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

asin: B00008PW4C binding: Audio CD list price: $26.99 USD amazon price: $26.99

5 CD Box set.

asin: B00000IKJR binding: Audio CD list price: $10.98 USD amazon price: $11.31 USD

Classical music for children has become a genre unto itself, founded on the premise of brain-power building and all too often steering parental buyers away from the full-blown versions of particular compositions toward reorchestrated renditions. It's frequently the case that a brain-tickling classical set will be played on digital keyboards, with softened tonal colors and shapes. Not so with this excellent Beethoven set. Recognized ensembles take up the music, from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to the New York Chamber Symphony to the Oxford String Quartet and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. The emphasis is on Beethoven's gentler side, from the poetic "Für Elise" for solo piano to the bucolic settings portrayed in the two selections from Beethoven's Symphony No. 6. This is neither a synapse-popping set of virtuoso performances nor an altered look at Beethoven, but it is a well-selected, well-programmed set of works that will ease a child's brain into the works at hand. --Andrew Bartlett

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