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

asin: B000NPCMGW binding: Audio CD list price: $11.98 USD amazon price: $9.49 USD

Specially priced 2-CD set in space-saving brilliant box with accompanying three-language booklet. Digitally remastered to the highest standards at the world-famous Abbey Road Studios.

asin: B000002RUP binding: Audio CD list price: $16.98 USD amazon price: $16.98 USD

Here's a disc that really throws down the gauntlet! Beethoven's late piano sonatas have an almost mythical reputation for sublime obscurity. That doesn't mean they don't get played, but rather that performers (and critics) tend to treat them with a seriousness not always supported by the music itself, which is frequently intimate, playful, and charming. In coupling two late sonatas with two earlier ones, Pratt demonstrates both the consistency of Beethoven's musical thought, and also makes a strong case for the late sonatas being far more approachable than most people think. He plays these two late works with the same sort of robust freshness and unaffected musicality that he lavishes on the two earlier ones, and the result is highly engaging. --David Hurwitz

asin: B0002W3EDG binding: Audio CD list price: $16.99 USD amazon price: $16.99 USD

Here's an inspired appendage to the Aimard-Harnoncourt set of the Beethoven Piano Concertos. When new, the Triple Concerto, combining three solo instruments with orchestra, was considered a bold new type of concerto. That's how it's played here. The solo trio blends nicely with the orchestra, giving the work a chamber music dimension. Once past the slow introduction, Harnoncourt conducts a vigorous, almost rhapsodic performance, with great forward momentum. But the honors go to the outstanding soloists. Aimard etches the piano line with exceptional clarity, Hagen, the cellist of the Hagen Quartet, plays with gorgeous tone, while violinist Zehetmair, who also leads a quartet bearing his name, almost steals the show through his agile playing and phrasing that cuts to the heart of the music. I know of no better performance of this work. The Choral Fantasy too comes off as more than a weird combination of a solo piano fantasia and a choral sketch for the last movement of the Ninth Symphony. And pianist and orchestra play the daylights out of the quirky Rondo in B-flat major. --Dan Davis

asin: B000FHBH78 binding: Paperback

Sheet Music for Beethoven's Sonatas No. 1 - 17, bound in an oversized paperback binding.

Eighteenth Printing