Boundless
Beethoven: complete four hands music
Artur Pizarro piano
Rinaldo Zhok piano
Beethoven’s music for piano four hands displays different facets of the composer’s skill with colour and form. The famous Grosse Fuge, Op. 134, originally for string quartet, is a monument to the art of transcription: Beethoven not only transcribes but reinvents this work, with stunning results. The same may be said of the piano four hands version of the Quintet for Piano and Winds, which Beethoven recasts as a truly impressive sonata. The Three Marches, Op. 45 influenced Schubert’s Three Military Marches and show Beethoven in a softer and more intimate light. The album also features the Eight Variations on a theme by Count Waldstein, WoO 67, in which Beethoven varies an elegant melody by the friend and patron whose name would be immortalised in his Piano Sonata, Op. 53. The Six Variations on ‘Ich denke dein’, WoO 74 draw inspiration from a literary source: Goethe’s poem Nähe des Geliebten – ‘The Nearness of the Beloved’.
