Word: beethovens
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...Beethoven: Quartet No. 14, Op. 131; Yale Quartet (Vanguard Cardinal). Even the young Guarneris cannot match this inciting and insightful performance...
...Beethoven: The 32 Piano Sonatas; Claude Frank; 12 LPs (RCA Victrola). Not only the first complete 32 ever recorded in the U.S., but one of the two or three best since Artur Schnabel set the record in the 1930s...
Vocal Heart. A thoroughly proper success it was, too. Böhm gave Beethoven's orchestral writing a brassy surface excitement that had a celebrity-filled audience cheering to the chandeliers. Save for a shaky Abscheulicher! in Act I, Soprano Leonie Rysanek as Leonore rescued her mate Florestan from Pizarro's dungeon with a heroinism that any latter-day Women's Lib leader would envy. Tenor Jon Vickers gave glorious vocal heart to Florestan's piteous degradation. Austrian Stage Director Otto Schenk clothed the production in medieval-dungeon darkness that gave way brilliantly...
...Beethoven year may have worn out some performers, but not the welcome of the music itself. The LPs have come along by the truckload. The books have been fewer, but choice-notably Thayer's century-old pioneering biography (newly reissued in a one-volume paperback; Princeton, $6.95) and the more compact Beethoven: Biography of a Genius, by George R. Marek (Funk & Wagnalls, $10). Marek, an American of Viennese birth and a former General Manager of RCA Records, has produced a fair, frank and freshly researched study of one of the most fascinatingly contradictory personalities in all the arts. Marek...
...result of all that labor proves that Beethoven did not just "free music"-as his romantic biographers put it-but the creative ego and id of every composer who followed. Prior to Beethoven, music in general never moved too far from the everyday interests of its patrons, be they commoners or royalty; this was true of a Bach cantata or a Mozart serenade. Beethoven changed that. As the father of musical romanticism, he made music an expressive function of himself. Later composers carried the cult of music for music's sake too far, and divorced "serious" composition from...