This recording represents only a snapshot of our lifelong effort to capture the spirit and essence of Beethoven’s music. While playing together in the Peabody Trio for nearly two decades, we performed all of the Beethoven Trios and recorded Opus 1 nos.1 and 3 and the Opus 70 trios on the Artek label. In addition, we played the cellos sonatas and coached our students on these pieces. In grappling with these works over many years, we have become increasingly familiar with the medium and ever more obsessive about the ways in which our instruments speak to each other in Beethoven’s music. The instruments sing together, argue, reminisce, shout, and weep. These sonatas have challenged us to use our utmost imagination in color and expression. It is this challenge that has inspired us to come back to these pieces over and over, to explore them again and again. Artist biographies: Cellist Natasha Brofsky has enjoyed a performing and teaching career which has taken her to China and Europe as well as to many cities in the US. As a member of the renowned Peabody Trio for seventeen years, Ms. Brofsky performed on important chamber music series throughout the U.S., Canada and the U.K and was heard on numerous radio broadcasts. Champions of new music as well as the classics, the trio recorded on the New World, CRI, and Artek labels. Ms. Brofsky has also enjoyed performing as a guest with the Borromeo, Jupiter, Norwegian, Parker, Prazak ,Takács and Ying Quartets. Since 2016 she has been artistic director of Music for Food’s New York chapter, a musician-led initiative for local hunger relief. Upon graduating from the Eastman School with a Performer’s Certificate award, Ms. Brofsky moved to the UK on a Fulbright scholarship. During nearly a decade in Europe she won the Muriel Taylor cello prize and held principal positions in the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra under Iona Brown. She was a member of the Serapion Ensemble and the string trio Opus 3 and a regular participant at IMS Open Chamber Music in Prussia Cove, England. Previous solo recordings include the Fantasy Variations of Shulamit Ran and Olav Anton Thommessen's Concerto for Cello and Winds, The Phantom of Light. A sought-after teacher, Natasha Brofsky serves on the cello faculty of the Juilliard School. Previously a member of the New England Conservatory cello faculty for fourteen years, she also served on the faculty of Barratt-Due Musikk Institutt in Oslo, Norway. She spends her summers at the Yellow Barn Festival in Vermont and the Kneisel Hall Festival in Maine. Ms. Brofsky has given master classes at many colleges and conservatories in the US and abroad, including for El Sistema in Venezuela as well as at Oberlin Conservatory, The Eastman School, Mannes College and the Shanghai Conservatory and Middle School and online at CelloBello.com. Recent articles on string playing appeared in The Strad Magazine and on Violin Channel. She lives in New York City with her husband Roger Tapping and their two daughters, Cordelia and Eleanor. Pianist Seth Knopp was a founding member of the Peabody Trio, recipient of the 1989 Naumburg Award and the Peabody Institute’s Ensemble-in-Residence from 1987-2017. After making their Alice Tully Hall debut in 1990, the trio performed on the most important chamber music series, nationally and internationally. Their reputation as champions of new music garnered them an invitation to the first Biennale for contemporary music, Tempus Fugit, in Tel Aviv, and the opportunity to commission and perform the music of many of today’s most inspired musical voices. After thirty years of music-making, the trio played its final concert in San Francisco, the city where it was formed. As Artistic Director of Yellow Barn, Seth Knopp has built an international center for chamber music, bringing musicians and audiences to Putney, Vermont for its festivals each summer. Twice awarded the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming, Yellow Barn’s innovative approach to lifelong education for musicians and audiences, a holistic philosophy, and programs that focus listeners in new ways, set it apart from any other chamber music center in this country. In 2008 he created Yellow Barn’s Artist Residencies, the first residency program for performing musicians in the United States. Since 2010 Mr. Knopp has been the Artistic Director of Soundings: New Music at the Nasher, a critically acclaimed series of concerts at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, drawing on the relationship between musical traditions and innovation, and the unique lens through which music helps us to better understand the world. Mr. Knopp serves on the piano and chamber music faculties at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. He studied with Leonard Shure at the New England Conservatory, Nathan Schwartz at the San Francisco Conservatory, and with Leon Fleisher. His solo and chamber music performances can be heard on the Artek, Koch, and New World Records labels. Mr. Knopp’s most treasured musical collaborations include work with baritone William Sharp; violinists Nicholas and Robert Mann, Anthony Marwood, and Violaine Melançon; violists Maria Lambros and Roger Tapping; cellists Natasha Brofsky and Michael Kannen; clarinetists Charles Neidich and Jörg Widmann; accordionist Merima Ključo; members of the Brentano String Quartet; and actors Andre de Shields and Walter van Dyk.