Season I, Episode 1

Brahms: “Lerchengesang” (transcription Geringas.) 

 Zuill Bailey, Cello, Awadagin Pratt, Piano 

Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third

Beethoven Symphony #5, All American Youth Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski Cond. 

Euryanthe Overture, Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, Erich Kleiber, Cond.

Beethoven Symphony #5 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Carlos Kleiber, Cond.*

Beethoven Piano Sonata Op. 27, #2 , (used without permission!)

Beethoven String Quartet Op 130, Mvt. 5 Cavatina, Cypress String Quartet**

Beethoven String Quartet Op 130, Grosse Fuge, Cypress String Quartet

Beethoven String Quartet Op. 132***, Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lyrischen Tonart.(!!) Molto Adagio-Andante. Cypress String Quartet

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Footnotes:

*This recording of Beethoven 5 is regarded by many to be the best. I do find it fantastic. 

**Fanfare: Beethoven: The Late String Quartets

above: Cypress Quartet

by Jerry Dubins, Fanfare, the Magazine for Serious Music Collectors:

First, bravo! Another modern-day ensemble acknowledges the importance of placing the B♭-Major Quartet’s Grosse Fuge ahead of the alternate finale.

Second, bravissimo! The Cypress String Quartet’s traversal of Beethoven’s late quartets is the best, bar none, I’ve yet to encounter. These are performances of a technical perfection and keenness of interpretive insight that one is apt to hear only in the mind’s inner ear. Tiny details seen in the score but almost never heard are revealed with crystalline clarity.

(full review here)

***  It is believed that T. S. Eliot‘s took inspiration from this quartet to write his Four Quartets. In a letter to Stephen Spender he wrote of the A-minor quartet: “I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.

****I have a special and exciting commissioning project which will bear fruit between April 2020-Jan 2022 related to T.S Eliot “Four Quartets”.  You can find out a little about it here at 21cm with my co-producer Mark Rabideau:

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