Music Play By Play

Newport Classic presents Music Play by Play, an encyclopedic collection of the worlds most important music.Here, for the first time, a CD-ROM containing the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas, on high quality MP3 files, performed by Seymour Lipkin. This disk is playable on any computer with a CD-ROM/DVD drive, MP3-compatible DVD players, and MP3-compatible home and automobile CD players. Visit NewportClassics.com to Interactive with this wonder interactive encyclopedia Notes by Ted LibbeyNowhere are Beethoven’s gifts as a composer greater, or more apparent, than in his sonatas for the piano. They contain what was from the start his most personal musical expression: the piano was his instrument, and he was constantly pushing its capacities–particularly its range and dynamic gradations–as far as they would go. Even when he could no longer hear the results he continued to explore the instrument’s possibilities, and had it not been for his deafness, he undoubtedly would have remained in later years the virtuoso interpreter of his own works that he was as a young man. While it may seem ironic that Beethoven was both a brilliant improviser and a composer who habitually sketched and re-sketched his ideas before committing them to a work, these two elements–the spontaneous and the structured–characterize all of his music for the piano, and give his sonatas a strength and vitality unparalleled in the keyboard literature.