Beethoven: The Early String Quartets AV2348

String Quartet Op.18 No.1
String Quartet Op.18 No.2
String Quartet Op.18 No.6

Disc 2
String Quartet Op.18 No.3
String Quartet Op.18 No.4
String Quartet Op.18 No.5

Included in this new 2-CD set - released internationally on May 6, 2016 on Avie Records - are original, extensive and insightful program notes written by Jan Swafford, author of "Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph." Jan Swafford's biographies of composers Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and 'fate's hammer', his ever-encroaching deafness. At the time of his death he was so widely celebrated that over ten thousand people attended his funeral.This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth, and throughout, Swafford - himself a composer - offers insightful readings of Beethoven's key works. More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.

More Information on CSQ-AVIE releases: Avie Records website
30 second samples coming soon
SAMPLES / TRACK LISTING
2:38:29 total running time