Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

[Bogey]

Something remarkable is going on at the Royal Festival Hall, where Daniel Barenboim, the master pianist, has reached the halfway point of his cycle of the Beethoven sonatas: 16 gone, 16 to go. The journey resumes tonight, and the fact that tickets for all eight concerts have gone won't stop people trying to grab a return.

*Wipes drool from mouth, then passes Kleenex box to wife so she can do the same.*

[BachQ]

The BSO barrels through Beethoven
By Tim Smith, Sun Music Critic
March 8, 2008



"Beethoven's grip on the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra tightened this week, and its grip on Beethoven tightened as well.  By season's end, all nine of the composer's symphonies will have been heard. His fist-shaking Fifth got a bracing workout Thursday at the Music Center at Strathmore, as did a shorter piece of equally compelling drama and propulsion, the Leonore Overture No. 3.  In between came music of our time, Christopher Rouse's Flute Concerto, which generated considerable drama and propulsion of its own. (The program is now at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.)  BSO music director Marin Alsop likes her Beethoven lean and mean, and that's how it sounded here - zero-percent body fat, but plenty of sinew."

[PerfectWagnerite]

I wish the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra would stop using the acronym BSO which to most of us means the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

[paulb]

The BSO barrels through Beethoven
By Tim Smith, Sun Music Critic
March 8, 2008



"Beethoven's grip on the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra tightened this week, and its grip on Beethoven tightened as well.  By season's end, all nine of the composer's symphonies will have been heard. His fist-shaking Fifth got a bracing workout Thursday at the Music Center at Strathmore, as did a shorter piece of equally compelling drama and propulsion, the Leonore Overture No. 3.  In between came music of our time, Christopher Rouse's Flute Concerto, which generated considerable drama and propulsion of its own. (The program is now at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.)  BSO music director Marin Alsop likes her Beethoven lean and mean, and that's how it sounded here - zero-percent body fat, but plenty of sinew."

LONG LIVE VON BEETHOVEN

[Lethevich]

I wish the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra would stop using the acronym BSO which to most of us means the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

They could use "Baltso" - kinda of catchy

[Norbeone]

Why can't we talk about Mendelssohn in this thread?!?! Jeez.....

[Gurn Blanston]

Why can't we talk about Mendelssohn in this thread?!?! Jeez.....

Mendelssohn wrote one of his early piano sonatas as a birthday gift for his sister. He was only 15 or 16 at the time, but it is really an impressive piece of work. It is in Bb, 4 movements including an extended fugue movement, and he numbered it Op 106... I guess he was a fanboy himself.   

[Saul]

"I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven"

          ~ Richard Wagner

"There was only Beethoven and Wagner [and] after them, nobody."

          ~ Gustav Mahler

Ammm.. the word propoganda comes to mind...

[PerfectWagnerite]

They could use "Baltso" - kinda of catchy

I prefer Orchestra of the Underachievers. So much potential, such shallow playing.

[Haffner]

Ammm.. the word propoganda comes to mind...

"I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven"

          ~ Richard Wagner

"There was only Beethoven and Wagner [and] after them, nobody."

          ~ Gustav Mahler



I think Herr Mahler could have added himself to the latter list at least, and Herr Wagner to the first. Just my opinion.

[George]

This is a great Beethoven CD, by a great Pianist:



See signature for details.  0:)

[BachQ]

Kuerti To The Rescue

Talk about father-son bonding. For those who didn't hear... Last night, pianist Leon Fleisher was too ill to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This left assistant conductor Julian Kuerti in the lurch until, that is, dad stepped onto the stage. See, Anton Kuerti can play.  We don't normally review the last night of a concert series, but we were able to get Matthew Guerrieri over to Symphony Hall.

Here's a sneak peak of his review, which will run in the Globe tomorrow.  Tuesday's Boston Symphony Orchestra concert paid tribute to every parent who ever bailed his kid out of a jam. Pianist Leon Fleisher fell victim to a stomach virus late Tuesday afternoon, putting the evening's scheduled performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 5 ("Emperor") in jeopardy. But BSO assistant conductor Julian Kuerti, making his official debut with the orchestra on these concerts, had a fallback: His dad was in town. And Anton Kuerti is one of the best interpreters of Beethoven around.

The Vienna-born pianist, now something of a national treasure in Canada, has an impeccable lineage, having studied with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. His playing is strikingly individual, yet honors the spirit of Horszowski's teacher, the legendary Theodor Leschetizky: a focus on line and touch, a clear and flexible rhythm, a deeply analytical and exploratory approach. The latter quality was immediately apparent on Tuesday; not a note had been taken for granted, with even the most prosaic passages refracted through a powerful intellectual prism. 

The elder Kuerti fully exploits the percussive attack of the piano without the tone ever becoming brittle. The opening movement's coursing scales buzzed and rang with bright power and stinging accents, while a quiet sharpness in the lyrical theme kept the electric current alive. Beethoven's explosive juxtapositions were not merely jolts, but the sudden release of coiled tension.

In the second-movement aria, Kuerti shaped the melody with a manifold palette of articulation, innumerable precisely-cut facets, but also deployed an uncanny consistency of tone to give Beethoven's more obsessive, repeated patterns a slow-burning intensity. An occasional delicate staccato and a touch of melting rubato emphasized the off-balance polyrhythms at the finale's outset, making the movement's thumping peroration all the more triumphant. After orchestra and soloist brought the music to a near-inaudible stillness, the piano positively detonated the blazing coda.

Contrasting with his father's often wiry tone, the younger Kuerti drew sumptuous sounds from the orchestra, making the concerto a real dialogue rather than a homogenized ersatz symphony. (He took a similar approach in the program's first half: a vibrant and dashing account of Oliver Knussen's "The Way to Castle Yonder" and a dark, robust reading of Dvorak's Seventh Symphony.) With no chance for rehearsal, rough edges were inevitable. But emphasizing spontaneity over smoothness, inquiry over indulgence, father and son showed why some warhorses deserve their status -- how, with enough intelligence and daring, even familiar music can seem new.

[BachQ]

Beethovenfest Features Politics of Music



This year's month-long Beethovenfest Bonn, will explore the relationship between power, politics and music, organizers have announced. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a multifaceted composer whose compositions have unequalled staying power.

Each year, Beethoven's birth city, Bonn, hosts an internationally acclaimed music festival in his honor. This year, the organizers have picked a particularly contemporary topic: the relationship between power, politics and music.

Deutsche Welle is an official media partner of the event, which will bring about 2,000 well-known artists from around the world to the former German capital city. For the past four years the Beethovenfest has focused on various countries. But this year's month-long event, which starts Aug. 29, will focus on the political aspects of Beethoven's legacy.


It will look at the political statements Beethoven made through his work as well as with the ideological misappropriation of his music in the 20th century. As part of this examination, several concerts will be held in Bonn venues with political and social importance such as the former West German parliamentary chambers, the Palais Schaumburg where former chancellors lived and worked and the Hotel Petersberg, the seat of the Allied High Commission after World War II.


Persecuted composers

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Masur will conduct all nine symphonies

By examining the misappropriation and marginalization in music, this year's Beethovenfest will set about exploring a very contemporary and explosive topic. "Ostracized music, forbidden music, the relationship between music and politics today -- the question of how music is functionalized, even today, that is a cutting edge theme," said Ilona Schmiel, the Beethovenfest's director.

One of the event's highlights will be a project led by the British violinist Daniel Hope. With his "Music was Hope" program, he will explore artists who were in the Nazi's Theresienstadt concentration camp located in what is now the Czech Republic. Hope, Philip Dukes and Ulrich Mattes will interpret music of Gideon Klein, Hans Krasa and Erwin Schulhoff. Hope will also present his arrangement of Maurice Ravel's Jewish Kaddish music.  "This is an examination of music that originated in the concentration camps from very young and courageous Czech composers," Hope said.

Klein was in his early 20s when he was imprisoned in the camp. He was already a talented pianist and composer, on the fast track towards a career as a traveling musician. During his imprisonment from 1942 to 1945 he became a supporter for other musicians held in Theresienstadt. "He simply motivated the other artists, musicians and writers to continue on and not to think about their situation," Hope said. "So I think that for me this fits extremely well to this examination of power and music."

Political context

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Daniel Hope will explore music from Nazi concentration camps

Beethoven's beloved Ninth Symphony is a perfect example of a work that has been exploited to fit ideologies. Beethoven composed it to pay homage to the spirit of the Enlightenment. The song was later used as propaganda by the Third Reich and as the Iron Curtain began to crumble it became an anthem of freedom during German reunification. The Beethovenfest will present the complete cycle of all nine symphonies under the direction of Kurt Masur with the Orchestre National de France.

Deutsche Welle will once again sponsor a youth orchestra to travel to Germany for a week-long residency and performance of a specially commissioned musical work. This year will feature the Anton-Rubinstein Orchestra from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which has produced numerous world-renown musicians over its 146 years in existence.

[BachQ]

85 CD set for $125.99 @ AMAZON (USA)





A substantial portion of the material derives from the Universal Classics family of labels. Friedrich Gulda's thrilling, sometimes iconoclastic late-1960s Piano Sonata cycle appears alongside the pianist's less consistent though never uninteresting collaborations with Horst Stein and the Vienna Philharmonic in the five piano concertos. Alfred Brendel's early Vox Diabelli Variations is musically and sonically inferior to his more mature Philips remakes, while an entire disc of keyboard miscellany (including the rabble-rousing G minor Fantasia Op. 77) features lean-toned, gutsy playing from one Georg Friedrich Schenck.

You can do worse than the sometimes underplayed (Nos. 3, 5, 7, and 9) yet never less than solid 1974 Masur/Leipzig symphonies cycle, where Nos. 1, 2, 4, and 8 particularly attract attention. Not only do the classic mono Grumiaux/Haskil Violin Sonata encounters from Philips still sonically hold their own, but they also tower above each of that label's subsequent stereo versions. The Guarneri's 1987-92 Beethoven quartet cycle always impressed me for its vitality, sharply honed linear interplay, and warm engineering.

Was a Philips Missa solemnis a must? If so, I would have recommended Jochum's heartfelt, robustly engineered version over the later and cooler Colin Davis traversal here. Similarly, why the clean yet faceless Szeryng/Haitink Violin Concerto instead of the more involved Grumiaux/Galleria? Yet collectors who searched far and wide for Heinrich Schiff's 1998 Cello Sonatas now can bask in this great artist's extraordinary finesse and musical intelligence.

Should you prefer Beethoven piano trios on the flexible, roomy side, the Borodin Trio's 1984 Chandos cycle will suit your metabolism. Other chamber works both hit and miss, performance-wise.

--Jed Distler

[BachQ]

New York Times
March 14, 2008


Music Review | San Francisco Symphony
Beethoven's Eroica -- Delivering the Standards Along With the Scarce
By ALLAN KOZINN

Michael Tilson Thomas's visits to New York with the San Francisco Symphony are invariably refreshing, partly because the orchestra's playing is flexible and energetic but mainly because Mr. Thomas's programs usually step beyond the standard canon. Still, major orchestras deserve (and generally demand) to be measured against the competition in the core repertory as well. So in his concerts at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday and Wednesday, Mr. Thomas led his San Franciscans in meticulously balanced programs, with war horses like Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony and Strauss's "Four Last Songs" offset by worthy rarities like William Schuman's Violin Concerto and Samuel Barber's "Andromache's Farewell."

The trick in playing a war horse is to make it sound as if it were not one without sacrificing the grandeur that won the work its status. That's having it both ways, and it's not easily done. Mr. Thomas's solution in the "Eroica" on Tuesday was to reduce the orchestra somewhat (though not quite to the chamber proportions he used in his Beethoven recordings of the 1980s) and to keep the tempos brisk, even breathless, everywhere but in the Marcia funebre. The work's two opening chords had hardly any space between them, and given the tempo of the opening section, it was hard not to think of them as a starter's gun rather than cannon blasts.

That is not to say that Mr. Thomas's tempos weren't effective. They put Beethoven's off-kilter accenting in a new light, and given the clean, focused and sometimes earthy performance, it was hard not to admire the virtuosity involved.

[Bogey]

Dm,
Really like what you have been doing with this Beethoven thread.  I do not subscribe to any classical music magazines and the articles you post fill this void nicely, so thank you for digging all of these articles up.  Ever consider also starting a Mozart thread like this?  I, for one, would read it. 

[BachQ]

Ever consider also starting a Mozart thread like this?  I, for one, would read it. 

The Mozart thread is reserved for Iago ! ! !

[Bogey]

The Mozart thread is reserved for Iago ! ! !

Why did that conjure up the image of Titanic and ice?

[BachQ]

Why did that conjure up the image of Titanic and ice?

Actually, in a parallel universe somewhere, Iago hosts a Mozart thread, Gurn hosts a Wagner thread, and I host an Elgar thread ......... 

[not edward]

Actually, in a parallel universe somewhere, Iago hosts a Mozart thread, Gurn hosts a Wagner thread, and I host an Elgar thread ......... 

And in this universe, perhaps Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner are good actors.