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

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.

asin: B00000AE72 binding: Audio CD list price: $9.98 USD amazon price: $8.99 USD

Hundreds of compilation recordings have been thrust on the market in recent years on the theory that classical music makes a nice, non-threatening accompaniment to everything from working out to making love. And here we have one compilation promising to make your baby smarter. It's offensive enough that the music featured on these compilations is spliced up so that the most you hear of any work is a single movement; what's really annoying is the poor quality of so many of the featured performances. So it is some consolation that the artists here include such 20th-century legends as the Cleveland Orchestra under Szell and the Budapest String Quartet with Mieczyslaw Horszowski. Of course if these folks were alive, one can imagine their violent objection to this presentation of their work. --Gwendolyn Freed

asin: B0000B383B binding: Audio CD list price: $17.95 USD amazon price: $17.95 USD

Includes Symphony NO. 5 and Piano Concerto No. 4. The work of Ludwig van Beethoven has been called the culmination of the Classical era or the wellspring of the Romantic era in European music. Historians today see him as the heir of Haydn and Mozart, carrying their musical discoveries to a new level of complexity and integration. No composer in the nineteenth century could aspire to the creation of a symphony without taking into account the example of Beethoven. In his Symphony No. 5, Beethoven achieved an unprecedented degree of unity and coherence through the use of a short musical phrase called a "movite" which recurs a number of times throughout the piece. In Piano Concerto No. 4, Beethoven breaks with tradition by beginning with an understated piano solo rather than a substantial orchestral introduction. Each CD package includes two CDs. The first, a Musical Performance Disk, features the top performers and symphony orchestras in the world, performing the best-loved music from the classical music Greats. Accompanying the Musical Performance Disc is a Conductor's Guide on a separate CD. Here, Maestro Gerard Schwarz discusses the musical performances in depth--movement by movement, section by section--using examples from the recorded performances. There's no better, more enjoyable way to get a basic education in classical music. You'll also receive a 16-page printed copy of Concert Notes, featuring the unique Music Disc Timeline, which is written to synchronize with the elapsed time display of your CD player. As you play the music on the Performance Disc, you can see exactly where the things that Maestro Schwarz discussed take place in the music. It's like looking into the score--but you don't have to know how to read music!