Beethoven Beethoven 7

"Muti's Beethoven Fifth is fleet, fluid, and transparent. He shows his usual attention to details, and offers many individual touches. I especially enjoyed the horn crescendo in bar 34 of the Allegro con brio. It's not indicated in my ancient Eulenberg score but makes perfect sense in its context. …Muti achieves a clarity and rhythmic definition found only in the finest interpretations…The playing of the Philadelphia Orchestra is nothing short of spectacular. The fast string triplets from measure 132 in the final movement are not only accurate but beautifully played with full tone.

For this super audio disc from Channel Classics, Dejan Lazic's live performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major is programmed with his solo recordings of the Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor, "Moonlight," and the Sonata No. 31 in A flat major. Ostensibly, this is a sonic showcase for Lazic and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, under Richard Tognetti, and the state-of-the-art technology brings out the best in the musicians, giving the pianist an intimate presence without crowding him or artificially boosting his volume, while at the same time lending the orchestra a spaciousness that really opens it up.

This is a Beethoven Symphonies Cycle of the 21st century! Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra perform Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 1 – 9 incl. and each DVD includes a one-hour-long documentary for each symphony.
Includes an hour-long documentary for each symphony where Maestro Thielemann and Joachim Kaiser (the most famous German music critic) discuss and analyze in an entertaining conversational exchange Thielemann’s interpretation, complemented by excerpts from rehearsals as well as by comparisons of Beethoven cycles with Karajan, Bernstein etc. – no aspect of Beethoven’s symphonic œuvre will remain unaffected!

Beethoven reputedly wasn't Beecham's favorite composer, but you wouldn't know it from this performance; it's exceedingly well conceived, highly energetic, and has that unique Beecham sparkle to it. The fillers also are delightful. All recorded in Ascona, Switzerland in 1957.

There are two really famous Beethoven violin sonatas, the Kreutzer and the Spring. The Kreutzer Sonata inspired the story by Leo Tolstoy, which in turn became the subject of Janácek's First String Quartet, so if you're into comparative studies in the arts, there's a thesis topic for you! The Spring Sonata was featured in Woody Allen's Love and Death, among other places. And perhaps most intriguingly of all, the scherzo of the late sonata, Op. 96, turns up quite clearly in the third movement of Mahler's Second Symphony.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include 9 symphonies, 5 piano concertos, 1 violin concerto, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, his great Mass the Missa solemnis, and one opera, Fidelio…

Maestro Casals leads a festival orchestra of about 50 players in the Seventh and 40 in the Eighth, but what they lack in numbers they more than compensate for in intensity. Every note played here conveys commitment and meaning. Consider, for example, the bass line in the second movement of the Seventh, these people aren't just keeping time but playing like soloists in counterpoint to the upper strings-extraordinary!

Alexei Lubimov’s 2010 disc of Impromptus by Schubert was praised in the press. During the same recording session in Haarlem in July 2009, Alexei Lubimov continued with the last three sonatas of Beethoven, Beethoven’s musical testimony which he plays with all the mastery of a great russian pianist, "a kind of russian Pollini" (Alain Lompech, Diapason).