Ludwig Van Beethoven Complete Works

Een driedubbele cd met het integrale werk voor cello en pianoforte van Ludwig Van Beethoven, dat is het resultaat van de intense muzikale samenwerking van celliste France Springuel en pianist Jan Vermeulen. De twee begonnen drie jaar geleden samen te musiceren en de muzikale klik die beiden toen voelden, deed hen besluiten om het repertoire voor cello en piano aan te pakken. Eerst waren er twee Schubertcd's, dan volgde Schumann, en nu is er dus Beethoven. De sonate voor cello en piano is in feite een uitvinding van Beethoven zelf.

This is the latest and, they tell us, the last of EMI’s Simon Rattle Edition, gathering together the conductor’s complete forays into certain composers and repertoire. As with any such project the sets hitherto released have contained both treasures and duds. Even though not everything here is perfect, this set sends the series out on a high with his complete Vienna recording of the Beethoven symphonies.

After eight discs with the 32 numbered sonatas, and a ninth comprising the early sonatas and sonatinas, Ronald Brautigam now embarks on the second leg of his traversal of Beethoven’s complete music for solo piano. In this volume he gives us the complete Bagatelles, and includes not only the three sets published during Beethoven’s life time, but also thirteen further pieces composed throughout Beethoven’s career, between 1795 and 1825. Some of these pieces, most famously ‘Für Elise’, are sometimes referred to as Bagatelles, others simply as Klavierstücke and several of them are only known by their tempo markings.

In eight previous volumes Ronald Brautigam has traversed what is often called 'The New Testament of Piano Music', namely Beethoven's 32 numbered sonatas. The present disc may be regarded as an appendix to these, as it explores the composer's first attempts in the genre. It opens with the three Kurfürsten Sonatas from 1783, in which Beethoven - at the tender age of twelve - demonstrates a remarkable maturity.

Theme and variations’ is one form that Beethoven employed throughout his career. He wrote his first surviving set while still a boy in Bonn and finished the last one some forty years later – a statistical fact that becomes interesting when one considers the inherent tension between the composer’s dramatic style and the static and decorative nature of the form itself. Towards the end of the 18th century variation form was generally used for entertaining elaborations on popular tunes but Beethoven, being Beethoven, changed the ground rules radically. For a while he followed the convention – or shrewd marketing strategy – of using existing melodies from operas or ballets, but often these would almost immediately undergo such profound transformations that he might as well have used an unknown theme. As a consequence it is understandable that Beethoven’s variations were often considered much too learned, far too eccentric and, by some, even offensive.

The pellucid tone and refined technique of Yo-Yo Ma and the passionate interpretations and flashy virtuosity of Mischa Maisky have defined the poles of post-Rostropovich cello playing. In contrast, Heinrich Schiff may seem reserved to the point of being unemotional and self-effacing to the point of disappearing altogether. But as his 1998 recording of Beethoven's complete works for cello and piano with Till Fellner demonstrate, Schiff is every bit as accomplished as Ma and Maisky.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s first printed work was a set of variations – published in 1783 when he was only twelve years old – and his final keyboard composition was the massive set of thirty-three variations on a theme by Anton Diabelli, composed almost four decades later. Not counting the several movements in variation form included in the sonatas, his twenty-one sets of piano variations thus trace a line of development in his production, parallel to those formed by the 32 piano sonatas or the 16 string quartets.

In 1819 the Viennese music publisher and composer Anton Diabelli sent a short waltz to a long list of composers. These included Schubert, Hummel, a very young Franz Liszt and, as the most prominent composer of the time, naturally Beethoven. Diabelli was proposing to compile an anthology of variations on his own waltz, one from each composer. Beethoven responded in a characteristic manner: first there was nothing, and then there was nothing … and then, in 1823, there was an entire, and monumental, set of no less than thirty-three variations.

Beethoven was the last great composer to write string trios, and his are the finest works of their type. Mozart hardly touched this particular combination, and Haydn wrote quite few very early works which are now completely unknown. In any case, Haydn used two violins and a cello, whereas with Beethoven the standard combination became violin, viola, and cello. These are all early works, expert examples of all that Beethoven learned from Haydn and Mozart in preparation for the writing of his first great string quartets. But far from being mere composition exercises, these are highly rewarding works on their own, and these outstanding performances make the best possible case for their claim to be ranked among Beethoven's chamber music masterpieces.