Reframing Beethoven: "Noticing and Responding to ALL the Expression Markings in Beethoven's Autograph Manuscripts"

from Piano Sonata in E Minor, op. 90

I. Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck

from Violin Sonata in G Major, op; 96

IV. Poco allegretto

from Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in B-flat Major, op. 97 ("Archduke")

III. Andante cantabile ma però con moto - Poco più adagio

from String Quartet in F Minor, op. 95

IV. Larghetto espressivo - Allegretto agitato - Allegro

from Symphony No. 7 in A Major, op. 92 (arr. for viola quintet)

II. Allegretto

from Symphony No. 8 in F Major, op. 93 (arr. for viola quintet)

IV. Allegro vivace

Performer biographies

The Borromeo String Quartet, formed in 1989, has had a rich and multi-faceted career performing all around the world.  They have performed in many of the world's great concerts halls: the Berlin Philharmonie, the Zurich Tonhalle, Dvořák Hall in Prague, Wigmore Hall in London, the Opera Bastille in Paris, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Oriental Arts Center in Shanghai and the Seoul Arts Center in Korea.  They have worked extensively with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Library of Congress, and have over many years presented quartet cycles such as the complete quartets of Beethoven and Shosta-kovich at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  They studied for their Artist Diploma at New England Conservatory of Music, and upon graduation in 1992 they were asked to become the Conservatory’s faculty String-Quartet-in-Residence. They have fulfilled this role with great enthusiasm for nearly 30 years now.  The Borromeo Quartet has also had a long-term involvement with the Taos School of Music, and they now serve as faculty String-Quartet-in-Residence at the Heifetz International Music Institute where first violinist Nicholas Kitchen is the Artistic Director.  For many years the Borromeo Quartet performed at the Spoleto Festivals in both Charleston and Italy, and they have also performed at Tanglewood and Ravinia. At each of these places they also gave special presentations about their unique research into the manuscripts of Beethoven.
        The Borromeo Quartet has received numerous awards.  They won top prizes in the Evian International String Quartet Competition, won the Young Concert Artists Auditions, and received the Cleveland Quartet Award, the Avery Fischer Career Grant and Lincoln Center's Martin E. Siegel Award.  They were Ensemble in Residence for NPR's Performance Today and have worked extensively with WGBH in Boston.
        The Borromeo Quartet is known as the first professional ensemble to use computers to read music in concerts, a practice they began in 2007 in order to always work from the full score.  This use of computers also made it natural for them to bring sources, such as composers’ manuscripts, into their rehearsal process, and this has proved very inspiring to the group in their work with many great composers - Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and Bartók, to mention just a few.
        The Borromeo Quartet invented and offered for many years a program called Living Archive where audience members could order CDs and DVDs of the live concert they just heard.  Recently this initiative has transformed into CD offerings as well as Web presentations, some of which delve into some of the more fascinating aspects of their work with the manuscripts of Beethoven. 
        Through the transcriptions of first violinist Nicholas Kitchen, the Borromeo Quartet has brought a great deal of the music of J. S. Bach into the repertoire of their quartet.  They have performed and recorded both books of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1 as a CD, Book 2 is a web presentation) and they perform the Goldberg Variations and numerous organ works.  They have also worked with a great array of living composers, including Gunther Schuller, John Cage, Steve Reich and NEC’s own John Heiss, Michael Gandolfi, Kati Agócs, and Malcolm Peyton.

Sean Gallagher is a music historian and pianist whose research focuses on music and culture in Italy, France, and the Low Countries during the ‘long’ fifteenth century (ca. 1380–1520). He has published articles on an array of subjects and is the author or editor of five books, ranging in topic from plainchant to Mozart: a monograph on the fifteenth-century composer Johannes Regis (Brepols, 2010); Secular Renaissance Music: Forms and Functions, editor (Ashgate, 2013); City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music, ed. with M. S. Cuthbert and C. Wolff (Harvard, 2013); The Century of Bach and Mozart: Perspectives on Historiography, Composition, Theory, and Performance, ed. with T. F. Kelly (Harvard, 2008); Western Plainchant in the First Millennium: Studies in the Medieval Liturgy and its Music, ed. with J. Haar, J. Nádas, and T. Striplin (Ashgate, 2003). Active as a pianist, he regularly presents lecture/recitals on a variety of topics that span much of the history of Western music. 
        He is the recipient of a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize at Harvard for excellence in teaching, and is the first music historian to be inducted into Johns Hopkins University’s Society of Scholars. He has worked closely with leading vocal ensembles, including The Clerks (dir. Edward Wickham), for whose recording Johannes Regis: Opera omnia he served as advisor. He is musicological advisor for Ockeghem@600, a multi-year project with the award-winning vocal ensemble Blue Heron (dir. Scott Metcalfe) to perform and record the works of Johannes Ockeghem. He is currently editing the chansons of Firminus Caron, to be published in the series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae. He serves on the editorial boards of the series Ars nova: nuova collana (published by Libreria Musicale Italiana) and I Codici di Trento (published by Istituto Italiano per la Storia della Musica). He is a member of the New England Conservatory musicology faculty.

Pianist HaeSun Paik has been hailed as a “sensitive and thinking musician first and an awesome technician second” (Los Angeles Times) with a “big and individual personality” (New York Times), whose performances are “a wonder — elastic, mercurial, charged with meaning, surprising” (Boston Globe) and “a rare example of technique actually serving both idea and feeling, head and heart” (Musical America). Having garnered top prizes at international piano competitions such as the Queen Elisabeth, Leeds, William Kapell, and the Tchaikovsky, Ms. Paik has performed concerts around the world in solo recitals, concerti with orchestras, and chamber music ensembles.
        Ms. Paik has appeared as a soloist under the baton of Mikhail Pletnev, Sir Simon Rattle, Vassily Sinaisky, Dmitri Kitaenko, Stanislav Skrovaczewski, and Myung Whun Chung, to name a few. She performed with orchestras including the Boston, National, London, City of Birmingham, Belgium National, Osaka, NHK, and KBS Symphony Orchestras, the Munich, Radio France, Tokyo, Warsaw, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Russian National Orchestra among others. Ms. Paik has appeared frequently in recitals at prestigious venues throughout the U.S. including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, and Jordan Hall in Boston, and her international tours have brought her to major concert halls around the globe. She has appeared at numerous international music festivals including the Beethoven Festival in Munich, Radio France Festival in Montpellier, Courchevel Music Festival in France, Dino Ciani Festival in Italy, Ishikawa Music Festival in Japan, Beijing International Music Festival and Academy, Orford Music Festival in Canada, Monadnock Music Festival in New Hampshire, International Keyboard Institute & Festival in New York, PianoSummer at New Paltz (New York), PYPA at Curtis (Philadelphia), and the PyeongChang Music Festival and School and Busan Music Festival in Korea.
        A superb collaborative artist, Ms. Paik performed with many distinguished artists including cellist Anner Bylsma, Mischa Maisky, Myung-wha Chung, violist Nobuko Imai, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, the Borromeo String Quartet, and the Jerusalem Quartet. Her duo recording with cellist Laurence Lesser of the complete works by Beethoven for cello and piano was released by Bridge Records. Her debut and subsequent solo recordings can be heard on the EMI label.
        One of the most sought after pedagogical influences in Korea, Ms. Paik was the youngest pianist of her generation to be appointed as a music professor at Seoul National University, where she taught for ten years. She was on the piano faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music and currently is a member of the piano faculty at New England Conservatory. She is also an artist-in-residence at the Catholic University of Daegu and serves as the Artistic Director of the Busan Music Festival in Korea. She gives master classes at institutions and festivals worldwide and has served as a juror in many international competitions including the Bösendorfer and Yamaha USASU, the Cleveland, the Gina Bachauer, the Hilton Head, the Honens, and the Seoul (Dong-A) international piano competitions.
        Ms. Paik's NEC training began at the age of 14, when she came to the U.S. from Korea to pursue her musical studies with Wha Kyung Byun, through the long-running partnership between New England Conservatory and the Walnut Hill School for the Performing Arts. Subsequently, Ms. Paik attended New England Conservatory, earning a Bachelor of Music degree, a Master of Music degree, and an Artist Diploma under the guidance of both Russell Sherman and Wha Kyung Byun. Ms. Paik’s artistic development was further influenced through her studies at the International Piano Foundation in Lake Como (Italy).

Amir Siraj is a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University (A.M./A.B. Candidate, Class of 2022, Leverett House) and serves as the Director of Interstellar Object Studies for the Galileo Project. Siraj seeks to understand the solar system in the context of its galactic environment through research topics including: interstellar objects, asteroids and comets, planetary system formation and evolution, supernovae, black holes, dark matter, and the search for life in the universe.
        The youngest scientist named to this year's Forbes “30 Under 30”, Siraj is a recipient of the Institute for Theory and Computation Predoctoral Fellowship,  Goldwater Scholarship, Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, Leo Goldberg Prize (Senior  & Junior), Origins of Life Summer Undergraduate Research Prize Award,  Mirzakhani Scholarship, John Harvard Scholarship, Harvard College Scholarship, and the Harvard College Research Program Grant. Siraj's research was featured as one of 2020's Best Space Moments and two of the 10 Mind-Blowing Recent Astronomical Developments, including #1 for the latter. Siraj is former president of Harvard Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and former Senior U.S. Editor of the Harvard Political Review.
        A U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, Siraj is concurrently pursuing a master's degree in piano at New England Conservatory, studying under the guidance of Professor Wha Kyung Byun. Siraj has been featured as a guest soloist with the Boston Symphony and the Boston Pops, and has played for luminaries such as Moon Jae-in, Justin Trudeau, and Queen Rania of Jordan. He is a Steinway Young Artist and an alum of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation Young Scholars Program. Siraj has performed at venues including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Wigmore Hall in London, and Millenium Park in Chicago. He appeared at the GRAMMY Salute to Classical Music at Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium, Swiss Alps Classics in Vitznau, and JBLFest in Las Vegas.
        Siraj is passionate about using music for social good and has collaborated with organizations including the National Park Foundation, Massachusetts General Hospital, Music For Food, and the Leeds International Piano Competition on such efforts, most recently by founding the Music For The Parks initiative with the support of NPR's From The Top. He serves as Assistant Music Director of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, the oldest theater group in the United States, and is a member of the Harvard Krokodiloes, Harvard University's oldest a cappella group.

Violinist Peter Zazofsky has enjoyed a career as soloist, chamber musician and educator that spans twenty years and thirty countries on five continents. He has performed with many of the great orchestras in the US and Europe, including the Boston Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, in collaboration with maestros such as Tennstedt, Ozawa, Ormandy, Kurt Sanderling and Charles Dutoit. As a recitalist, Mr. Zazofsky has given innovative programs in Carnegie Hall, Sala Cecilia Meireles in Rio de Janeiro, Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. He also tours the world's music centers as first violinist of the Muir String Quartet.            
        Peter Zazofsky was born in Boston, where his father was assistant concertmaster of the Boston Symphony. Joseph Silverstein was his first teacher, and he later studied with Dorothy Delay, Jaime Laredo and Ivan Galamian at the Curtis Institute. Beginning in 1974, Mr. Zazofsky won a series of prizes and awards culminating in the Gold Medal at the 1980 Queen Elisabeth Competition and the Grand Prize of the 1979 Montreal International Competition. (He remains the only American to win this award.) In 1985 he was honored to receive the Avery Fisher Career Grant.  Since then, Peter Zazofsky has made solo appearances with the orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Leipzig, Santiago, Toronto, Minnesota and Montreal. He has toured Asia as soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, as well as the US with the Danish Radio orchestra. He is a frequent visitor to Israel, where he has given over forty performances of concerti, from Beethoven and Sibelius to Bach, Berg and Brahms.
        In recent years Peter Zazofsky has added several new facets to his career. He has given premieres of new works written for him by composers in Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Spain, and he recorded concerti by Robert Chumbley and Frederick Van Rossum in Liege, Belgium and Warsaw, Poland. Mr. Zazofsky holds the position of Associate Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at Boston University, is a member of the New Englad Conservatory faculty, and he occasionally serves as a jury member for the violin competitions in Montreal, Brussels, and Odense, Denmark. As first violinist of the Muir Quartet, he has performed many complete cycles of the Beethoven quartets, and has encouraged creation of new works by American composers Joan Tower, Sheila Silver, and Richard Danielpour.