Event

Classical Sound Room: The Badness of Beethoven

Pianist Ian Scarfe brings a program of classical chamber music, exploring the dramatic narrative, spiritual transcendence, and delicate nuances of Ludwig van Beethoven's music. Featuring Ian Scarfe on piano; Rachel Patrick on violin and Charles Akert in cello.

Leaving his home in northern Germany in his early 20s for Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, a young Beethoven fully expected to rise to the top. He had the perfect combination of gifts: unheard-of virtuosity as a pianist, a passionate mind for improvisation, and a fearless attitude toward breaking norms and shocking the bourgeois concert audiences. Sure enough, by his early 30s Beethoven was the talk of Europe, heralded as the next great musician. But lingering health issues culminated in a terrible tragedy: over the course of a couple years, Beethoven lost his hearing and went completely deaf.

How would any of us struggle with hearing loss at this age? How must Beethoven have felt, at the moment of realizing his life's dream, to suffer this blow of fate? Thankfully to all of humanity, Beethoven struggled on, creating more and greater music after his deafness. His imagination, his creative mind, and his iron will to master musical forms and shape them to his dramatic ideals won out in the end.

This Concert will feature selected Violin and Cello Sonatas by Beethoven, alongside a premiere of a new work by Max Stoffregen, the 2018 composer-in-residence at the Trinity
Alps Chamber Music Festival, and Dmitri Shostakovich's tragic masterpiece, the Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 67. We will explore the music of Beethoven accompanied by narrative by the performers about the history and context of the music, and specific elements in the performance that audiences can listen for.