Alex Ross: “The most valuable recordings of the Beethoven Year—Igor Levit’s survey of the sonatas and the Quatuor Ébène’s cycle of the quartets—bring out those contrarian tones of wit, weirdness, irony, understatement, frenzy, stasis, and bittersweet release. Having created the single most potent persona in the history of music, Beethoven proceeded to engender another, more elusive self, which was perhaps the truer one.” – The New Yorker
