Beethoven / Schuch- Reflecting Beethoven
"Beethoven has been pressed into many categories. At times he was seen as the great Titan, at others as an idealist; later approaches occasionally attempted to "de-emotionalize" his music. He simply had an incredible ability to be many things, but his music was never dispassionate. Beethoven could even sound overemotional, and then display dry wit! I see him at a crossroads in music history where he was occasionally still allowed to write plain, simple music, and I find that thoroughly moving. I'm always searching for connections across the centuries. Composers relate to one another, consciously or unconsciously. For instance, unconsciously: Henri Pousseur wasn't thinking at all about Beethoven's G Major Sonata. When I was thirteen years old, I performed the Pousseur piece at the European Youth Music Competition: it was a compulsory piece, and I won a special prize. It was the first truly "modern" piece in my repertoire, and required things I wasn't prepared for at all. At the beginning, for example, six different dynamic shadings are overlapping simultaneously in both hands. I found those challenges exciting: after having gone through such an experience, I had "tasted blood" as far as contemporary music was concerned. In the middle of the piece, there is an improvisation on predetermined musical material: I wrote my version down, and have recorded it that way now." (Herbert Schuch)
"Beethoven has been pressed into many categories. At times he was seen as the great Titan, at others as an idealist; later approaches occasionally attempted to "de-emotionalize" his music. He simply had an incredible ability to be many things, but his music was never dispassionate. Beethoven could even sound overemotional, and then display dry wit! I see him at a crossroads in music history where he was occasionally still allowed to write plain, simple music, and I find that thoroughly moving. I'm always searching for connections across the centuries. Composers relate to one another, consciously or unconsciously. For instance, unconsciously: Henri Pousseur wasn't thinking at all about Beethoven's G Major Sonata. When I was thirteen years old, I performed the Pousseur piece at the European Youth Music Competition: it was a compulsory piece, and I won a special prize. It was the first truly "modern" piece in my repertoire, and required things I wasn't prepared for at all. At the beginning, for example, six different dynamic shadings are overlapping simultaneously in both hands. I found those challenges exciting: after having gone through such an experience, I had "tasted blood" as far as contemporary music was concerned. In the middle of the piece, there is an improvisation on predetermined musical material: I wrote my version down, and have recorded it that way now." (Herbert Schuch)