¹ Nancy November, Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber: Sociability, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Marie Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018); Mark Everist, Mozart’s Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Jonathan Kregor, Liszt as Transcriber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

² See, for instance, Boxwood and Brass’s Beethoven Transformed recording project: www.boxwoodandbrass.co.uk/multi-media (accessed 11 May 2025).

³ Ax, Kavakos, and Ma began playing together as a trio at Tanglewood in 2014 and three years later released the album Brahms: The Piano Trios, Sony Classical, 0889854072926, 2017.

⁴ The production team is the same for all three albums. Symphonies 2 and 5 were recorded 1–4 August 2021 at the Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood; Symphony no. 6 and Op. 1 no. 3 in May 2022 at the same venue; Symphony No. 4 and Op. 97 in August 2023 at Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.

⁵ Ax noted in the Washington Post: ‘there were no orchestra concerts going on. Everything had just simply stopped. And Yo-Yo said, “This is our chance to play things like the Beethoven symphonies for a small group”. And, of course, that was always part of the way these pieces got introduced’. Quoted on www.fabermusic.com/news/new-recording-colin-matthews-arrangement-of-beethovens-fifth-for-piano-trio-16032022 (accessed 11 May 2025).

⁶ See www.sonyclassical.com/releases/releases-details/beethoven-for-three-symphonies-nos-2-5-2 (accessed 11 May 2025).

⁷ See ‘Kavakos, Ma and Ax: A Legendary Trio Performs Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’, www.thestrad.com/video/kavakos-ma-and-ax-a-legendary-trio-performs-beethovens-fifth-symphony/17763.article (accessed 11 May 2025).

⁸ Witness, from multiple examples, the title of Edward Klorman’s Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Mara Parker, The String Quartet, 1750–1797: Four Types of Musical Conversation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); and Mary Hunter, ‘“The Most Interesting Genre of Music”: Performance, Sociability and Meaning in the Classical String Quartet, 1800–1830’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 9 (2012): 53–74.

⁹ Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 125–26.

¹⁰ Rutherford-Johnson, Music After the Fall, 127.

¹¹ Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, translated by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 43.

¹² Szendy, Listen, 44.

¹³ Fuller explorations of arrangements can be found in William Drummond, Arrangement, Listening, and the Music of Gérard Pesson (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2020); and Frankie Perry, Lieder Reimagined: Arrangements and Adaptations of Romantic Song in the Twenty-First Century (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2021).

¹⁴ The score is available for hire: www.fabermusic.com/music/7a500f2f-a870–40da-b27f-1a37b006e78b (accessed 11 May 2025).