Beethoven's Celtic Voice

Beethoven performing seemingly rather trivial tasks for publishers offers a lesser known perspective on the mastermind: the businessman. Like with Joseph Haydn, there exist a multitude of folk song arrangements by Beethoven from many different language areas, besides the here portrayed Scottish, Irish and Welsh songs also Spanish, Hungarian or Swedish ones. Scottish musicians Lorna Anderson, soprano and Jamie MacDougall, tenor and the Austrian TrioVanBeethoven (Verena Stourzh, Clemens Zeilinger, Franz Ortner) take on an exploration to the treasures of Celtic melodies. Beethoven's personal touch in these songs is not only perceivable in the pre- and postludes, but is present in all of the instrumentation - a fact that motivated the initiator George Thomson several times to request even more simple instrumental parts as accompaniment, which Beethoven rejected in his very own way: "Unfortunately, I am not able to fulfill your request. I am not accustomed to retouching my compositions."