William Kinderman - Beethoven: Diabelli Variations

Sealed.

Two-disc collection includes the complete studio recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations as performed by William Kinderman and a 45 minute lecture about the variations by Kinderman (with live excerpts from a performance of the Diabelli Variations in Bakersfield, California, 2002). The two CDs are housed in a handsome gatefold digipak, which includes a 24-page booklet with liner notes by William Kinderman, Moisés Kaufman, and Arietta Music founder Geoffrey Merritt. The 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli Op. 120, commonly known as the Diabelli Variations, is a set of variations for the piano written between 1819 and 1823 by Ludwig van Beethoven on a waltz composed by Anton Diabelli. One of the supreme compositions for the piano, it often shares the highest honours with Bach's Goldberg Variations. Pianist Alfred Brendel has described it as simply "the greatest of all piano works.". It also comprises, in the words of Hans von Bülow, "a microcosm of Beethoven's art." Or, as Martin Cooper writes in Beethoven: The Last Decade 1817 - 1827, "The variety of treatment is almost without parallel, so that the work represents a book of advanced studies in Beethoven's manner of expression and his use of the keyboard, as well as a monumental work in its own right."