Beethoven Piano Your resource for the piano music of Ludwig van Beethoven

asin: B000001G79 binding: Audio CD list price: $16.98 USD amazon price: $16.98 USD

Emil Gilels unfailingly conveys a manly strength in his performances of Beethoven's music, with a feeling of power held in reserve. The technique is stunning, but what is truly extraordinary is the lively, leonine quality of the playing. Gilels's account of the Waldstein has the quintessential energy and gruffness one associates with the work, and his rendition of Les Adieux is among the most imaginative ever captured. --Ted Libbey

asin: B0000064YB binding: Audio CD list price: $8.99 USD amazon price: $11.63 USD

A wizard of technical control since his prodigy days, Kissin simply uses this as a foundation to probe the depths of such core repertory items as the ones on this collection. It takes a truly subtle musicality and grasp to make the endlessly recorded Moonlight sound fresh, but Kissin has the goods, pulling the carpet from underneath and making you really notice, with his unsentimental, steady tempo, how unsettling Beethoven's harmonic fluctuations are in a first movement of startling inwardness. Kissin allows the middle minuet to blossom within the sonata's larger nightscape, while he pushes the finale's cri de coeur to its heaven-storming edge. He likewise traces the late-19th-century gothic labyrinth of Franck's Prelude, Choral et Fugue with an absorbing blend of delicacy and power. But the real highlight of this disc is the gloriously brilliant intensity Kissin brings to the Brahms Paganini Variations. Listen to how he parades a dizzying, dazzling series of moods--from caressing introspection and bone-crunching, steely chords to the giddy cross-rhythms of Book II, Variation 7--to match Brahms's magnitude of invention. This is pianism of the first order. --Thomas May

author: Ludwig van Beethoven asin: 0786643897 binding: Library Binding list price: $10.95 USD amazon price: $10.95

This unique series offers students and teachers a graded collection of Beethoven's piano sonatas. In addition to the only duet piano sonata Beethoven ever composed along with more difficult intermediate-level favorite sonatas, this volume contains an informative biography including a moving letter Beethoven wrote to his brothers. The table of contents provides background notes on several of the sonatas. This series is ideal for introducing intermediate to advanced students to the works of this masterful composer while providing insightful biographical notes. Some fingerings have been provided by the editor.

author: Franz Liszt asin: 0486418847 binding: Paperback list price: $16.95 USD amazon price: $11.53 USD

Second volume in a Dover series of Liszt's piano transcriptions of Beethoven's 9 symphonies includes Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, "Pastorale"; Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92; Symphony No. 8 in F major, Op. 93; and Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, "Choral."