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Sunday, January 20, 2013

Sunday Morning in the Church of Beethoven

One of LvB's most underrated sonatas, here from Daniel Barenboim (who I'll be seeing two weeks from today doing The Ninth with West-East Divan at Carnegie).

1 comment:

Laurence Glavin said...

NEXT Sunday, January 27th, is Mozart's Birthday. It might make for a nice "Church of Beethoven" entry for tha date, some3 composition of Mozart's that would seem to have been very in=fluential in Beethoven's career. The two minor-key Piano Concertos 20 and 24 brought new levels of intensity to the concerto form (WAM's violin concertos did not). His last symphony, #41, Kochel-rating (a little Flandersa & Swann reference) K551 has a last movement with a finale built from four simple notes. His "Dissonance" Quartet, Kochel-rating 465, is often described in program notes and concert bulletins as being in C-major. But Mozart does not provide any key signature in the first movement exposition, a marker of C -major, except from that point on, several notes are accompanied by sharps and flats (all the notes in the C-major scale are played natural) which is how the "Dissonance" Quartet got its name. Beethoven must have been familiar with all these works. He might not have heard or seen the score of Mozart's Great Mass in C-minor, which includes an unusualloy strong setting of the Credo, so it might not have been an inspiration for the "Missa Solem nis".