Bagatelles

"[Beethoven's] Leipzig publisher complained that they were such insignificant trifles no one would believe they were by Beethoven: not only slight but on the whole easy too. The joy of having a player of Steven Osborne's spare, rhythmically incisive brilliance shows the idiocy of the publisher's words."
(Obserever)

"It's a part of [Osborne's] personal excursion to seek the individual potency of each Bagatelle...Osborne has delved deep to extract so much from cameos that pack emotional enormity within small spaces."
(Gramophone)

Following his highly acclaimed Beethoven 'Moonlight', 'Pathétique' and 'Waldstein' Sonatas release, Hyperion's Gramophone-award-winning artist Steven Osborne turns his talents to Beethoven's complete Bagatelles. Though the composer himself referred to these thirty short piano works, which he penned throughout his life, as 'trifles', these are nonetheless trifles from the mind of a genius. In this polished album, Osborne lends his remarkable artistry to everything from the Six Bagatelles of Op 126, which at times occupy the same rarefied spiritual world as the late quartets and were the very last works Beethoven ever wrote for the piano, to the composer's most famous stand-alone piano piece, the mysterious little A minor Bagatelle known to all the world as 'Für Elise'.