What Makes it Great?
Beethoven’s Archduke Trio

A Noe Music virtual Mainstage performance dedicated to the memory of Bahman Sheikh

Rob Kapilow and returning Noe Music favorites the Horszowski Trio team up for “What Makes it Great?”—a lecture, demonstration, and concert all-in-one, featuring Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio, Op. 97.

Beethoven, the Pandemic & the Power of Connection 
In October of 1802, Beethoven wrote a deeply personal and impassioned note to his brothers known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. In words that sound like they could have been written today, he describes how his growing deafness forced him to “isolate myself, to live in loneliness…Like an exile… Separate from the world.” This sense of isolation led him to write some of the most remarkable music with the aim to create connection. Though the pandemic has removed much of the celebration surrounding Beethoven's 250th birthday year, looking at his revolutionary music through the lens of our current moment offers us new ways of hearing these canonical masterpieces, and a thought-provoking perspective on our own need for connection.

Widely considered to be the greatest piano trio ever written – the equivalent in the piano trio repertoire of the Fifth Symphony or the Emperor Concerto – the iconic “Archduke” Trio boldly replaces the polite, private, amateur world of chamber music with virtuosic, public music of symphonic scope.