Markus Becker – Regarding Beethoven (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 46:04 minutes | 776 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BERTHOLD Records

The first question that comes to mind when listening to the new album by pianist Markus Becker is: “Can you do that?” Becker has taken Beethoven’s music on board, and not to perform it as close to the original as possible. In “Regarding Beethoven” the pianist improvises on the old master. The result sounds as if his music is suddenly completely new. And yet he always remains present. “Regarding Beethoven” has nothing to do with the fall of an icon. “They are improvisations on Beethoven’s ideas,” says Becker. “I’m not concerned with improvising alongside the pieces. Something really new should emerge from small things.” Sometimes a humble motif is sufficient as a starting point, which then becomes the source of the almost effervescent music.The first of Beethoven’s “Eleven Bagatelles”, played to death, shines here in a new light. The well-known melody is taken and repeatedly modified without it ever disappearing. In the end, it dissolves in a short cascade of fast playednotes.Beethoven’s music, elevated and developed by Markus Becker, is great fun. It sounds as if it is being heard for the first time. It is played without severity, but remains untrivialised.“Vom Tode” (About Death), for example, originally a heavy Schubertian lament which, especially when sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, can rob the most cheerfullistener of joie de vivre. Here, Becker makes the music float. Though it sounds composed, it was produced spontaneously, in close harmony with the original material.Becker drawns on a vast musical fundus. The improvisation on the third movement of the “Appassionata” (written in 1805 and in which, as was common at the time –even with Beethoven, not a single phrase is complete) indicates how Markus Becker naturally incorporates jazz techniques into his playing: here, not in the way that classical music, Jacques-Loussier-like, is made to swing. Yet you hear jazz shimmering through: the stumbling of Thelonious Monk, a leeway in the approach to the material. “The improvisation gives me more freedom, but on the other hand shows me that I yearn for structures,” says Becker. And freedom, with an accompanying supporting structure, is the great promise of jazz.The clear and the immediate distinguish the improvisationsof the piano virtuoso Markus Becker. That may be because his playing was grounded in childhood and not at the conservatory. “I learnt piano as a child and imitated and improvised on the things that I heard. It’s something completely organic for me to approach playing from listening and not from notes or other such guidelines.”This freedom can be heard in “Regarding Beethoven” making it one of the most vibrant jazz and classical solo albums of recent years.

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