All About Jazz — Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin, 474 pages, $30) A good biography of a musician makes the reader want to listen. Alexander Wheelock Thayer triggered that compulsion with his life of Beethoven, Marion Hildesheimer wi... more info

Mercury News, California — In a consistently strong program, it was interesting to see what this group, among the world's best, played best and loved the most: Beethoven. more info

Buffalo News, New York — Matthew Bassett was in fourth grade in Cleveland when he heard Beethoven's uproarious Seventh Symphony. And something clicked. more info

Guardian Music — One reason only music by "long dead composers" is being played in the "thriving musical culture" in Britain (Letters, 6 February) is that amateur orchestras cannot afford the enormous cost of hiring sets of orchestral parts, since most modern works a... more info

Detroit Free Press — When times are tough, people want a sure thing. And in classical music, that means Beethoven, one of the few names on a marquee to all-but-guarantee boffo box office. more info

Guardian Music — (Naxos)Beethoven wrote his incidental music to Goethe's Egmont for a ­production in Vienna in 1810. ­Dealing with the ­transgressive love between the ­aristocratic Egmont and the ­bourgeois Klärchen – both involved in the­... more info

Guardian Music — Barbican, LondonThere has been a lot of Beethoven in London of late, much of it high-profile and all of it high-class. At the South Bank, Daniel Barenboim's performances of the concertos with the Berlin Staatskapelle coincided with the OAE's ­symp... more info

Guardian Music — Symphony Hall, BirminghamLang Lang concerts have the ­hallmarks of celebrity: a capacity crowd, a later-than-­advertised start, camera flashes, ­applause in the wrong places, and a young man who lollops and glides like a pop idol. For the Ch... more info

NME - The Daily Download — Baby Monster have made a few appearances on this blog before. We posted their remix of Wolf Gang's 'Pieces Of You' last July and their own single 'Ultraviolence & Beethoven' the following October. If you can't remember it sounds like this and you can... more info

The Brentano String Quartet played ?les derniers soupirs? (?the last breaths?) with the requisite passion and tenderness. more info