Harmony Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 4 & Symphony No. 7
The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen · Paavo Järvi
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 287 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: RCA Red Seal # 88697129332 | Country/Year: Europe 2007 | Genre: Classical

…Once again, Järvi and his band have captured Beethoven's wilful and often irascible character, rhetoric, polemics and sheer genius in fully-charged performances which also reveal his deep humanity. They certainly should number among the elite.

The debut disc of the Voxpopuli Quartet incorporates the best from the repertoire of the Mozart and Beethoven series. Mozart's Adagio & Fugue, inspired by the writing of Bach who greatly impressed the composer, comes in a slow and solemn part, followed by a fiery movement where the voices of the four instruments intersect in a bewildering harmony. Beethoven’s Op 132 Quartet, written when he had just seen death up close, is a declaration of war on destiny, a war Beethoven knows is lost in advance. The second movement, a monument to classical music, is a long tribute to the hypnotic and overwhelming “healing gods”.

Beethoven was a revolutionary man living in a revolutionary time. He captured his inner voice—demons and all—and the spirit of his time, and in doing so, created a body of music the likes of which no one had ever before imagined. "An artist must never stand still," he once said. A virtuoso at the keyboard, Beethoven used the piano as his personal musical laboratory, and the piano sonata became, more than any other genre of music, a place where he could experiment with harmony, motivic development, the contextual use of form, and, most important, his developing view of music as a self-expressive art.

The Smetana Quartet, a famous Czech group representing the latter half of the 20th century, visited Japan for the first time in 1958 as the first cultural envoy to restore diplomatic relations between Japan and Czechoslovakia. Having visited Japan, he was very familiar to us. During that time, more than 200 of their LP records have been released in Japan, including reissues, and they have won the Record Academy Award sponsored by Ongaku no Tomosha seven times. I was. In 1980 and 1985, "Ongaku no Tomo" magazine ranked the top 10 most popular string quartets by musicians such as Amadeus, Italia, Juilliard, LaSalle, and Alban Berg. It won first place both times, pushing aside its rivals. The two pillars of their repertoire were works from their native Czech Republic, such as Smetana, Dvořák and Janáček, and Beethoven in this set. This set was not recorded at once, but was recorded one song at a time. Known as a monumental masterpiece.
The reason why they like to play Beethoven is that it is ``a piece that is deeply connected with reason and emotion'' and ``a song that makes you think deeply about philosophy, aesthetics, and morals'', especially his late string quartet.

The year 1812 was a busy year for the well-known but deaf composer Ludwig van Beethoven. At last, Beethoven got the chance to meet that other famous German, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but Goethe’s personality proved a disappointed to Beethoven. The composer was carrying on a hectic love life: in 1812 he wrote his famous letter to an anonymous ‘Unsterbliche Geliebte’ (‘Immortal Beloved’). Moreover, he was getting involved in the life of his younger brother, who was infatuated with a housekeeper. Yet despite his activities, Beethoven found the time to compose several new works, among which his Seventh Symphony.

The first of the Artemis Quartet’s Virgin Classics CDs of Beethoven Quartets was released in Autumn 2005. Now, nearly six years later, the complete Beethoven cycle becomes available in a box of 7 CDs which includes two previously unreleased items: the quartet No 10, op 74, known as the ‘Harp’, and a transcription for string quartet, proudly made by Beethoven himself, of the Piano Sonata No 9, op 14.