Leonardo Miucci & Alea Ensemble – The Art of Arrangement: Mozart & Beethoven Quartets for Piano & Strings (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:47 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dynamic
Both of these quartets are transcriptions of quintets for winds and piano by their respective composers but the links that bind them go much deeper. In the year after Mozart’s death, Beethoven began the draft of a work for the unusual instrumental ensemble of four wind instruments and piano. He was inspired by the similar work by Mozart, which had largely emancipated winds from their role in Harmoniemusik, employing them instead in the sophisticated ambience of chamber music. In this performance, following Beethoven’s own practice, the cadenzas in his quartet are improvised. ‘After The Young Beethoven, this second recording project completes the quartets for strings and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven. As in the previous programme, the link between the worlds of Mozart and Beethoven is clear and, in some aspects even more pronounced. In this case, the Quartet for Strings and Piano KV 452 represented an important reference point for the creation of the Quartet Op. 16, and it was such an important source of inspiration that we decided to put them together and highlight their evident and numerous elements of continuity, despite some relevant differences.’ – Leonardo Miucci
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Meret Lüthi, Sonoko Asabuki, Alexandre Foster, Leonardo Miucci – The Young Beethoven (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:54 minutes | 1,52 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Dynamic
At the age of 13 Beethoven was already hailed as the new Mozart and many of his early works, especially in the chamber music genre, were influenced by Mozart’s model, like the Three Quartets for Piano and Strings WoO 36, composed in 1785 and published posthumously in November 1828. These three chamber works are directly modeled on three of the six violin sonatas that Mozart published in 1781: KV 296, 379 and 380. One of young Beethoven’s patrons was Johann Gottfried Mastiaux , whose children played violin, viola, cello and the piano. Although there is no concrete evidence for it, Beethoven’s association with the Mastiaux family could have inspired him to write for such an instrumental ensemble; it is unlikely that Beethoven was yet aware of the first example of this genre, Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, KV 478, which was finished only on 16 October 1785 in Vienna, thus not in time for Beethoven to have become acquainted with it in Bonn. Therefore, it is possible that WoO 36 – and not KV 478 – was in fact the first example of the piano quartet in chamber music literature. Despite these circumstances and the composer’s youth, the WoO 36 piano quartets represent an important artistic pinnacle in which the seeds of Beethoven’s genius that would proliferate during his maturity were already evident. This album features the first recording on historical instruments of the Piano Quartets WoO 36 (Bonn, 1785) played by Leonardo Miucci (historical piano), Meret Lüthi, Sonoko Asabuki, and Alexandre Foster.
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