Thank you for your understanding.
Cast
Daniel Barenboim — Presenter, pianist
Carlos Villa — Violinist
Kenneth Moore — Violinist
Herbert Downes — Violist
Norman Jones — Cellist
New Philharmonia Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim — Conductor
Program notes
If we had never heard Beethoven’s music before and decided to look at his final piano sonata, Op. 111, alongside his very first, we would be floored by the differences in tonal and formal expansiveness, motivic spontaneity, and compositional architecture—it might even seem unbelievable that the works had come from the pen of one composer. But Barenboim, having already taken us through middle-period Beethoven—the "Waldstein," the "Appasionata", the Eroica—argues that the “unmistakable quality” of the late works represents “a logical development of his whole life’s work.” This chapter of Barenboim on Beethoven focuses on the final sonata’s first movement, “some of the tensest music he ever wrote” in which he proves himself “a master of small forms.”
