Beethoven's Profound Piano Quartets

The Three Piano Quartets were written when the Composer was only 15 years old.

They are among the most profound of Beethoven's Earliest Compositions.

When Beethoven was very young, He was musically influenced mostly by Christian Neefe a Composer and one of Beethoven's First Music Teachers. He was also highly influenced by Franz Sterkel -- One Of the Best Pianists in Europe at that time as well as by Mozart.

Of all influences on the Young Beethoven, Neefe's was immediate and Mozart's extremely profound.

The First of Beethoven's Quartets is based on Mozart's K- 379/373a, the Second on K 380/374f and the Third on K - 296. All 3 Piano Quartets are in 3 Movements.

The E Flat Major Quartet is unique in that its slow first movement jumps without waiting into an Allegro Con Spirito in E Flat Minor.

The E Flat Minor Movement in Sonata Form features an extremely small development but has some adventurous passages in its recapitulation. The Final Movement is a set of 6 Variations in an ornamental style on a High Classical Era Theme with 2 Eight Measure Segments.

Each of the Segments is repeated, the First Moving to the Dominant and the Second returning to the Tonic. Beethoven follows this pattern in all of the variations the fifth of which is in E Flat Minor.

After the Awesome Variations have been done with the theme returns only slightly differently followed by a movement of the first variation.

It should be remembered right here that The Piano dominates the Musical Scene Completely.

Beethoven Set the D Major Quartet in a more traditional way, with a slow central movement encompassed by two fast ones.

The Opening Allegro is in Sonata Form and is modulated to the dominant Key. Boasting a much larger development section than that of the E Flat Quartet, the movement touches on D Minor before it recapitulates again.

The Second Movement in F Sharp Minor is in two parts and is aptly named Andante Con Moto.

The Piano opens the concluding Rondo with a movement of Youthful Energy dominated by the Keys.

Finally, We come to the Third and Final Piano Quartet. What Does Beethoven have in store for us here ??

The Quartet in C Major has 3 Movements, the second of which is in a laid back F Major.

After a Brief Development Section, Beethoven commences the recapitulation on the subdominant -- a procedure Schubert would make use of in several of his Piano Works.

The Second Movement features some of the most melodic passages of Beethoven's Youthful Days though his tendency to double most of these robs them of some of their delicate nature.

Nearly, all of the Thematic Material in the closing Rondo is concentrated in the Piano Part.

The Art of Playing And Understanding Beethoven's Razumovsky String Quartets

They are not easy listening and even harder to play.

Beethoven's three "Razumovsky" string quartets left both their first performers and the public shocked and suspicious. The violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, whose quartet premiered the Opus 59 works, complained they were unreasonably difficult. After playing the opening solo from the second movement of the first of the three quartets, cellist Bernhard Romberg threw his music to the ground and stamped on it.

What sort of sorry substitute for a tune was this? How insulting to give a cellist of his stature such a banal rhythm, the sort of thing anyone could tap out with a pencil!

Meanwhile, the violinist Felix Radicati is said to have complained these were "not music".

"They are not for you, but for a later age," Beethoven told his critics.

Commissioned in 1802 by Count Razumovsky to write three new quartets, Beethoven surprised his Russian patron by presenting him with lengthy compositions that express intense, shifting emotions. Imagine the scene: the guests at Count Razumovsky's new Viennese palace, after a sumptuous meal, pause on the terrace to look down over the Danube and spires of Vienna; they adjourn to an elaborate concert hall to listen to these brand new works. But the opening music of Opus 59 No 2 is hardly an aid to digestion: two loud chords followed by a bar's silence.

A few bars of breathless, mysterious music and another silence. It was like nothing they had heard before. The complicated rhythms and dialogue between the different parts must have perplexed anyone encountering them for the first time. Schuppanzigh had good reason to feel worried about the music – exposed runs and leaps that cover the whole range of the violin with alarming velocity.

But it was not only the technical demands that disturbed these early interpreters. They suspected that the music was inappropriate – that it did not behave as classical chamber music should. The movement that so offended Romberg is marked sempre scherzando – "always jokingly". With its unpredictable changes of emotion and texture, the musicians probably felt that the joke was at their expense.

A sweet melody has only just got going when it peters out to be replaced by an aggressive rhythm. Very loud passages end abruptly and are superseded by cheeky, quiet music that seems to bear no relation to the previous music. The last bars of the movement feature wrong-sounding notes righted only by emphatic final chords.

The closest thing to a favourable review of Beethoven's new quartets was published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung on 27 February 1807:

"Three new, very long and difficult Beethoven string quartets … are attracting the attention of all connoisseurs. The conception is profound and the construction excellent, but they are not easily comprehended."

Although the Razumovsky Quartets are today among Beethoven's most popular works, it's worth reminding ourselves of those first reactions – which can inform our own approach to this radical music.

The Takács Quartet begins a year-long traversal of the complete Beethoven cycle over six concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Playing the works is a thrilling and daunting experience. We feel like tennis players forced out of position, obliged to draw on our physical and mental resources to raise our game. We have rehearsed this music for many years, but performing a Beethoven quartet still inspires an exhilarating sense of danger.

There's a short passage during the last movement of Opus 59 No 2 that raises our blood pressure however many times we perform it. We throw a three-note figure from one instrument to the next as if engaged in a frantic relay race. No sooner has a player grabbed the baton than it must be passed on to the next, who gives it on to the next, now back to the first, and so on, to create a musical line that whirls us back to the opening tune.

If someone misses an entrance, the resulting hole is as comical as the culprit's desperate attempt to recover. A late entrance results in collision with the following player – who drops the baton altogether while the others wait in confusion, wondering what to do next. In rehearsal such an accident is amusing, in a concert less so.

Playing the passage is easier if we approach it like a technical study, concentrating merely on entering at the right time. But to bring out its mischievous character requires an element of risk. Although we know this passage so well that it whirls around in our heads during sleepless nights, on stage it should sound spontaneous. We vary slightly the dynamics and timing each night – spontaneity helps maintain the illusion that the music is being created for the first time.

The thrill of Beethoven's quartets comes in part from the combination of virtuosic difficulty and emotional intensity. In the second Opus 59 quartet's first movement, sudden changes of dynamics, unexplained silences and breathless digressions draw us into a drama where emotions are barely under control.

It would certainly be easier to manage the music if we could play in a detached manner, keeping our muscles loose and remembering to breathe deeply. Frequent breaks to towel down, eat a banana and do some yoga stretches would be handy in performance as well as rehearsal. Yet the turbulent character of this music is impossible to achieve if the performers appear to be holding back. In rehearsal we often alternate approaches, playing first slowly and comfortably, then with maximum commitment, trusting that our joints will remember to stay supple as we become more emotionally engaged.

Communicating sudden and extreme shifts of emotion in Beethoven's quartets requires a combination of abandon and control. Beethoven follows the whirlwind ending to this first movement with an Adagio molto, apparently composed after contemplating the stars at night.

Celestial serenity brings solace after the turbulence of the first movement, but this shift from one mood to another is a challenge. As we play the first quiet notes with smooth and slow bows, our hearts are still racing from the previous movement. I try to communicate an atmosphere of peaceful wonder aided by a large bead of sweat that tickles its way down my nose before splashing on to the top of my violin.

Our rehearsals give us time to explore different musical possibilities and return to familiar passages to question our interpretation. How best to create the maximum shock with those chords at the beginning of Opus 59 No 2?

Our cellist András worries that we are using too much bow and should focus more on a crisp initial attack. We send him out into the hall to gauge how distance affects the impact. He confirms that the violin sound is too shallow and needs more bite. Geri, our violist, reminds us to freeze in the following silence – the suspense will be lessened if I fidget on my chair.

At the beginning of the slow movement Károly suggests that I play with a less rich sound. When he joins in with the second violin part we will be able to make a purer sound together – more like a church choir. Encouraging each other to try different approaches helps us to stay true to the searching spirit in the music.

Although Beethoven would no doubt be happy that his quartet cycle is now celebrated as mainstream chamber music repertoire, he might have derived his greatest satisfaction from the music's continuing ability to surprise and challenge. He never wanted his performers and audience ever to become too comfortable. The experience of the first players and listeners can still inspire us.

Credits : The Takacs Take on Beethoven's Razumovsky String Quartets
               By Edward Dusinberre
               November 5, 2009
               The Guardian
               United Kingdom 

A Stupendous Task Regarding Beethoven's Complete Piano Sonatas

Andras Schiff has just come to the end of a project to record all of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas for the ECM label, a project he put off for years until he felt he was ready.

"For me, these sonatas are the most stupendous journey. They give a complete picture of how Beethoven developed though his creative life."

Preparing these pieces meant first of all paying close attention to the text. Schiff found this could sometimes yield surprises. "Take the famous Moonlight Sonata," he says.

"Beethoven marks it 'senza sordino' [without mutes] throughout, and in piano music that means 'without dampers'. That blurs all the harmonies together, which at that date was a very bold thing to do, and most pianists shy away from it." But not this one.

Another example comes in Beethoven's most titanic piano sonata, the famous Hammerklavier.

"Many people say that the metronome mark of the opening movement is simply impossible, and there are quite a few other pianists, even great ones, who make it seem very heavy and turgid. But it's not impossible, it's just difficult."

But what about that famous leap for the left hand at the beginning, which strikes terror into every pianist?

"Well, yes, it's really dangerous at that speed, but that's how it's supposed to be. You know, I would rather cut my hand off than divide that leap between the two hands, the way some pianists do."

This "close reading" of Beethoven underlies several striking moments that you might think are simply Schiff's personal take on the music. There's a moment in his recording of the Hammerklavier where he makes an enormous pause on a particular chord.

"Yes, I know the chord you mean. That's an example of how analysing the way a piece works helps you to make it more expressive. That chord is so remote from the main key, and I wanted to emphasise that sense of being at the furthest point from home."

But not everything Schiff finds in these great pieces is so abstract. Humour is there, too. "You know that G major sonata, the one where the hands are misaligned?" he asks. "To me, it's like a parody of those pianists who can't or won't play with the hands together.

"The slow movement of that sonata is humorous, too. It's full of exaggerated operatic pathos, with this florid melody over a simple bass. If you take it seriously, it's absurd. I think Alfred Brendel was right when he described it as a parody of Italian opera.

"One thing we know about Beethoven is that he was really annoyed that Rossini's music was so much more popular in Vienna than his, and this sonata is a kind of revenge."

At the opposite pole are the moments of stillness, where Beethoven seems to be peering into the infinite. "I love these moments, which often sit right next to a bit of rough humour. This is what gives Beethoven his Shakespearian breadth.

"In his late sonatas, Beethoven creates aural symbols of the transcendent, in a way no other composer had before him. Take the very last piano sonata he wrote. The first movement is heavy and earth-bound; the second lifts up to heaven. The sound has no bass, it seems to float at a great height, and time is suspended."

Finally, Schiff is starting to get animated. As he talks, he makes arabesques with his hands, as if moulding an imagined musical phrase. What fires this man is the never-ending process of getting closer to a great work, a process that involves so much more than mere accuracy.

"You know, as a performer you have duties and you have liberties," he says.

"And one of the liberties is highlighting those moments where the music is at a crossroads. You can help the listener to be aware that the music has an inner freedom, so it could have gone another way at that point.

"The final instalment of Andras Schiff's complete Beethoven sonata cycle was released on the ECM label on Oct 29, 2007. He appeared with bass Robert Holl at the Wigmore Hall on Nov 13, 2007.

Credits : How Andras Schiff Completed All Beethoven's Sonatas
              By Ivan Hewett
              23 October 2008, The Telegraph
              United Kingdom 

Anne Sophie Mutter and Beethoven's Absorbing String Trios

It seems that in regard to string trios, three’s a crowd, with little appeal for composers who since the Baroque era have preferred to write for string quartets or other chamber formations.

The catalog for musical threesomes is relatively small: Boccherini wrote a dozen pieces for violin, viola and cello, and Mozart contributed a significant work. In the 20th century, composers, including Webern, Xenakis and Schoenberg, added to the genre. Beethoven wrote five string trios early in his career, three of which were performed on Sunday afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall by the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, the cellist Lynn Harrell and the violist Yuri Bashmet.

The focal point in this celebrity trio was certainly Ms. Mutter, artist in residence at the New York Philharmonic this season. The three musicians have different performing styles and here Mr. Bashmet and Mr. Harrell seemed content to play second fiddle to Ms. Mutter’s more dominant personality.

Beethoven’s string trios, now infrequently performed, were all written before 1798; when he began composing string quartets shortly afterward, he never revisited the string-trio genre.

The afternoon concluded with the earliest work on the program, the String Trio in E flat (Op. 3), Beethoven’s first effort in the genre, written before 1794. This sunny work echoes Mozart in sound and structure (if not in substance), with the same six-movement layout as Mozart’s Divertimento for String Trio (K. 563).

Here and in the two works before intermission, Ms. Mutter was the more aggressive player, her powerful sound a contrast to Mr. Bashmet’s warm, buttery tone (too infrequently heard throughout the concert) and Mr. Harrell’s more lyrical approach.

The program opened with a fast-paced rendition of the String Trio in C minor (Op. 9, No. 3), a key that Beethoven frequently used and that is often associated with his stormy artistic character. The opening movement hints at the turbulence to come in some of his string quartets.

Credits : The New York Times
               November 15, 2010 

Getting To The Heart of Beethoven

The Budapest String Quartet has always been my standard-bearer for chamber music. I grew up listening to their recordings, and specially admired not only their gorgeous sound, but also the uncanny interaction among all four players, even when there were changes in personnel. They had a way of playing as if they were speaking to each other, expressing deep and sometimes complicated feelings.

One of my most memorable concert experiences was the only time I ever heard the Budapest in person, when I was 20. The concert was sold out, but the management decided to sell seats on the stage. It was like being in a room and overhearing an enthralling conversation only a few feet away.

I learned the Beethoven quartets under two remarkable circumstances. I took an amazing course on the quartets in college, directed by the great violinist and historian Boris Schwarz (no relation). Instead of playing recordings, he assembled a string quartet from the faculty with himself on first violin.

Each musical illustration was presented by the live musicians, and after each lecture, the group would play the entire quartet. One summer, my undergraduate mentor invited me to house-sit at her Greenwich Village studio while she was on vacation. I wouldn't have to pay rent if I promised to listen to her recordings of the Budapest Quartet playing Beethoven.

The Beethoven quartets are, maybe along with his 32 piano sonatas, a kind of lifelong spiritual autobiography. Like Shakespeare, Beethoven starts out by showing his influences while he is already striking out on his own, keeping well within the old 18th-century formal boundaries but leaving behind the sublime nuances of Mozart and the refined wit of Haydn for a new Romantic energy.

When he returns to quartet writing in the middle of his career, his ambitions are more vast. He expands the very nature of the string quartet.

The works are denser and grander yet more personal, like Shakespeare's dark comedies. Near the end of his career, Beethoven completes five more quartets, and these so-called "late quartets" rank among the most extraordinary compositions in all of music — longer than any previous string quartet, infinitely more complex in form as well as in content.

The quartet No. 15 in A-minor became the model for T.S. Eliot's great poetic meditation on time, the Four Quartets. One of the quartets is in seven movements, instead of the usual four. One movement — a Great Fugue — is so convoluted and intense, it's on the edge of atonality, and it's so long that Beethoven ended up making it a separate, independent Opus.

There are three complete recorded cycles of the 16 Beethoven string quartets by the Budapest Quartet. My touchstone is still the set they made for Columbia in the early 1950s, playing the magnificent instruments owned by the Library of Congress. This complete series has never been issued on CD in this country. There's also a remarkable series on the Bridge label: live concerts at the Library of Congress between 1940 and 1962.

And now, more than 50 years after its original LP release, Sony has finally issued a CD of the studio recordings the Budapest Quartet made in the late '50s and early '60s, in stereo. Some of these performances are less subtle and less purely beautiful than the earlier set, but they have their own large dimension of drama and power and heart, and are equally indispensable.

Credits : Budapest Quartet Gets To The Heart Of Beethoven
              By Lloyd Schwartz
              October 16, 2012 

Beethoven's Amazing Piano Trios

An intuitive collaboration between Alexander Melnikov, Isabelle Faust and Jean-Guihen Queyras brings sensitivity and lyricism to Beethoven's Piano Trios. 

 

Put three such stylistically perceptive young musicians as Alexander Melnikov, Isabelle Faust and Jean-Guihen Queyras together and you can anticipate a result no less than stimulating. True to expectations, their playing, their sensitivity and the way they interact with each other lend their performances of Beethoven's final two piano trios both vitality and stature.

The slow introductory phrases of the E flat Trio Op 70 No 2 immediately define the ensemble's interpretative stance: the violin and the cello are virtually vibrato-less, and the keyboard is a fortepiano. In fact, it is a restored Viennese fortepiano of about 1828, somewhat later than either of these trios but not to the extent of being disturbingly anachronistic.

The instrument, which comes from Melnikov's own collection, has a lovely mellow, ample timbre with a pearly glow on which he capitalises in playing of refined shaping and clarity. Faust (on a 1704 Stradivarius) and Queyras (on a 1696 Giofredo Cappa) do not forsake vibrato altogether as the E flat Trio progresses, but they use it sparingly for expressive effect, in a manner that could well have been the norm in Beethoven's own day.

Equally, those phrases that they play with no vibrato at all take on an eerie, withdrawn quality that arrests the ear, not in a negative self-conscious way but as a reasoned, plausible component of a dramatic colour scheme. There is certainly no shortage of energy or conviction in their propounding of the musical arguments in the first movement or the scurrying, excitingly accented finale.

The judiciously applied palette of weight, touch and tonal variety that so animates the E flat Trio is similarly in evidence in the great "Archduke".

Here Melnikov, Faust and Queyras give the music proper space to breathe in the broad first movement while keeping a firm hand on the structural reins.

The playing throughout the trio is thoroughly attuned to the tone and emotional scope of the music, profoundly rapt in the andante and perkily whimsical, explosive and propulsive in the gloriously idiosyncratic finale.

Credits : Beethoven's Piano Trios -- A Review
               By Geoffrey Norris
               20 February, 2014
               The Telegraph, United Kingdom 

An Awesome Spin on Beethoven -- The Late String Quartets

For any string quartet, performances of the late Beethoven quartets represents the summit of their craft, a challenge to stretch their intellectual and musical powers to their limits. Just as Beethoven's symphonies redefined the form and set its development on an utterly new track that continued right through the 19th century, so his string quartets, and the series of late works that began with the E flat Quartet, Op 127, in particular, set a new standard for the musical significance of the medium - and put in train a line of development which is carried on even today in the quartets of Elliott Carter and Brian Ferneyhough.

Those five quartets - six if you regard the Grosse Fuge, originally intended as the finale of the B flat, Op 130, as an independent work - come with a huge amount of musical and historical baggage, therefore, all of which just increases the weight of expectation placed upon any interpretation. The performing tradition of these works, first in the concert hall and in the second half of the 20th century on disc too, is probably more sanctified than that of any other repertoire: record collectors may talk with reverence about Furtwängler's recording of Tristan, Toscanini's Falstaff or Klemperer's Eroica Symphony, but a special awe is reserved for discussions of the Busch Quartet's late Beethoven, or even the recordings of a generation later by the Budapest and Hungarian Quartets.

Though most of those performances are more than half a century old now, they remain the standards against which any new set of these works is bound to be judged, and it is saying a great deal about the sheer understanding and accomplishment of these recordings by the Takács Quartet that they are the first to arrive for a long time to deserve such comparisons. Alongside these interpretations most other contemporary accounts are simply nowhere; the Takács make the competition seem either slick and meretricious, or insecure and over-emphatic.

These are performances that have quite clearly been maturing for a long time, so that every detail (one or two of them unexpected - the Takács play from a new edition of the works) is placed in its natural context, the phrasing, using just a trace of a slide between some notes, is utterly organic and the ensemble at times almost subliminally precise.

There are one or two trifling complaints to be made about the set, however. It is very well-filled - the F minor Quartet Op 95 is included as well as the genuinely late works (presumably because no room could be found for it in the two previous instalments of the Takács cycle, which covered the Op 18 works, and the Rasumovskys and Op 74 respectively) and both of Beethoven's finales for Op 130 are there, with the Grosse Fuge placed on the disc before its replacement. But accommodating that amount of music on just three discs means that the order of the works is not chronological - the first disc contains the E flat Op 127 and the C sharp minor Op 131, the second the A minor Op 132, and the very last in F major Op 135, with Op 130 prefaced by Op 95 on the last.

Anyone who wants to hear just a single work won't be bothered by such an arrangement, but those who would like to follow the extraordinary evolution of Beethoven's formal thinking in these late works - from the classical four movements of Op 127, through the proliferation of movements in 130, 131 and 132, with a return to the classical plan in Op 135 will have a bit of disc swapping and track-finding to do.

With performances as superb as these, though, it is a minor inconvenience. There are so many things to treasure in every work, details that it is hard to imagine better done, whether it's the perfectly controlled sense of release in the first movement of Op 127, the utterly certain progress of the fugue that opens 131 and the bewitchingly deft account of the little Presto later in the same work, the gradually increasing radiance of the thanksgiving hymn in 132, or the way in which the infinitely touching account of the Cavatina in 130, never sentimental and followed by the Grosse Fuge which never even momentarily sounds under strain.

This is an exceptional achievement. For anyone who does not possess versions of these works it is now the obvious recommendation (the sound is wonderfully lifelike and unobtrusively detailed too), and even those who remain passionate about the performances by the Busch Quartet or some other iconic recordings will find them fascinating and satisfying.

Credits : Beethoven -- The Late String Quartets
               By Andrew Clements -- The Guardian
               2005 

A Famous Conductor - Pianist On Beethoven

It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer’s life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer’s works.

In Beethoven’s case, one mustn’t forget that in 1802, the year he was contemplating suicide – as he wrote in an unsent letter to his brothers that came to be known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament” – he also composed the Second Symphony, one of his works that was most positive in spirit, thus showing us that it is of vital importance to separate his music from his personal biography and not to conflate the two.

Therefore, I will not aim here to provide an elaborate psychological study of the man Beethoven through an analysis of his works, or vice versa. It must be understood that one cannot explain the nature or the message of music through words. Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life. It might be poetic, philosophical, or mathematical, but in any case it must, in my view, have something to do with the soul of the human being. Hence it is metaphysical; but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical: sound.

I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical message through physical means that is the strength of music. It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.

Beethoven’s importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. Sometimes I feel in his late works a will to break all signs of continuity.

The music is abrupt and seemingly disconnected, as in the last piano sonata (Op 111). In musical expression, he did not feel restrained by the weight of convention. By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works.

This courageous attitude in fact becomes a requirement for the performers of Beethoven’s music. His compositions demand the performer to show courage, for example in the use of dynamics.

Beethoven’s habit of increasing the volume with an intense crescendo and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage (a “subito piano”) was only rarely used by composers before him. In other words, Beethoven asks the performer to show courage, not to be afraid of going to the edge of the precipice, and he thus forces the performer to find the “line of most resistance”, a phrase coined by the great pianist Artur Schnabel.

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society. Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated freedom of thought and of personal expression.

Beethoven’s music is too often seen as exclusively dramatic, expressive of titanic struggle. In this respect, the Eroica and the Fifth symphonies represent only one side of his work; one must also appreciate, for example, his Pastoral Symphony. His music is both introverted and extroverted and it again and again juxtaposes these qualities. The one human trait that is not present in his music is superficiality. Nor can it be characterised as shy or cute. On the contrary, even when it is intimate, as in the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Pastoral Symphony, it has an element of grandeur. And when it is grand, it also remains intensely personal, the obvious example being the Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven, in my view, was able to achieve a perfect balance in his music between vertical pressure – pressure from the composer’s mastery of musical form – and horizontal flow: he always combines vertical factors such as harmony, pitch, accents or tempo, all of which relate to a sense of rigour, with a great sense of freedom and fluidity. This question of extremes and of balance, I believe, must have been a conscious preoccupation for him.

You find an expression of it in Fidelio, for example: the composition contains a constant movement between polar opposites – from light to darkness, the negative to the positive, between events that occur above, on the surface, and those that take place underground. Just as he was unable to write anything superficial, or simply pretty, he was equally unable or unwilling to write anything portraying what was fundamentally and exclusively evil.

Even a character such as Pizarro, the governor of the prison in Fidelio, can be understood as a personification of corruption and oppression, but not of evil.

Beethoven’s music tends to move from chaos to order (as with the introduction to the Fourth Symphony) as if order were an imperative of human existence. For him, order does not result from forgetting or ignoring the disorders that plague our existence; order is a necessary development, an improvement that may lead to the Greek ideal of catharsis.

It is not by chance that the Funeral March is not the last movement of the Eroica Symphony, but the second, so that suffering does not have the last word. One could paraphrase much of the work of Beethoven by saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.

Credits : Daniel Barenboim On The Beauty of Beethoven
               16 December 2015
                The Telegraph United Kingdom 

 

Beethoven's Triple Concerto A Treat for Classical Music Lovers

Beethoven Triple Concerto: arguably the least successful of any of Beethoven's mature concertos in the concert hall. It's one of those pieces that never seems to get a performance that does it justice.

Usually, you get terrible seriousness when a big orchestra and three star names try to out-do each other, as the cello, violin, and piano soloists fight for the limelight.

On disc, it hasn't fared much better, and there's an infamous Herbert von Karajan recording from 1969 with David Oistrakh on violin, Sviatoslav Richter on piano, and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich: it's a nadir of gigantic egos trying to trump each other, a bonfire of the vanities from which Karajan and the Berlin Philarmonic still somehow manage to emerge victorious.

So praise be to the Avison Ensemble at Kings Place, and a performance that made the Triple Concerto come alive as a concert experience. There was the thrill of seeing a period instrument band take up every inch of the stage in Kings Place's Hall 1 (even if the string section was reduced to a handful of violins and violas, just 3 cellos and a couple of double of basses), and hearing them fill the hall's fantastic acoustic.

The truth is that the Triple Concerto isn't a concerto at all, since there's no real dialogue between the orchestra and the soloists, and the three soloists carry virtually all of the musical argument themselves. The Avison Ensemble's performance revealed the piece for what it really is: an amplified piano trio, with the orchestra beefing up the textures but often reduced to no more than generic accompaniment. Best of all in the Avison's performance was its sheer sense of fun.

The Avisons playing was far from perfect in its balance and technique, but it was exciting, physical, and improvisational. In the Triple Concerto, I'd take them over Karajan and the Russians any day.

Credits : Beethoven's Triple Concerto By Tom Service
              27 March 2009
              The Guardian, United Kingdom 

Beethoven's Piano Concertos -- In Heaven Already

At 38 Paul Lewis is a major pianist, and his new recordings of the five Beethoven piano concertos, with Jiri Belohlavek conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Harmonia Mundi HMC 902053.55; three CDs), are exceptionally fine. These are freshly considered, elegant and engrossing performances.

Though Mr. Lewis has an extensive repertory, Beethoven has been central to his activities of late. 

Starting in 2005 he performed the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in a series of recitals in Europe and America. His widely acclaimed recordings of the sonatas for Harmonia Mundi, first issued in installments, are now available as a 10-CD boxed set. Even among the eminent competition, including several historic surveys, Mr. Lewis’s recordings are richly satisfying. The same holds for the new concerto set.

 The first movement of the Concerto No. 1 in C suggests what is to come. The tempo, though lively, is not especially fast. The exuberance stems from the mix of urgency and relaxation that Mr. Belohlavek draws from the orchestra. 

The phrases of the theme are laid out with clarity and purpose, like the sentences of a compelling conversationalist. When the piano makes its first entrance, Mr. Lewis is similarly lucid and immediate. His playing is by turns delicate, incisive, mysterious, punchy: whatever seems called for.

 In each concerto Mr. Lewis is specially good at fleshing out the character of the music. There is no padding, no mere passage work in these performances. Every phrase speaks; every note counts. The tempos of the jaunty Concerto No. 2 in B flat are restrained in comparison with those in many of typical performances. Yet by revealing the refinement of the music so sensitively, Mr. Lewis makes this work seem less beholden to existing Classical models, more a precursor to the mystical experiments that were to come, specially in the Fourth Concerto.

He also has plenty of firepower in the break-out moments of the “Emperor” Concerto, like the pummeling double octaves in the vehement development section of the first movement. Still, what distinguishes the performance is Mr. Lewis’s deft blend of magisterial vigor and impetuosity. Mr. Belohlavek and the BBC players are his co-conspirators in this bracing “Emperor.” Fourth Concerto.

Credits :  Mixing Urgency and Relaxation 

                By ANTHONY TOMMASINI 

                SEPT. 24, 2010

                The New York Times  

The Amazing Story Behind Beethoven's Cello Sonatas

Performing Beethoven's entire oeuvre for cello and piano in sequence is a very different experience from playing any of the works separately; it is a journey through a life. One wonderful aspect of the sonatas is that they represent all of Beethoven's three major creative periods. The first two, in F major and G minor, Op 5, were written at a time when the composer was carving out a career for himself as a virtuoso pianist; in those days, of course, most performers composed.

Beethoven performed these pieces with the famous French cellist Jean-Pierre Duport in Berlin, at the court of King Friedrich II of Prussia (an amateur cellist himself, for whom Haydn and Mozart had written quartets). This was in 1796, when Beethoven was just 25 years old, not yet suffering from the deafness that would transform his whole existence.

The two sonatas are real concert pieces, large in scale, full of exciting effects that would have left the Berliners gasping. They are really sonatas for piano with cello, not the other way round; although there are unexpected flights to high registers for the cello (as there are in all three sets of variations for cello and piano that Beethoven wrote between 1796 and 1801), there is no question as to which instrument gets the lion's share of virtuosity here. Beethoven was not going to let himself be overshadowed by a mere cellist!

The third sonata, the A major, Op 69, inhabits a different world altogether. Beethoven worked on this sonata between 1806 and 1808; by then, his deafness was acute, if not quite complete. In his tragic letter known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, written in October 1802, Beethoven had admitted that he had harboured thoughts of suicide. "It was only my art that held me back.

Oh, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me." Yet this sonata - in common with several other works from the same period - is one of the most positive works imaginable; from the opening phrase, it radiates serenity, humour and joy.

There is not a note that is trivial, however. The A major Sonata is a thoroughly classical work, its proportions carefully measured, the themes answering each other in perfect symmetry. It is also the first equal sonata for cello and piano. Previous cello sonatas had either been cello solos with continuo accompaniment or, like Beethoven's first two, piano sonatas with cello obbligato. Here, every theme is perfectly conceived for both instruments; Beethoven had invented a new genre.

The "late" period of Beethoven's creative life is generally said to have begun around 1815. If so, the two cello sonatas Op 102, both dating from that year, would be among the first examples of that miraculous group of masterpieces. They certainly exude the atmosphere of other-worldliness, of transcendent spirituality, that characterise his last utterances. The differences between these two sonatas and their predecessors are immediately striking.

For a start, they are far shorter - approximately half as long as either of the first two. Everything here is concentrated, each gesture kept to its bare essentials. They are also far more closely argued, each note occupying an important place in the overall structure.

The fourth sonata, in the "basic" key of C major, opens with a simple two-bar phrase. It is from this apparently straightforward beginning, however, that the entire work develops; practically every note is derived from those two bars. The last sonata, in D major, takes off in other new directions.

After the dramatic opening movement, Beethoven gives us, for the first time in these works, a full slow movement, a prayer that must surely be the most beautiful movement ever written for cello and piano. But after that glimpse of eternity, he returns us to earth with a fugue that is positively rollicking.

And yet for all its sense of fun - and it is fun - the fugue also conveys a strong sense of achievement, of defiant finality; after struggles that would have destroyed a lesser being, Beethoven has emerged in heroic triumph and we can hear him exulting as he bids farewell to the cello sonata.

Credits : The Story Behind Beethoven's Cello Sonatas
               By Steven Isserlis
               The Guardian, January 2007