Beethoven News

Listening to a new piece of music is like meeting someone for the first time, says Richard Price , Danbury Concert Chorus music director.

Published: Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 6:01 a.m. Last Modified: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:12 a.m. The classical strains of Ludwig van Beethoven, as well as those by Aaron Copland and even P.D.Q. Bach, will fill the University Auditorium in an annual salute to the German composer on Friday.

Kai Talim, 16, takes a bow after performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Portland Youth Philharmonic during a dress rehearsal at George Fox University.

Not long ago, Philip Roth gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal , one of several in various publications that occasioned some surprise, since Roth is a notoriously reclusive writer.

Vienna Piotr Anderszewski Piotr Anderszewski, one of the world's foremost concert pianists and the subject of Bruno Monsaingeon's 2008 biopic Unquiet Traveller, plays a rare recital of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations at the Vienna Konzerthaus on Monday.

Till Fellner, the Austrian pianist, plays Beethoven sonatas like a poet. In a recital of five of them he gave at the National Gallery two weeks ago, he performed with a simplicity, a lack of showiness, an absence of affected mannerism. He played like an early romantic poet in the age before romanticism became synonymous with 'over the top' -- the age, that is, in which Beethoven wrote these works.

The layers of analysis and performance and recording and interpretation that have accrued around Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas over the generations can obscure the fact that Beethoven isn't rocket science. If these sonatas were poems, many of them would be about flowers, birds, and love: 19th-century subjects, expressed in a 19th-century idiom. As it is, their meaning is often comparably direct. The sonatas are 'about' the contrast between loud passages and soft, high notes and low ones, a rising figure in the right hand played off against a descending one in the left. They're 'about' the stirring heroism expressed by dotted rhythms (in which long notes alternate with short ones: baDUM, baDUM). They're 'about' the way that a C minor chord is startling when it comes in a place where the 19th-century ear expects a straight E-flat major (at the opening of the 26th sonata, called 'Les Adieux'). To contemporary ears, a C minor chord is not very surprising. The art of Beethoven performance lies in finding ways to make it fresh.

In an Unforgettable LIVE Performance at Englewood's bergenPAC Wednesday December 9th - 8:00 PM Together since the early 70s, The Canadian Brass Quintet's recorded output is prolific and extraordinary.

A free chamber music concert featuring three groups from the Amphion Club will perform at 2 p.m. Sunday at First United Methodist Church, 210 Martina St.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- A love of pop and classical music is partly in our genes London, UK - If you've ever wondered why a close group of friends might like completely different types of music, blame their genes.

THE 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has been celebrated this week.

The focus of the TakA cs Quartet's current season is Beethoven a ' a complete cycle of the 17 quartets that they have divided into pairs of programmes, and have spaced out between this month and next May.

Daniel Barenboim, the Argentine-born conductor and long-term Berlin resident, who played a concert at the Brandenburg Gate with his Staatskapelle orchestra.

Theme: Beethoven's Ninth -- Freedom Without Walls. Collaboration between ICO and the U of I Music Department celebrates 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The new conductor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Music, Ronald Zollman, will lead a special concert of works by Jewish composers whose music the Nazis banned.

Martin Majkut, one of five conductors competing for the artistic helm of the Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestra, will conduct the orchestra's second concert series of the season beginning Friday, Nov.

Beethoven's 'Razumovsky' string quartets were never meant to be easy listening a ' and they are even harder to play.

Updated 5:50 p.m. ET With two concerts and a series of workshops for young musicians, the White House put a big spotlight on classical music Wednesday and sent a strong message that it's not just for stuffed shirts.

The Oregon Symphony's first performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony under its new music director Carlos Kalmar was a jolt of discovery - fast, loud and thrilling.

The elegant sounds of harp, viola and flute will grace the stage of the Clarke Theatre on Saturday, Nov.

Musical Masterworks launched its 19th season Saturday night as if to prove that change is not necessarily loss.