Souvenir de Beethoven

Generally speaking, a souvenir is a token of remembrance, a symbol of a past that is meaningful to its creator, dedicatees, addressees, and the whole community for which it is created. [...] A musical souvenir is a specialized token of remembrance. [...] In line with Stewart’s and Rehding’s approach to the musical souvenir, this CD both conjures up and commemorates Beethoven’s cultural-musicological experience: one may even get to the point of saying with the American Transcendentalist poet Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) that the Bonn genius’s “mind’s deep history here in tones is wrought” (1887) and rendered through the compositional reception performed by some representative works for flute and piano composed by some of Beethoven’s followers, epigones, and imitators during the nineteenth century.