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