NEW YORK (AP) - For Sir Simon Rattle, Beethoven was, of course, brilliant. And perhaps crazy. How much of the composer's creativity was tied to his loss of hearing? "If he had not been so cut off from ...

Sometimes rating orchestras and conductors seems like a riddle as mysterious as the Sphinx. This month on Symphony @ 7, I'm featuring orchestras and conductors on Bachtrack's list of the top-ten for ...

Time was when a recording of the Beethoven symphonies was a rite of passage for conductors above a certain rank. Felix Weingartner made the first cycle in the 1930s (Naxos Records is in the process of ...

Barbara Bonney, Birgit Remmert, Kurt Streit, Thomas Hampson; City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus; Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle (2002 live recordings). EMI Classics, $48.98 (five ...

Recordings of all the Beethoven symphonies with their chief conductor are always a milestone in the artistic work of the Berliner Philharmoniker. So it was with Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado, ...

One of the world's most important orchestras has just come out with a series of recordings of all nine symphonies by Beethoven. The orchestra is the Vienna Philharmonic, and the conductor is Simon ...

There is hardly a better way to approach Ludwig van Beethoven than through his piano concertos. Beethoven’s own instrument was the piano, and in his improvisations – which made him the darling of the ...

NEW YORK — For Sir Simon Rattle, Beethoven was, of course, brilliant. And perhaps crazy. How much of the composer's creativity was tied to his loss of hearing? "If he had not been so cut off from the ...