Ludwig van Beethoven - Alfred Brendel, Aaron Rosand - Blockbusters

Beethoven was not your typical misunderstood genius. For the most part he was very much understood and greatly appreciated, and if many of his works did cause consternation in his contemporaries' ears, they at least recognized him as a great composer—as if they were simply not on his wavelength but aware that future generations would be.

Beethoven straddles two musical periods like a colossus. His early works take their points of departure from the two towering figures of the Viennese Classical school: Haydn and Mozart. And while the characteristic Beethovenian stamp makes itself felt early and strongly, we may, with no slighting of his achievement (indeed, the reverse would be more true), note that most everything he did had precedents in those older composers' music, at least in terms of techniques and procedures. Beethoven expanded on his Austrian models, enlarging formal schemes, extending key relations and experimenting with new sonorities (as for example with the piano, which in his time underwent considerable development leading to more power and more tonal nuance). All these elements would in the normal course of the art's evolution have progressed in much the same general direction anyway, even without Beethoven, as in fact was happening through his contemporaries' works (Carl Maria von Weber, Ludwig Spohr, Johann Nepomuk Hummel among others). Where Beethoven surpasses them—later composers as well—is in the expressive force of his music. Beethoven's message— and to be very sure he had a message, even when no specific program was identified or even intended—and his use of music as a vehicle for expressing something non-musical, a poetic idea so to speak, immediately set him apart and established him as the model for the younger generation of composers who ushered in the Romantic era.

The works presented here show many aspects of Beethoven's art and personality (the two are indivisible), from the genial, easygoing Cello Sonata, Op. 69, to the intensely dramatic Egmont Overture, with much in between: serenity in the Violin Concerto, joviality in the Ninth symphony’s Scherzo, passion in the F minor Piano Sonata, Op. 57 "Appassionata". Here is a sampling that we trust will open a larger world of discovery, one to last a lifetime.