On January 24, 2025, Signum Classics will release BEETHOVEN: The Early Quartets, the final installment in the Calidore String Quartet's award-winning full Beethoven cycle. The Early Quartets follows ...

In the 1960s my mother put up with a lot of dreadful music. She bought me a trumpet and insisted I play it for an hour every day. She endured my wobbly scales, arpeggios and Al Hirt impersonations ...

Volume one of the cycle includes Beethoven’s Op. 18 string quartets over 2 CDs – on CD 1, String Quartet in F major, Op.18 No.1; String Quartet in D major, Op.18 No. 3; and String Quartet in B-flat ...

The Budapest String Quartet has always been my standard-bearer for chamber music. I grew up listening to their recordings, and especially admired not only their gorgeous sound, but also the uncanny ...

Why should Beethoven’s string quartets have come to represent the pinnacle of achievement in western classical music? After all, this is a modest, intimate format involving just four players, better ...

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. "Grotesque", "monstrous", "chaotic", "madness"... When audiences ...

The Doric are perhaps the foremost British string quartet at the moment, so their turn to Beethoven in their 25th-anniversary year is an important one. They choose not to proceed set by set through ...

In the spring of 1825, when Beethoven was 54, he became terribly sick. He was in bed for a month and he wrote to his doctor, "I am not feeling well ... I am in great pain." The doctor put Beethoven on ...

The greatness of Beethoven cast a long shadow. It was Brahms whose First Symphony was long delayed by the intensity with which the composer felt “the tramp of such a giant behind you”. And the shadow ...

When we finally see the return of concerts, shared experiences by full audiences, everyone together, the moment will be less for fireworks than for thanksgiving. Let us begin, then, with Beethoven as ...

Performances in N.Y.C. Advertisement Supported by Beethoven at 250 | Critic’s Notebook The Danish String Quartet presented the composer’s complete quartets over six extraordinary concerts at Alice ...

For the last two years of his life, Beethoven's world was dark and silent. His health was completely shot. And his emotional state was worse. He'd failed in his relationship with his nephew Karl, and ...