Overtures (Incls Leonore Nos. 1-3 & Coriolan)

Yoel Levi and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra recently completed a concert tour of the East Coast, including a performance at New York's Carnegie Hall in February. Their most recent recording for Telarc were discs of the Barber Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto, and Souvenirs for Orchestra (CD-80441); and CD-80443, "Classical Zoo," featuring Itzhak Perlman narrating new poetry for the Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals."

Beethoven continued to call his opera Fidelio by the title of Leonore, after the true name of the heroine. When he published his overtures to the work, he called them by his preferred title. This opera, as the composer affirmed on his deathbed, caused him the worst birth pangs, and for that reason," he said, "it is the most dear to me." He made several revisions of the work for various revivals. The most popular of the versions is Leonore Overture No. 3, called by Basil Deane, "the first, and perhaps the greatest, tone poem."

Beethoven wrote incidental music for two dramatic productions between 1807 and 1809--for Coriolan (not the Shakespeare version, but a drama by Beethoven's friend Heinrich Joseph von Collin) and for Egmont (a Vienna production of the Goethe tragedy).