Composer of the Week: Beethoven: New Pathways

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

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An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Beethoven Unleashed: New Pathways: Still in the Game

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Beethoven Unleashed: New Pathways

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Beethoven Unleashed: New Pathways, Still in the Game

Beethoven embraces his career as a performer, while he still can. With Donald Macleod.

Faced with encroaching deafness, Beethoven embraces his career as a star performer, while he still can. Presented by Donald Macleod.

Beethoven had faced his encroaching deafness first with desperation and then with a new resolve: to live for his art, and make art that really counted. That meant not only making strides as a composer but embracing his life as a star performer, while he still could.

All this week, Donald Macleod traces Beethoven’s story through the momentous years of 1802 and 1803. It was a time that saw remarkable developments in Beethoven’s creativity as he pursued a self-declared ‘new path’ for his music. He undertook his most ambitious works yet, pouring his whole self into his art.  At the same time his personal life was reaching a crisis point that would plunge him to the darkest depths of despair and threaten to ruin all his carefully laid plans for the future.  

Composer of the Week is returning to the story of Beethoven’s life and music throughout 2020. Part of Radio 3’s Beethoven Unleashed season marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.

Piano Sonata No 17,  Op.31 No.2 ‘The Tempest’, II. Adagio
Khatia Buniatishvili, paino

Quintet for piano and winds Op 16. III. Rondo
Robin Williams, oboe
Maximiliano Martin, clarinet
Peter Whelan, bassoon
Alec Frank-Gemmill, horn
Pavel Kolesnikov, piano

Andante Favori  WoO 57
Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano

Violin Sonata in A major  Op 47 ‘Kreutzer’ I. Adagio sostenuto - Presto
Veronika Eberle, violin
Oliver Schnyder, piano

Piano Sonata No 21 in C major  Op 53 ‘Waldstein’, I. Allegro con brio
Igor Levit, piano

Composer of the Week: Beethoven Unleashed: New Pathways

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod traces Beethoven's story through the momentous years of 1802 and 1803.

Donald Macleod traces Beethoven's story through the momentous years of 1802 and 1803 - a time that saw remarkable developments in Beethoven's creativity as he pursued a 'new path'.

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