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Life & Works - Johannes Brahms
- Narrated by: Jeremy Siepmann, Jasper Britton, Karen Archer, Elaine Claxton, Neville Jason, Nicholas Boulton, David Timson
- Length: 4 hrs and 59 mins
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Editorial reviews
Unlike the Naxos musical biographies of composers, this is an anatomical dissection of a single noteworthy piece of music. In terms more familiar to music professionals than to beginners ("a harmonic wash of pure pianistic tone colour"), Siepmann analyzes the construction, difficulty, unconventionality, and beauty of Brahms's second piano concerto. His technique is to say a few words about a musical passage and then present it piecemeal, working step by step through the entire work. Finally, we hear the whole movement with much more appreciation than before.
Publisher's summary
Brahms is one of the best loved yet most controversial of all the Romantics. Almost uniquely, his works have never suffered the slightest period of eclipse. Profoundly emotional yet governed by an iron discipline, the music, like the man, is a fascinating, entertaining, often deeply moving blend of opposites. He had a gift for friendship and a capacity for love far beyond the ordinary, yet no man could be ruder or more hurtful. Though humble, he was consumed by a sense of destiny, and his inner life, colored by his adoration and fear of women, found expression in some of the greatest music ever written.
Listening to this audio-biography is leaping inside the life and times of a great German Romantic, understanding the man who was haunted by the ghost of Beethoven for years and was 43 before he wrote his first symphony.
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- Unabridged
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Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author Christoph Wolff presents a new picture that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. This engaging new biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was, while bringing to bear all the advances of the last half-century of Bach scholarship.
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Has all the boring details...
- By L. Jensen on 05-14-19
By: Christoph Wolff
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The Life and Works of Beethoven
- By: Jeremy Siepmann
- Narrated by: Jeremy Siepmann, Bob Peck, Neville Jason, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Original Recording
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For many people, Beethoven is the greatest composer who ever lived. In this portrait-in-sound, actors’ readings combine with his music to reveal a titanic personality, both vulnerable and belligerent, comic and tragic, and above all heroic, as he comes to grips with perhaps the greatest disability a musician can suffer. No man’s music is more universal; few men’s lives are more inspiring. In every sense but one - his modest height - he was a giant. The great bonus of this audio-biography is that the development of Beethoven’s music can be heard in the context of his life.
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I'm a Believer
- By Syd Young on 10-20-14
By: Jeremy Siepmann
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The Life and Works of Frédéric Chopin
- By: Jeremy Siepmann
- Narrated by: Jeremy Siepmann, Anton Lesser, Neville Jason, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
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Frédéric Chopin is the pianist-composer par excellence. Regarded as one of the most mesmerizing performers of his day, he lives on in his music – his waltzes, mazurkas, études, preludes, nocturnes, three piano sonatas, two piano concertos, and much more. Here, his life, from his birth in Poland, his famous affair with the French writer George Sand, to his death at the age of 39 in Paris, is told with his music featuring prominently. We think of Chopin as a "frail, sheltered genius" but this forthright portrait demonstrates he was far more boisterous than that.
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Frederic Chopin
- By Mary Hawthorne on 03-24-17
By: Jeremy Siepmann
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Life & Works - Antonin Dvorak
- By: Jeremy Siepmann
- Narrated by: Jeremy Siepmann, Sean Barrett, Jonathan Keeble, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the best-loved composers of all time, Dvorák rose from rural origins to become not only a great but an influential composer. The first composer to put his native Bohemia on the musical map of the world, he was invited to do the same for America. One result was the famous "New World" Symphony, which made him a household name across the globe. Writing music of irresistible color, lilt and peasant vitality, he was also a melodist-in-a-million. This portrait-in-sound follows a lovable and in many ways a very simple, man from hay cart to imperial palace, from tragic loss to heart-warming joy, to pigeon-raising and world celebrity.
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Serviceable, lightweight bio with music
- By Bonny on 07-05-14
By: Jeremy Siepmann
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Mozart
- The Reign of Love
- By: Jan Swafford
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 30 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: A man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.
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Comprehensive Bio
- By Judy on 01-07-21
By: Jan Swafford
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Fryderyk Chopin
- A Life and Times
- By: Dr. Alan Walker
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 23 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on 10 years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin.
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This book is a masterpiece
- By Carpe Diem on 02-09-19
By: Dr. Alan Walker
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The Life and Works of Chopin
- By: Jeremy Siepmann
- Narrated by: Jeremy Siepmann
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Frédéric Chopin is the pianist-composer par excellence. Here, his life - from his birth in Poland, his famous affair with the French writer George Sand, and his death at the age of 49 in Paris - is told with his music featuring prominently.
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Excellent Through and Through
- By Stephen on 07-16-03
By: Jeremy Siepmann
What listeners say about Life & Works - Johannes Brahms
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Yvonne Angel
- 11-03-21
Wonderful
This series by Jeremy Siepmann is wonderful. My favorite so far is the one on Franz Schubert. It was simply amazing. But I'm sure a lot depends on the biographical material, letters, etc. An d the musical selections are fantastic.
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- laurie dahlstrom
- 08-17-23
Brahms
What a wonderful story. I heard excerpts of music I hadn't heard in years. And oh, the second piano concerto. so very wonderful and exciting. The composers were not just touched by the finger of God, but by the whole of His hand upon his head and upon his heart.
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