his Quintet in E flat major, Op. 16, which he arranged at the same time for piano quartet. He also wrote music for dances and settings of folk songs, and reflected the public’s interest in automata by writing for musical clock. The Napoleonic wars were mirrored in Beethoven’s music of the period, especially in his military compositions such as a series of Marches and the Equali, scored for trombones, which were later played at his funeral. The Naxos Beethoven Complete Edition 90-album boxed set (8.500250) features a host of fragments, sketches, drafts, arrangements, transcriptions and reconstructions. Following Sergio Gallo’s Piano Pieces and Fragments (8.574131) and the Fine Arts Quartet’s Fugues and Rarities for String Quartet (8.574051) albums, this new release includes many lesser-known works that will attract connoisseurs and completists, and casual listeners as well.

One of the least explored areas of Beethoven’s compositions is the miscellaneous sequence of canons, early exercises in counterpoint, mature jokes and jeux d’esprit that he wrote over many years. He composed a two-part canon for the composer Hummel in 1816 and in 1823 one for four voices (written in a tavern) for Count Lichnowsky. He also wrote birthday and Christmas greetings for colleagues and friends, and songs that punned on recipients’ names or poked fun at them. Viennese chamber choir Cantus Novus Wiendraws on an extensive repertoire of Baroque, Classical, and contemporary music, including a cappella choral music, oratorios by Handel and Haydn, and requiems by Mozart, Brahms, Verdi, and Fauré. Contemporary music is one of the choir’s focal points, including regular world premieres of commissioned pieces. The choir has been conducted by Thomas Holmes since 2001. Ensemble Tamanial is a vocal quartet based in Vienna, Austria. The ensemble was established to provide a place in which to grow and learn as musicians through undertaking soloist responsibility across a wide variety of musical styles, including Renaissance, Classical, Romantic and also in contemporary works. For these Beethoven recordings the ensemble have been working closely with Thomas Holmes as their musical director and wish to express their deep gratitude.

It is good to have Pinchas Zukerman returning to the Beethoven Violin Concerto. It was in the late 1970s that he made his earlier DG recording with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a fine spacious reading, which I have unfortunately not had a chance to hear on CD format. The comparison with the LP brings home an extra depth in the new reading. If in the earlier version the characteristic warmth of Zukerman's tone marked the whole performance, this one brings greater emphasis on purity and refinement. The violin sound has less fat on it, and in this work that helps to convey an extra inner intensity. Such passages as the coda of the first movement are the more poignant in their seeming simplicity of expression, hushed to an extreme pianissimo. Zukerman is also stricter with himself over maintaining steady speeds, again purifying his concept. The result may be more disciplined, but it is never too rigid, with even the opening of the finale on the main rondo theme given a sense of gentle communing, not as outward-going as before. The recording helps, with the solo violin less forwardly balanced, and though the playing of the tuttis fails to match the soloist in intensity, the orchestra comes alive the moment he enters.

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [11/1992]
reviewing the Violin Concerto, originally released as RCA 61219

-------

Collegium Aureum records are valuable as practical musicology, and it is irrelevant to say you prefer your Beethoven on modern instruments; this disc is a supplement, not a takeover bid. Badura-Skoda, who presumably directs the small band from the keyboard, plays a Broadwood Grand of 1816 and you soon get used to its tinny quality. Franzjosef Maier has his marvellous unmodernized Guarnerius of 1726, and like the excellent cellist he eschews vibrato. It is sometimes thought that when the balance fails in Beethoven the fault lies with our modern instruments but as this record shows this is not necessarily the case. Semiquavers in the bass of orchestral tuttis are still inaudible (as in the first climax of the first movement) and in the development when the soloists are all playing loud triplet quavers you can't hear the thematic fragments on the woodwind; you never can, and I suppose Beethoven is to blame. Old instruments can create as many problems as hey solve. This Broadwood Grand does not smother as much detail on other instruments as a modern piano, but it does not impinge on our consciousness as it should in its very first entry. One bonus is the sot/a race effect Beethoven asks for in the finale (modern instruments are never so self-effacing) and another is the proper sound of a Beethoven-period sustaining pedal being held through the last three bars. There is some very good playing from all three soloists in this finale. I suspected a slightly closer microphone was being used in the cadenza, but in general they have been under-emphasized by the recording engineers to help produce an early nineteenth-century sound. The whole disc provides a most rewarding experience.

-- Gramophone [8/1978]
reviewing the original LP release of the Triple Concerto

Following on from their universally acclaimed debut album, Music for a Prussian Salon, the period wind ensemble Boxwood & Brass returns to Resonus with the first of two volumes of Beethoven Transformed. In this major new project, the group explores the status of wind music in early-nineteenth century Vienna through original and arranged music by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and his contemporaries. In this first album, Beethoven’s Op. 71 Sextet is paired with the Op. 20 Septet in E-flat major, arranged for six-part Harmonie by his prolific pupil, Carl Czerny (1791–1857). Founded in 2013, Boxwood & Brass brings together the emerging generation of British period wind-instrument players to advocate for neglected wind chamber music and harmoniemusik of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Members of the group work regularly with top orchestras from across Europe, including the Orchestra Revolutionnaire et Romantique, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Gabrieli, L’Orchestra de Champs-Elysees and Spira Mirabilis. In-depth scholarly research into style and repertoire is important to the ensemble, as is promoting the highest standards in period wind playing.

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his 10 Violin Sonatas between 1797 and 1812. The Sonatas 1 to 9 were written between 1797 and 1803 before almost ten years passed until his opus 96. The composer premiered all his early piano works himself, which might be why he called them "Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violin." In the spirit of W. A. Mozart's redefinition of the genre, who elevated the violin from its previously only accompanying role, and in spite of today's common designation as "violin sonatas," both instrumental parts in Beethoven's sonatas are on an equal musical footing. In 2020 - the anniversary year surrounding Beethoven's 250th birthday - the Korean violinist Clara-Jumi Kang and her partner on the piano, Sunwook Kim, took on this special cycle of chamber music works. Kang first worked on one of Beethoven's sonatas, the Fifth, at the tender age of eight and can already look back on an extremely successful international career. With Sunwook Kim, she has an exceptionally experienced Beethoven interpreter at her side, whose recordings of the piano sonatas, among others, have received high accolades around the globe. Together they have developed an inspiring and very personal reading of Beethoven's sonatas, of which this complete recording bears impressive witness.

BEETHOVEN: SYMPHONIES NOS 1 &

The young, Venezuelan pianist Walkiria Izaguirre who received her musical training in Vienna presents her debut album with a pure Beethoven program, which features an early, a middle and a late piano sonata and thereby gives an overview of the master’s oeuvre. In her own words, this album is a tribute to one of the most important figures in the history of music, whose musical creativity would reach an unexpected and wonderful development towards freedom and individual expression for eternity. The sonata in F major Op. 10/2 was called one of Beethoven’s most joyful works by Paul Badura-Skoda, the sonata in D major Op. 28 described by him as gentle, idyllic and light-filled to the brim, perhaps a response to the gloomier previous “Moonlight” sonata, a rejection of depression, a move towards friendlier climes, and is also called the “Pastoral” sonata. Finally, the sonata Op. 109 is kept in the ‘mystical’ key of E major, expressing exhilaration, rapture, earthly, and heavenly love. The variation movement’s theme is proof that, despite some contemporary critic’s judgement, Beethoven was indeed capable of writing beautiful melodies.

“No composer has ever lived who speaks so directly to so many people”, said Leonard Bernstein of Ludwig van Beethoven. The great German composer, born in 1770 – 250 years ago in 2020 – had a gift for communication through music that links him directly to Bernstein, one of the 20th century’s great musical communicators. This is nowhere more clear than in a work like the Ninth Symphony, with its rousing message of universal brotherhood. Bernstein was also a significant interpreter of Beethoven’s music, and recorded much of it multiple times.

Sony Classical is proud to re-release Bernstein’s first recorded cycle of Beethoven symphonies, made with the New York Philharmonic between 1958 and 1964. Also included are a collection of Beethoven overtures, first released in 1970, and the Missa solemnis recording of 1960. All recordings are newly or recently remastered. Soloists include Martina Arroyo in the Ninth Symphony, and Eileen Farrell and Kim Borg in the Missa solemnis. Bernstein described Beethoven’s work as “Perhaps the closest music has ever come to universality”, an aim to which Bernstein himself aspired through his composing and education work, as well as his conducting. These recordings, presented in vivid detail, are a testament to two great musical communicators.

Past praise from a previously released edition of this set:

Leonard Bernstein was always a very impressive Beethoven conductor. In the first place, he isn’t all bluster and excess. The first two symphonies have plenty of stylish playing and conducting supporting their energetic cast. Those crucial bass lines in the finale of the Fifth speak more powerfully here than they do in Vienna, and the special affinity that Bernstein has always felt for the Eroica and Seventh Symphonies are very much in evidence. Granted, the Ninth has to make due with an average cast of soloists (Martina Arroyo aside), and the Juilliard Chorus is good but not great, but then this is true of so many versions of this symphony; certainly Bernstein’s interpretation has plenty of fire and a genuinely hushed intensity in the Adagio. The Pastoral too has lots of rustic character, with the last three movements particularly well paced.

The overtures are marvelous: Leonore No. 3 and The Consecration of the House are especially outstanding.

Sonically these recordings have held up well; they capture the performances with a certain unvarnished directness that seems to suit the interpretations.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Fortepiano (Viennese action) was restored by J. van den Hamel, Antwerp 1996 and tuned by Claire Chevallier.

The long-awaited Beethoven year has turned out different from what everyone expected. The major project of Nike Wagner, artistic director of the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, has also had to be postponed for a year. It was to include amongst other things all of Beethoven's symphonies in the piano version by Franz Liszt, and Boris Bloch would have been involved in this project. And yet for many People Beethoven is omnipresent, and not only in 2020, but every year, indeed every day. Boris Bloch’s real work and passion for Beethoven began in New York City, after meeting his fellow student, the German pianist Michael Korstick, who is rated by critics as an outstanding Beethoven interpreter, his repertoire encompassing all of Beethoven's sonatas and concertos. It was he who sparked Bloch’s true love for Beethoven and defined his understanding of his style and spirit. On this double album recording Boris Bloch presents various works by Beethoven, including the Moonlight Sonata and the "Storm Sonata" in D minor.