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Beethoven, Piano & Winds
Ludwig van Beethoven

Markus Becker & Ma'alot Quintett

Beethoven, Piano & Winds

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: CAvi
UPC: 4260085531103
Catnr: AVI 8553110
Release date: 01 May 2020
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Label
CAvi
UPC
4260085531103
Catalogue number
AVI 8553110
Release date
01 May 2020
Album
Artist(s)
Composer(s)
EN

About the album

HOW MANY PIECES BEETHOVEN WROTE FOR PIANO AND WINDS?
THE YOUNG BEETHOVEN
One can easily find a great number of outstanding chamber music works for string instruments; on the other hand, chamber music repertoire for woodwinds on a similar high level of composition is relatively sparse. By the 1800s, string instruments and the piano had achieved a high standard in terms of playing technique and construction; wind instruments, however, lagged somewhat behind.

Woodwinds still sounded uneven across their registers and suffered from technical constraints, including limitations in terms of musical keys: all of this must have exerted a counterproductive influence on a generation of Romantic composers who wanted to expand music’s horizons in terms of dynamics and harmony.

The Ma’alot Wind Quintet has teamed up on this CD with pianist Markus Becker in works by Ludwig van Beethoven for piano and woodwinds, supplemented by several of Beethoven’s charming works for flute-playing clock, arranged by clarinetist Ulf-Guido Schäfer for woodwind quintet.

The main raison-d’être for this choice of program lies in the fact that Beethoven himself composed an excellent large-scale original work for four woodwinds (oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon) and piano – a work which, in terms of musical proportions and compositional ingenuity, rose far above the standard of what was otherwise being written for winds at the time when it was premiered (1796).

That original composition is coupled on this CD with another work by Beethoven for which we no longer have the original instrumentation, but which can be reconstructed, thanks to a series of circumstances, to a point of departure from which Ulf-Guido Schäfer has been able to arrange it as a chamber-music Concerto for piano and wind quintet. (from Booklet Notes by Andreas N. Tarkmann)

Artist(s)

Markus Becker (piano)

“As a musical virtuoso, Markus Becker is unbeatable – an intelligent creator of soulful musical portraits.” Eleonore Büning, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Born in 1963 in Osnabrück, Markus Becker has convinced audiences and critics alike as a highly formative interpreter of piano literature from Bach to Rihm, an eminent artist on the international scale who is noted for his original programming choices. Exceptionally among classical pianists, he also stands out as a virtuoso jazz improviser. Becker makes regular appearances at the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and the Kissingen Summer Festival. Markus Becker has played with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, RSB Berlin, the radio symphony orchestras of the NDR, WDR and SWR in Germany, and the BBC Welsh Orchestra under such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Howard...
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“As a musical virtuoso, Markus Becker is unbeatable – an intelligent creator of soulful musical portraits.” Eleonore Büning, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Born in 1963 in Osnabrück, Markus Becker has convinced audiences and critics alike as a highly formative interpreter of piano literature from Bach to Rihm, an eminent artist on the international scale who is noted for his original programming choices. Exceptionally among classical pianists, he also stands out as a virtuoso jazz improviser.
Becker makes regular appearances at the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and the Kissingen Summer Festival. Markus Becker has played with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, RSB Berlin, the radio symphony orchestras of the NDR, WDR and SWR in Germany, and the BBC Welsh Orchestra under such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Howard Griffiths, Michael Sanderling, and Thierry Fisher. Becker’s chamber music partners include Albrecht Mayer, Nils Mönkemeyer, Adrian Brendel, Igor Levit, Sharon Kam and Alban Gerhardt.
He studied with Prof. Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and received additional crucial guidance for many years from Alfred Brendel. Since 1993, he has been a professor at the Hanover Academy of Music, Theatre and Media, where he supervises a class of pianists and chamber ensembles, oversees the Masters Degree department, and directs the Chamber Music Institute.
With his CD recordings, Becker is the three-time winner of the ECHO-Klassik award as well as the German Critics Choice Award, along with a number of further distinctions from the international music press (Gramophone, Fono Forum, Klassik Heute, BBC Music Magazine, American Record Guide).
Becker‘s recording of Max Reger’s complete piano works on 12 CDs (Thorofon) is already considered legendary. Fono Forum‘s assessment of this encyclopaedic feat: “One of the rare and truly major achievements of German piano artistry in the past 50 years.” He received an OPUS award for his live recorded Reger piano concerto.

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Composer(s)

Ludwig van Beethoven

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 nine symphonies, five piano concertos, one violin concerto, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, his great Mass the Missa solemnis, and one opera, Fidelio. Together with Mozart and Haydn, he was part of the First Viennese School.    Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of the Holy Roman Empire, Beethoven displayed his musical talents at an early age and was taught by his father Johann van Beethoven and by composer and conductor Christian Gottlob...
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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 nine symphonies, five piano concertos, one violin concerto, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, his great Mass the Missa solemnis, and one opera, Fidelio. Together with Mozart and Haydn, he was part of the First Viennese School. Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of the Holy Roman Empire, Beethoven displayed his musical talents at an early age and was taught by his father Johann van Beethoven and by composer and conductor Christian Gottlob Neefe. At the age of 21 he moved to Vienna, where he began studying composition with Joseph Haydn, and gained a reputation as a virtuoso pianist. He lived in Vienna until his death. By his late 20s his hearing began to deteriorate, and by the last decade of his life he was almost totally deaf. In 1811 he gave up conducting and performing in public but continued to compose; many of his most admired works come from these last 15 years of his life.

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Press

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Often bought together with..

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart, Piano & Winds
Markus Becker & Ma'alot Quintett

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