New period-instrument recordings of breakthrough works by the teenage Beethoven.The piano quartet is an unassuming genre for a musical milestone, but it was with this trio of works that Beethoven, at the age of 15, first found the voice that would within the next half-century come to be widely recognised as the symbolic, universal voice of music, of freedom and of personal autonomy.That’s a lot for three humble piano quartets to bear, and by and large this is still young man’s music, wearing lightly the second-hand influence of Haydn and contemporary French music. This was the kind of music heard and played by the teenage Beethoven as a violinist, organist and court employee of the Elector in his hometown of Bonn. Perhaps the quartets were intended for dedication to the new elector in 1784, but in the event they remained unpublished until after the composer’s death.
