9. BeethovenBeethoven At Bedtime
Whenever I come back to Beethoven I find it very, very affecting. I think he really nailed what music is supposed to be about. A lot composers just wrote clever things most of the time, whereas Beethoven seems to be somewhere down deep in the essence of where it’s coming from somehow. He’s got a different effect entirely in that.
Beethoven At Bedtime is an album and one with a great selection of shorter pieces of his – sonatas and piano concertos and these five- and 10-minute pieces. It really is a great little album. It’s part of the classic …At Bedtime series.
Beethoven has real accessibility and gets down to the very core of things. It’s often said that he was the start of modern music and I think that’s true. He managed to achieve things that nobody surpassed for nearly a hundred years. I don’t think there’s anything more modern than Beethoven that I’m familiar with until the 20th century
