Edding Quartet

The pairing of the two works on this album is unique in that one comes from the dawn, the other from the dusk of Ludwig van Beethoven’s career. Indeed, whereas the composer wrote the Quintet for winds and piano, op.16, when he was only 26 – the talented young man also excelled as a successful pianist – he did not finish his String Quartet, op.130, until a year before his death. The Edding Quartet proposes here the original version of the work, with the Grosse Fuge, op.133, as finale.

With these three sonatas for piano and violin, Baptiste Lopez and Maude Gratton give us an overview of fifteen years in Beethoven’s life; the joie de vivre of the impetuous young composer, still strongly influenced by Classical forms, gradually gives way to a violent aesthetic break, the eccentricity of which was decried by contemporary critics. If, in Beethoven’s view, music confronts humanity with the difficulties of our condition, it also enables us to overcome them; the composer himself transcended his battle against deafness by finding in it the profundity of a creative force.

With these three sonatas for piano and violin, Baptiste Lopez and Maude Gratton give us an overview of fifteen years in Beethoven’s life; the joie de vivre of the impetuous young composer, still strongly influenced by Classical forms, gradually gives way to a violent aesthetic break, the eccentricity of which was decried by contemporary critics. If, in Beethoven’s view, music confronts humanity with the difficulties of our condition, it also enables us to overcome them; the composer himself transcended his battle against deafness by finding in it the profundity of a creative force.