Paul Lewis has emerged as a fine contemporary Beethoven specialist, as something of an heir to the probing readings of Alfred Brendel. His readings of Beethoven's sonatas are worth multiple hearings, and so it is with this group of bagatelles, a term that Beethoven was the first to use consistently for a musical genre. The word means "trifle," but Beethoven's bagatelles are insignificant only in length: they are quite short, in a few cases (like No. 10 of the Op. 119 set) freakishly short. The Op. 33 set, from 1802, has the ...
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Paul Lewis has emerged as a fine contemporary Beethoven specialist, as something of an heir to the probing readings of Alfred Brendel. His readings of Beethoven's sonatas are worth multiple hearings, and so it is with this group of bagatelles, a term that Beethoven was the first to use consistently for a musical genre. The word means "trifle," but Beethoven's bagatelles are insignificant only in length: they are quite short, in a few cases (like No. 10 of the Op. 119 set) freakishly short. The Op. 33 set, from 1802, has the feel of discarded sonata movements, and they have the restless quality of many of the sonatas from that period. Try the fifth bagatelle of the set, where Lewis catches the wildly humorous treatment of register without devolving into grotesquerie. The pieces in the Op. 119 set, erroneously stated here as dating from 1820 to 1822, actually come from several phases of Beethoven's career, and Lewis' readings are appropriately diverse. The Op. 126 bagatelles, from 1823, are genuine late...
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Add this copy of Beethoven: Fur Elise, Bagatelles to cart. $21.57, new condition, Sold by Importcds rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Sunrise, FL, UNITED STATES, published 2020 by Harmonia Mundi.
