fri 11/07/2025

Beethoven

Staatskapelle Berlin, Barenboim, Royal Festival Hall

The returns queue gets longer and so does the wait – considerably longer than the 69 minutes of programmed music in this the second of the Daniel Barenboim Beethoven/Schoenberg series. But what a satisfying two–course meal it was: Schoenberg’s “...

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Staatskapelle Berlin, Barenboim, Royal Festival Hall

Anyone who can sell out four concerts of Beethoven and Schoenberg, even if it's only half-scary Schoenberg, surely looms large in the public imagination. Daniel Barenboim is a great humanitarian figure, and has been a thought-provoking...

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Philharmonia, Mackerras, RFH

Sir Charles Mackerras: hitting the right emotional spots with effortless mastery

Creative old age brings with it not just the expected serene glow but also a singular urgency, a fresh intensity, or so that magisterial pianist Claudio Arrau once wrote. Arrau was a living testament to his claim; so, now, is the 84-year-old Sir...

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Birthdays on the Tube, 13-19 December

A continuing series celebrating musicians' birthdays. 16 December 1899: Noel Coward, sharing a birthday with Beethoven, an early English rapper of the silk polka dot dressing gown and cigarette holder school. {youtube width="400" height="300"}...

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Till Fellner, Wigmore Hall

Till Fellner's ear for detail makes an artful musical argument compelling

Much like Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G, Op 79, with which he started the programme, I’ll get straight to the point. Till Fellner is a very good pianist. To demonstrate this, I’d like to jump to the last sonata of five we heard in this all-Beethoven...

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DVD Release: In Search of Beethoven

Joseph Karl Stieler's portrait of Beethoven 'when composing the Missa Solemnis'

Early on in Phil Grabsky's documentary In Search of Beethoven (out today on DVD), handy fortepiano player and Ludwig van-lookalike Ronald Brautigam starts screwing up a section of Beethoven's very first, unpublished piano concerto. "If I concentrate...

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