Maurizio Zaccaria – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Opp. 13 & 27 & Other Works (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:01:40 minutes | 837 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © OnClassical

In the first decade of his career as a published composer, Ludwig van Beethoven completed an enormous amount of music. Some of the most beloved sonatas for piano belong to this prolific period, marked not only by the desire to be acknowledged as an emerging composer of his time, but also by wonderfully creative inspiration and innovation. All of these sonatas are crucial in the way Beethoven understood both musical forms and the possibilities of the piano as the new household instrument.

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Maurizio Zaccaria – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Op. 31 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:00:51 minutes | 843 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © OnClassical

As the nineteenth century began, Beethoven produced vast amounts of music, much of it involving the piano. A string of piano sonatas, all highly original compositions, were published between 1801 and 1803. The Three Sonatas, Op. 31, the culmination of this artistic outpouring, were part of an effort to bring new life to a form considered somewhat tired and old-fashioned. The first of the three Sonatas, in G Major, was the last to be completed. The opening movement, Allegro vivace, features an array of technical challenges (parallel scales and arpeggi) displayed in full force in the first theme and its different incarnations throughout the movement. However, the tendency is that of desynchronizing the hands in stuttering gestures, perhaps wittingly depicting a piano lesson in which the student’s inability to play evenly is met with irate retorts from the teacher. The second theme, dancelike, is in the key of B major/B minor – an unusual choice, which mirrors the tonal scheme found in first movements of earlier sonatas. The Adagio grazioso that follows is a delightful serenade, clearly modeled after operatic archetypes, with richly ornate cadenzas and arabesques. The closing movement, Allegretto, is a rondo defined by lyrical elegance. The material is characterized by frequent dialogues between the soprano and tenor registers, mode shifts, and cross rhythms. After a series of interruptions …

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Maurizio Zaccaria – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Op. 2 Nos. 1-3 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:06:35 minutes | 927 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © OnClassical

Beethoven’s Opus 2, published in Wien in March 1796, is the first work in which the composer’s strong personality is declared.

Accordingly to Carli Ballola, Piano Sonatas Op. 2 are the manifesto of the style that the composer achieved in the early XVIII century and that will be characterizing of the following years: this is, according to Lenz, the so-called “Early Beethovenian period”.

Important aspects affect the form: the Sonatas are now – differently from Haydn, Clementi and Mozart’s Sonatas – structured in four movements. For the first time, Beethoven starts an expansion and a development of the forma-sonata, concerning to the structure of dynamics and rhythm, and to the dialectic of transitions; it follows that the treatment of the pianistic matter turns out to be more psychological than reminding to a frivolous style.

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Maurizio Zaccaria – Beethoven: Works for Piano (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 51:00 minutes | 732 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © OnClassical

The two albums OC19040B and OC19041B introduce Beethoven’s more intimate works that appropriately trace his evolution: from the four Sonatinas, WoO 50 and 51, Anh. 5/1, 5/2, composed in the late 1780s or early 1790s and published posthumously; exploring the four sonatas of the first-period (the Three Sonatas, Op. 10 and the Sonata, Op. 22); two sonatas from the middle period (Opp. 78, in two relatively brief movements; and Op. 79, the shortest of the three-movement sonatas); and ending with the late-period’s Eleven Bagatelles, Op. 119, revised and published as a set in 1823 but gathering works that span from the 1790s to the early 1820s. While Beethoven’s very early sonatinas may show a rather conservative attitude toward composition and pianistic language (perhaps the reason why they remained unpublished), it is in the Sonatas, Op. 10 that we sense Beethoven’s urge as a young composer to push the boundaries of already old-fashioned archetypes – in the use of the rondo-sonata form, for example, but also in the quintessentially orchestral writing of the third sonata. And it is in the second half of the Bagatelles, Op. 119, written in 1821-22, that we most perceive Beethoven’s iconoclastic force had he not prematurely left the world only several years later.

The present recording was made by Alessandro Simonetto with a pair of 2-stereo Stennheiser microphones.

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Maurizio Zaccaria – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Opp. 10, 78 & 79 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:01:54 minutes | 892 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © OnClassical

Beethoven’s Opus 2, published in Wien in March 1796, is the first work in which the composer’s strong personality is declared.

Accordingly to Carli Ballola, Piano Sonatas Op. 2 are the manifesto of the style that the composer achieved in the early XVIII century and that will be characterizing of the following years: this is, according to Lenz, the so-called “Early Beethovenian period”.

Important aspects affect the form: the Sonatas are now – differently from Haydn, Clementi and Mozart’s Sonatas – structured in four movements. For the first time, Beethoven starts an expansion and a development of the forma-sonata, concerning to the structure of dynamics and rhythm, and to the dialectic of transitions; it follows that the treatment of the pianistic matter turns out to be more psychological than reminding to a frivolous style.

(more…)

Maurizio Zaccaria – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 4, 9 & 10 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 52:07 minutes | 726 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © OnClassical

With the Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 7, published by Artaria “for harpsichord and piano” in 1797, Beethoven expands the scope of keyboard technique and structural proportions. Indeed, some of the passagework in the outer movements must have been prohibitive to most amateur pianists; and the length of the sonata, at the time, made it the longest work for piano ever published, and the second longest sonata Beethoven composed (the record goes to the Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. 106 “Hammerklavier”). Metric displacements and violent dynamic contrasts inform the opening movement, while the prayer-like Adagio is possibly one of the most extraordinary achievements of Beethoven’s youth. The Allegro that follows, light and playful, is interrupted by a stormy “minore” section that was most likely the inspiration for the first of Schubert’s Klavierstucke, D 946. The melodious but challenging Rondo closes the sonata, unexpectedly, in a murmur.

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Maurizio Zaccaria – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:13:30 minutes | 1,03 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © OnClassical

Beethoven’s Opus 2, published in Wien in March 1796, is the first work in which the composer’s strong personality is declared. Accordingly to Carli Ballola, Piano Sonatas Op. 2 are the manifesto of the style that the composer achieved in the early XVIII century and that will be characterizing of the following years: this is, according to Lenz, the so-called “Early Beethovenian period”.

Important aspects affect the form: the Sonatas are now – differently from Haydn, Clementi and Mozart’s Sonatas – structured in four movements. For the first time, Beethoven starts an expansion and a development of the forma-sonata, concerning to the structure of dynamics and rhythm, and to the dialectic of transitions; it follows that the treatment of the pianistic matter turns out to be more psychological than reminding to a frivolous style.

About Maurizio Zaccaria (AE17032 Gerhswin, G.: Complete Published Piano Works; AE15003 Massenet, J.: Complete Piano Works; OC18011B Beethoven, L. Van: Piano Sonatas Opp. 26, 28, 49, 90) renowned pianist Aldo Ciccolini wrote “he is a pianist endowed with rare technical and musical means.”

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