Markus Becker

Markus Becker – Reger: Piano Concerto & Solo works (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 58:57 minutes | 523 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

Back when Reger was writing his Piano Concerto, 1910, Debussy was working on La Mer and Stravinsky his Firebird. Vienna was becoming the crucible of the new dodecaphonism style. Reger kept his distance from all these tendencies, preferring to explore his own path, which, while sometimes difficult, was always marked by polyphony and counterpoint. His music’s architecture was always made up of self-contained cells, like a kind of careful patchwork in which the various elements didn’t always seem to relate to each other. Just listen (or re-listen, rather) carefully to the Concerto and you will get a taste of this juxtaposition of modernity with a desire to remain rooted in the past. Markus Becker (who recorded all of Reger’s solo piano works over twenty years) rounds off the collection with the Épisodes, written in the same year as the Concerto, but in an almost-miniaturist style – which just goes to show that all of Reger’s work isn’t marked by gigantism as these pieces all clock in at three or four minutes each. In them, the composer returns to the path of his great inspirations: the later Brahms and Beethoven’s final works including the Bagatelles.

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Markus Becker – Haydn: Piano Sonatas (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:15:04 minutes | 670 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

This music may seem easy to grasp at first glance: so much seems clear and straightforward. However, once you take a closer look and spend more time playing and listening to Haydn’s music, it develops an endless, multifaceted life of its own. It becomes more concrete and at the same time more mysterious. Unexpected turns of phrase, sudden occurrences, humorous juxtapositions and startling asymmetries are just as much a part of this music as its extended melodic arcs that make the piano sing. Haydn’s music forms an intimate bond between song and speech. In each movement of the ca. 60 piano sonatas he wrote, we meet a personality, an unmistakeable character, evoked in detail.

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Markus Becker – Haydn: Piano Works II (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:10:38 minutes | 601 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

Haydn’s piano sonatas have thrilled me since childhood. This music may seem easy to grasp at first glance: so much seems clear and straightforward. However, once you take a closer look and spend more time playing and listening to Haydn’s music, it develops an endless, multifaceted life of its own. It becomes more concrete and at teh same time it develops an endless, multifaceted life of its own. It becomes more concrete and at teh same time more mysterious. Unexpected turns of phrase, sudden occurences, humorous juxtapositions and startling asymmetries are just as much a part of this music as its extended melodic arcs that make the piano sing. Haydn’s music forms an intimate bond between song and speech. In each movement of the ca. 60 piano sonatas he wrote, we meet a personality, an unmistakeable character, evoked in detail. Haydn was long viewed as teh mere forerunner of vienna Classicism – Mozart and Beethoven’s Papa, so to speak. His sonatas were mainly regarded as witty, useful pedagogical material. Several generations seem to have been unaware of his profoundly nuanced approach. Perhaps, however, Haydn’s keyboard oeuvre might require even better interpreters than the works written by his towering colleagues. One cannot clothe this music in an adequate form without applying a great deal of fantasy in one’s choice of timbres, along with a keen sense for musical thetoric and careful regard for phrasing. Most of all, the Haydn performer should be able to modify the entire timbre effect and redistribute the balance among parts from one moment to the next. We must not forget that he was born way back in 1732: Haydn thus still had one foot in the Baroque age, as one can tell from the latent polyphony and frequent figures of musical rhetoric. His variegated types of articulation cover a wide spectrum: dozens of nuances fill out the range between Haydn’s profound, songlike legato and his humorously accentuated staccato. Here is not where we will find Beethoven’s force and dramatic vigor, neither Mozart’s ethereal beauty. Haydn wrote a music of profound humanity, with a basic outlook similar to what the German Romantics called humor’: a reflection of human life with all its beauties, unfathomable depths, hopes, losses, crises and joys, all shouldered with a large dose of passion and irony.

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Markus Becker – Beethoven: Piano & Winds (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:05:02 minutes | 613 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

While string instruments gave rise to a new repertoire of chamber music at the end of the 18th century with new forms emerging such as the quartet and its derivatives, quintets, septet or octet, the same could not be said for wind instruments since their construction was constantly changing, preventing a cohesive sound when it came to playing together. These counter-productive technical constraints caused a delay in terms of new works.

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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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