It is a pleasure to find a company using its back-catalogue for reissues as imaginatively as Philips are doing in their Duo series. This Beethoven issue presents an excellent example, adding to the 11 regular Beethoven overtures—in excellent performances from Masur and the Leipzig orchestra—almost an hour of Beethoven in lighter mood. The Marriner collection of Minuets and Dances, winningly done, was originally recorded in 1978, several years after the overtures—just the sort of rarity from the catalogue that can easily be forgotten. With sound even fuller and better-focused than in the overtures, the result is a delight, and Philips helpfully give all 36 dances separate tracks. The only reservation to be made about the recording of the overtures is that in the Leipzig manner the sound is reverberant, some would say excessively so, with the ripely braying East German horns generally set at a distance in relation to the rest. None the less, there is plenty of dramatic bite in Masur's commanding, finely turned performances.'