Ludwig van Beethoven
1051 products
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis (Documentary And Performance) / Bernius, Kammerchor Stuttgart [Blu-Ray]
Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is the one work the composer admired above all his compositions. It was written for his great patron and friend Archduke Rudolf of Austria at around the same time that he embarked on his Ninth Symphony and as the writer Donald Tovey noted, ‘there is no choral and no orchestral writing, earlier or later, that shows a more thrilling sense of the individual colour of every chord.’ This insightful documentary follows Frieder Bernius on a journey of discovery as he immerses himself in Beethoven’s monumental masterpiece in preparation for a recording.
Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 3 (Live)
Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2 & Rondo, WoO 6 / Giltburg, Petrenko, RLPO
Beethoven’s first two piano concertos share an abundance of lyric and virtuosic qualities. Concerto No. 1 in C major is expansive and richly orchestrated with a sublime slow movement that is tender and ardent, and a finale full of inventive humor. Concerto No. 2 in B flat major marries energy with elegance, reserving poetic breadth for its slow movement and quirky wit for the finale. Also included is the jovial Rondo, WoO 6, which Beethoven originally intended to be the finale of Concerto No. 2.
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REVIEWS:
Here’s a very promising start to what I assume will be a new Beethoven piano concerto cycle, featuring performances not otherwise included in Naxos’ “complete” Beethoven box. Boris Giltburg plays both works with the youthful panache that they require–the kind that makes you forget about any formal issues and just revel in the virtuoso passagework and good tunes. The standard for comparison in this coupling is Argerich/Sinopoli on DG–you might think an unmatchable team, at least pianistically, but Giltburg more than holds his own. Indeed, in Concerto No. 2 he matches Argerich’s fleet timing in the finale (and other movements) almost exactly, and in the First Concerto he’s even a bit quicker, all without sacrificing subtleties of touch, dynamics and phrasing for mere velocity.
Of course there are difference–welcome ones too. In the first concerto, Giltburg adds a couple of minutes to the central Largo, producing a genuine specimen of that particular tempo designation. His legato playing is beautifully sustained, making this early example of Beethovenian lyricism a real gem. Petrenko accompanies with real flair, proving himself a true partner in both concerto first movements. It’s so much more satisfying to have a real conductor working with a gifted soloist, rather than the single-person-at-the-keyboard approach so frequently offered these days. There’s just no substitute for full-time orchestral guidance. Giltburg also includes the original “Concerto No. 2 finale version” of the Rondo WoO 6, a considerable bonus, as are his intelligent and detailed booklet notes. Fine playing, fine conducting, fine engineering–in short, a really fine release generally.
– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)
Giltburg is a subtle artist who, despite his all-encompassing technique, rarely, if ever, engages in virtuosic grandstanding, preferring instead to interpret the music for maximum artistic yield. Nor does he employ radical or eccentric interpretive approaches. Yet, his performances are never bland but rather quite individual, typically rich in nuance and meaningful detail, and containing insights missing in other versions. His accounts of the two concertos feature well-chosen dynamics, main lines and inner voices perfectly balanced, and judicious tempos. In addition, he realizes these are the works of a youthful Beethoven, not of the mature, profound and serious-minded master of the three concertos that followed. Thus, he points up their lighter, more vivacious characteristics, his dynamics appropriately less weighty and his pacing never too relaxed.
Not only do you get performances to rank with the best, but also a bonus of the splendidly played Rondo.
– MusicWeb International
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis
Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 6 & 7 / Blomstedt, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig
In his Sixth Symphony, the "Pastoral", Ludwig van Beethoven conveys his musical message in such a way that lets the listener literally "see" images of beautiful nature, tempestuous storms, and shepherds singing in the fields, whereas in his Seventh Symphony, Beethoven lets the music speak for itself. The performances of these works by the Gewandhausorchester under its conductor laureate Herbert Bomstedt give the uplifting feeling that the intentions of both composer and performers are united in serving the musical message. In the lively, subtly differentiated interpretation of the works, sincere happiness, deep respect, piety, joyful, serenity and an affinity to nature as well as passion, vitality and spirit can all be felt. This is what the "authenticity" of making music is all about. The humanist and musician Herbert Blomstedt embodies this truth in a unique way, creating an atmosphere where the wonders of music all become true.
Baby Needs Beethoven
It's time for Beethoven to be recognized as an important part of the young-of-age or -spirit's musical curriculum. Baby Needs Beethoven is an excellent place to start! This release explores all aspects of Beethoven's more introspective work, with music from his symphonies and chamber works to the solo performances for piano. The pieces chosen may be familiar to many, but there are a few lesser-known gems that will be of interest even to the Beethoven connoisseur.
Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets (1982 Live Recordings) / Juilliard String Quartet
In the 1960s and in the decades following, the Budapest String Quartet’s mantle at Columbia was passed on to the Juilliard String Quartet. Over the years, with some changes in personnel, the ensemble repeatedly set down its famously lean, energetic and expressive interpretations of the Beethoven quartets in New York recording studios. These have remained catalogue staples. Less well known is the Beethoven cycle they recorded live in Washington at the Library of Congress in 1982. Gramophone singled out this complete traversal for its special depth and flexibility. Presented here on 9 albums, this is its first Sony release.
REVIEW:
The slow introduction to the C Major Quartet No. 9 is handled wonderfully, which sets up well for the rest of the movement and the work as a whole. These are followed by nice recordings of the “Harp” and “Serioso” quartets, thus bringing the middle period to an end.
The late quartets open with a really nice recording of the Nos. 12 and 13, with the first of these being particularly fine. The final disc of the nine houses the 15th and 16th quartets, which again receive fairly good recordings. Overall, the tempos selected here tend to be slower than in their earlier recording, which is usual for live recordings.
Overall sound quality is, at times, a bit of an issue here, even taking into account the live nature of these recordings, and overall isn't up to the sound quality of the quartet's highly regarded 1960s studio cycle of these works for RCA.
– MusicWeb International
Beethoven: In Search of New Paths / Koch
| Tobias Koch: “This recording of eleven Beethoven sonatas was made during several recitals entitled Beethoven – in search of new paths. These sonatas were written in short succession from 1797 to 1802: one practically led to the next. It was the same period in which Beethoven is said to have revealed to a friend that he was “dissatisfied with his previous works” and intended to “embark on a new path”. Indeed, in those years, the composer seems to have stepped on the turbo accelerator, innovating sonata form in a series of energetically concentrated experiments. Beethoven’s musical propositions are often bold, unconventional, and extreme, something which we often tend to overlook and smooth out with today’s knowledge of all that was to come. |
Beethoven: String Quartets, Vol. 4 / Borodin Quartet
Beethoven, L. van: Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8
5 PIANO CONCERTOS
Beethoven: Folk Songs / Various
Beethoven: The Middle String Quartets / Cypress String Quartet
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 29, 'Hammerklavier' - Eroica Variations / Aimard
After his acclaimed interpretation of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard returns to PENTATONE with a recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Eroica Variations. The Hammerklavier Sonata is one of the pinnacles of Beethoven’s creative output, and arguably one of the highest mountains to climb for any pianist. To Aimard, it poses one of the most frightening tests of a performer’s life, but one that is as irresistible as it is insurmountable. The dazzling Eroica Variations are nicknamed after Beethoven’s iconoclastic Third Symphony, and employ the melody he would later use as the main theme of the symphony’s finale. Beethoven’s fondness for this melody is evident, as he also used it in his ballet music for The Creatures of Prometheus, as well as in the seventh of his 12 Contredanses. Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time and as a uniquely significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career. He started his exclusive engagement to PENTATONE with a complete recording of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux (2018).
REVIEW:
Having heard Pierre-Laurent Aimard give several intense and impassioned live performances of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata over the past several seasons, his studio recording generally seems reserved and even foursquare by comparison.
To be certain, his exemplary technique allows for no vagaries of voice leading or textural misfires, while Pentatone’s production values do justice to Aimard’s tonal clarity and transparency at quieter dynamic levels. Still, there’s a pre-planned quality about nearly every breath pause, tenuto, caesura, and dynamic hairpin that somewhat dissipates the outer movements’ continuity and momentum. This is not a function of Aimard’s generally conservative tempos, although the fugal finale becomes heavier and less timbrally alluring as the music unfolds (this is true about most performances, to be fair).
Interestingly, in concert Aimard’s outer movements went for broke, while the Adagio sostenuto came off sounding relatively reserved and reticent. Here, however, Aimard’s expressive palette opens up, with a controlled freedom to the rubatos that culminates in a devastating climax. In the rising chain of broken fifths and sixths between hands just before the first-movement recapitulation (measures 224-226), Aimard reads the lower note upbeat as A-natural, rather than the so-called “inspired misprint” A-sharp, vis-à-vis Kempff, Petri, Brendel, and Perahia; I personally prefer A-sharp, as do Schnabel, Solomon, Arrau, and Levit.
Years ago during a public master class I heard Aimard spontaneously launch into a most inspired and unified reading of Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor. Similar inspiration and unity abound throughout his Eroica Variations, with more than a few audacious touches.
I like the force of his right-hand triplets in Variation 2, buttoned by brash left-hand accents at phrase endings, as much as No. 5’s ruminative delicacy. In No. 6, Aimard’s suave, effortlessly dispatched broken octaves enable the offbeat accents their due without pressing the point. All the more surprising that No. 13’s triplet chords and witty melodic appogiaturas don’t match the insouciant thrust one hears from Clifford Curzon. Yet the concluding Fugue has the variety of character and articulation that I expected to encounter more consistently throughout Aimard’s Hammerklavier Fugue.
– ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)
Beethoven: Cello Sonatas, Variations / Rosler, Wurtz
Also featured are the three delightful sets of variations for cello and piano, each modelled on a different aria from Handel's opera Judas Maccabeus and Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, and each (just like the sonatas) placing the piano on an equal footing with the cello throughout. The works are an engaging addition to a collection that marks the return of Israeli/Dutch cellist Timora Rosler and Hungarian pianist Klára Würtz, whose previous Brilliant Classics release 'Cello Rhapsody' (9157) was released to critical acclaim, and which provides a snapshot of the composer's stylistic development over a period of nearly 20 years.
Other information:
- Filling "only" two CD's, the complete works for cello and piano are quintessential and vintage Beethoven. The two youthful Opus 5 sonatas are written in virtuoso concerto style, with an especially glittering role for the piano (Beethoven was a tremendous pianist in his early years), the sonata Op. 69 is in the expansive, sonorous and deep-feeling tonal language of Beethoven's Middle-Period, whereas the two Late sonatas Op. 102 are marvels of originality, experiment, "quirkiness" and humanity.
- The two musicians Timora Rosler and Klára Würtz have been playing together for more than 15 years, having won several chamber music prizes. They performed the Beethoven cycle several times in concert over the years, and their interpretation has ripened to such an extent that the time came to record it. And here it is: every note alive and vibrant, played with gusto and feeling, alternating melancholy and joy, sadness and sheer fun.
- Contains notes on the music and detailed artist biographies.
- Recorded 19--23 January 2013, Sala congressi del Parco naturalistico di Onara, Padua, Italy.
V5: COMPLETE WORKS PIANO TRIO
Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas, Vol. 2 / Giovanni Bellucci
The second volume of Giovanni Bellucci’s Beethoven cycle for Brilliant Classics takes the listener on a journey of six eventful years, from Op.22 of 1800 to the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata of 1806. During that time Beethoven established himself as Vienna’s pre-eminent pianist-composer. He came to regard Op.22 as the best of his ‘early’ sonatas but a sea-change in the deepening of his expression is already evident in the piano-writing of Op.26, with its funeral march ‘in memory of a hero’. There follow the remarkable formal innovations of the Op.27 pair – No.2 immortally inscribed on the popular imagination as the ‘Moonlight’ – and then the smooth, undulating rhythms of the ‘Pastorale’ Op.28. The trio of Op.31 sonatas present a study in contrasts, from the graceful profile of No.1 in G major to the sound and fury of the ‘Tempest’ No.2 and then the hectic momentum of No.3, presaging the concision of works at the end of his ‘middle’ period such as the ‘Serioso’ Quartet and the Eighth Symphony. The proportions of the two-movement Op.54 are even more tautly circumscribed, before the reach of Beethoven’s expressive range for his instrument expands to hitherto undreamt heights in the ‘Waldstein’ Op.53 and the ‘Appassionata’ Op.57. Giovanni Bellucci is among the most strikingly individual of modern pianists. Described by Italian critic Piero Rattalino as ‘a force of nature, vast and palpitating’, he cultivates an old-fashioned richness of piano timbre while still attending to the letter as well as the spirit of Beethoven’s scores. According to Le Monde, ‘he takes us back to the Golden Age of the Piano’. His recordings have been showered with prizes such as Diapason d’Or, Choc, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, CD Maestro etc.
Beethoven: Die Ruinen von Athen / Segerstam, Turku Philharmonic Orchestra
Die Ruinen von Athen (‘The Ruins of Athens’) was composed to celebrate the opening of the new German theatre in Pest in 1812. Designed to accompany the play of that name by August von Kotzebue, its incidental music is substantial enough to form a kind of one-act Singspiel and is full of attractive arias, duets and choruses and includes the famous Turkish March. Though the work’s theme was rooted in Greek mythology, in reality it was explicitly political in nature, celebrating Pest as ‘the new Athens.’ This is the first ever recording of the work with full narration.
Beethoven: Violin Sonatas Nos. 6-8 / Tetzlaff, Vogt
The award-winning duo ensemble formed by Christian Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt are returning to the masterworks of European chamber music with this new album that includes Ludwig van Beethoven’s three violin sonatas from Op. 30.
The expressive and intimate chamber music recordings by the star duo have gathered numerous awards and their previous album also received an ECHO Klassik award in 2017. Beethoven wrote his three Violin Sonatas Op. 30 in 1801 and 1802. They are relatively early works but already pointing towards the direction of Beethoven’s revolutionary 3rd Symphony, Eroica, which was completed in 1803. Although the influence of Haydn is still visible, in these sonatas Beethoven created movements in all the sonatas that are completely untypical and that had never existed before in this way. No wonder that these delightful works belong to the artists’ favorite works by the great composer.
REVIEWS:
Christian Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt make a formidable team: technically right at the top of their game (Tetzlaff’s bow control is phenomenal), and yet at the same time always managing to convey the notion of taking risks.
-- BBC Music Magazine
This is chamber-playing at its most humane; impossible to hear without feeling a renewed love and admiration for music and performers alike.
-- Gramophone
PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3 PIANO SO
MISSA SOLEMNIS
Glenn Gould Plays Beethoven (Live)
Beethoven: Piano Trios, Vol. 1 / Sitkovetsky Trio
With the three piano trios Op. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with entertaining salon music, and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content – especially so in the case of the Trio No. 3 in C minor, Beethoven’s trademark key. It is therefore fitting that the Sitkovetsky Trio has chosen this work to open their cycle of the composer’s piano trios. That the C minor trio was pioneering is illustrated by the fact that Haydn, who at the time was Beethoven’s teacher, advised against its publication. He feared that it would not ‘be understood so quickly and easily’ – but the world as Haydn knew it was clearly changing and the trios became a commercial success as well as harbingers of a new musical aesthetic. Some twenty years later, in 1813 when E. T.A. Hoffmann reviewed the two Op. 70 trios, the new era was firmly established, and to Hoffmann the works confirmed ‘how Beethoven carries the Romantic spirit of music deep within his soul’. Between the two complete trios recorded here, the Sitkovetskys include Beethoven’s last contribution to the piano trio genre, the little Allegretto in B flat major, WoO 39. It was composed in June 1812 for Maximiliane Brentano, the ten-year-old daughter of Franz and Antonie Brentano – or, as it says on the title page of the autograph manuscript, ‘for my little friend Maxe Brentano, to encourage her piano playing’.
Rudolf Serkin Plays Beethoven, Vol. 1 (1958)
SYMPHONIES NO. 6 & 8
Beethoven: The Violin Sonatas / Sunwook Kim, Clara-Jumi Kang
| 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. |
Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonatas nos. 3, 23 & 30
Beethoven: Sonates Vol. 1
