The Beethoven Experience

BBC Radio 3 is playing all Beethoven, all the time, at least through this Friday. It is part of their Beethoven Experience which you can listen to on the net. It is worth checking out, if you are a Beethoven fan like I am. I thought I would put together a small playlist of a few of my absolute favorite Beethoven works: the Grosse Fugue, the pastoral Symphony, and the Appassionata piano sonata. Their are many more works I would have liked to included, but check out the Beethoven Experience if you desire more. As you can see I included works from three different areas of which he was a master: the string quartet, the symphony, and the piano sonata. I am especially a big fan of the Appassionata sonata. It is hard to realize what a ground breaking piece of work this was. Beethoven was so hard on his pianos, that he actually used to routinely break them as he pushed the piano and his music to the outer limits. I like to think of the Appassionata sonata as a revolutionary work, in today's terms you might think of it as analogous to Jimi Hendrix's guitar work. Click here to listen.