Beethoven Symphonies
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Reflexe
Magazine Review Date: 11/1989
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 353
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 749852-2
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 1 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 2 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 3, 'Eroica' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 4 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 5 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 6, 'Pastoral' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 7 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 8 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 9, 'Choral' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players London Schütz Choir Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Patrick Power, Tenor Petteri Salomaa, Bass Roger Norrington, Conductor Sarah Walker, Mezzo soprano Yvonne Kenny, Soprano |
| (Die) Geschöpfe des Prometheus, '(The) Creatures of Prometheus', Movement: Overture |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Coriolan |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Egmont, Movement: Overture |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Reflexe
Magazine Review Date: 11/1989
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 65
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 749656-2
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 4 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 5 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Reflexe
Magazine Review Date: 11/1989
Media Format: Vinyl
Media Runtime: 0
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: EL749816-1
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 7 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Egmont, Movement: Overture |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Coriolan |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Reflexe
Magazine Review Date: 11/1989
Media Format: Cassette
Media Runtime: 0
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: EL749816-4
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 7 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Egmont, Movement: Overture |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Coriolan |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Reflexe
Magazine Review Date: 11/1989
Media Format: Vinyl
Media Runtime: 0
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: EL749656-1
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 4 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 5 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Reflexe
Magazine Review Date: 11/1989
Media Format: Cassette
Media Runtime: 0
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: EX749852-4
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 1 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 2 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 3, 'Eroica' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 4 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 5 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 6, 'Pastoral' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 7 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 8 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 9, 'Choral' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players London Schütz Choir Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Patrick Power, Tenor Petteri Salomaa, Bass Roger Norrington, Conductor Sarah Walker, Mezzo soprano Yvonne Kenny, Soprano |
| (Die) Geschöpfe des Prometheus, '(The) Creatures of Prometheus', Movement: Overture |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Coriolan |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Egmont, Movement: Overture |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Reflexe
Magazine Review Date: 11/1989
Media Format: Cassette
Media Runtime: 0
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: EL749656-4
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 4 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Symphony No. 5 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Reflexe
Magazine Review Date: 11/1989
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 53
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 749816-2
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 7 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Egmont, Movement: Overture |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
| Coriolan |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
London Classical Players Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Roger Norrington, Conductor |
Author: Richard Osborne
New recordings of the Fourth, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies complete what must be regarded as an historic set of performances, a gramophone landmark, not because they are hitherto unrivalled but because through a mixture of flair and pragmatism Norrington and his players have articulated the period instruments' case in Beethoven just about as compellingly as it is possible to imagine at this particular time. Norrington being Norrington, in ten years' time he will probably be echoing lines from the Jew of Malta: ''But that was another country/And besides, the set is unavailable''. But for the time being....
I say 'set of performances' rather than 'cycle' because though there are no doubt compelling commercial reasons for parcelling the performances up into a six-CD set, the idea of a 'Norrington cycle', immutably there, is alien to the whole concept. One of Norrington's strengths is the passion with which he holds ideas that he acknowledges to be provisional. Indeed, this feeds into the interpretations themselves which can be terrifyingly actual precisely because they present Beethoven skirmishing with his own doubts, skirmishing with the provisional accommodations between life and art—which is the tag Ars longa, vita brevis in the older sense of life being too short for even the greatest master ever to be fully master of craft, let alone his destiny. Certainly, there is nothing here of the 'cycle' as a summarizing statement, of a musician looking back, wisely and steadily, over a lifetime's experience of these inexhaustible works. This, too, is a valid approach, finely realized by men like Weingartner and Klemperer, but it is obviously not Norrington's.
Like any cycle, the Norrington has its ups and downs. Surprisingly, given the essentially dramatic, sometimes rugged nature of his conducting, it is the even-numbered symphonies that are consistently successful: the Second, Fourth, Sixth and Eighth are all outstandingly well done. The First and the new Fifth are also excellent, but I have some reservations, primarily technical, about the new Seventh, and about the Eroica and the Ninth. The first two movements of the Eroica are rather lightly treated and though the reading of the Ninth is full of revelatory thinking in the first three movements there is an element of the hairshirt about Norrington's sometimes very brusque and in one instance very leisurely, reading of the finale's various sections. In other words, three of the discs—Symphonies Nos. I and 6, 2 and 8, and 4 and 5 merit a place in any Beethoven collection. But the remainder of the readings trigger the recidivist in me simply because I feel that Furtwangler or Klemperer found far more in the first movement of the Eroica, whilst Toscanini's Beethoven Seventh (RCA), or Carlos Kleiber's (DG), are, quite simply, better played.
But what of the new Seventh? The reading itself is predictably enterprising, most obviously in the Allegretto which is taken swiftly, at the metronome, but phrased and articulated almost as though it were an arioso, an unusual idea persuasively realized. By and large, the performance and the booklet notes are well co-ordinated, but I was relieved to find that Norrington doesn't treat the third movement trio like an old Austrian pilgrim's hymn. Toscanini pointed the way here over 50 years ago but many conductors still trudge lugubriously through this fine trio. Where I have doubts about the new Seventh is with the recording and to some extent the playing and interpretation of the outer movements, in particular the finale. True, the recording has none of the Brucknerian reverberations of the Hanover Band's Nimbus version but it is fairly spacious and far back at times, inclining to fogginess and greyness round the edges. Perhaps Norrington asked for something rather grand. Certainly, his reading, unpredictably, is more epic than dynamic (''muscular prowess'' is a phrase used by Wyn Jones in the booklet). At times it is almost Klempererish without, quite, Klemperer's (at best) astonishingly inevitable rhythms. Carlos Kleiber is less weighty, more dynamic, but he is also more or less the authenticist with the first and second violins, crucially in the symphony's coda, divided right and left. It's here, and at other nodal points in the symphonic drama, that Kleiber and the VPO simply outplay Norrington and the LCP, and DG's engineering is better focused than EMI's. With Kleiber the string sound is cleaner, the tuttis are less bluntly sounded, and where the EMI performance can seem to have a certain dynamic sameness about it Kleiber's is electrifying, not only in the antiphonal swording of the fiddles in the coda, but in the dynamic grading as Beethoven, deploying very conservative forces, sweeps in the coda to his firstever symphonic triple forte, down to a subito piano nine bars later, and then back up to another triple forte on a crescendo steeper than any Rossini ever dreamed of.
The record of the Seventh Symphony also includes a clean, unfussy account of the Coriolan Overture and a performance of the Egmont Overture which is excellent in the Allegro and coda but strangely neglectful of the dramatic and programmatic elements. At the violin's dramatic cut-off, Egmont's death, the articulation is lightweight and the succeeding silent fermata (which Furtwangler always held for an age, to remarkable effect), is absurdly brief. The Overture's introduction, an astonishing 24-bar essay in discord, the pathos of suffering, and, possibly, the specifically Spanish nature of the terror, is also swiftly dispatched, with the minims in bars two to four jauntily foreshortened on the dubious premise of their being marked staccato.
With the coupling of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies we return to another outstanding release, with excellent playing—what range and potency the period horns and basses have in the Fifth Symphony!—and, to my ears, cleaner, more immediate recorded sound. Once, Norrington improvises a detail, a swell on the fermata in the reprise of the exposition, that might work in concert but which threatens to pall on record, but the reading is dramatic and cogent in the first movement, rich in incident in the second, powerful and ennobling in the fourth. In the third movement, Norrington restores the five-pan structure Beethoven clearly had it in mind to establish at this point in his symphonic career, with a repeat of the scherzo and trio from bar 234. This isn't a first on record—Loughran gave us the repeat in his 1978 Enigma recording (nla) and it is there on Hogwood's rather disappointing L'Oiseau-Lyre performance but it is welcome.
The reading of the Fourth Symphony is full of energy and wit, which, by and large, is how I prefer it to go, though this tends to be a minority view, with conductors often drooling over the slow introduction and playing the finale in the light of the ma non troppo marking. In the finale, Norrington is quick and vivid but he leaves space enough to let the ruminative cross-currents through, a kind of dissident conservative lobby that tends to remain smugly silent when the conductor opts for a more leisurely tempo. As Norrington plays the movement it is very brilliant, very eventful, and very amusing. The symphony's slow introduction is flowingly paced with no loss to its sense of mystery and the Allegro con brio is just that, and as exhilarating as it always is when it is played with pace and flair. Comparable performances would be the pre-war BBC SO/Toscanini (EMI—on LP only) and Karajan's 1962 DG Berlin account (mid-price CD), with Karajan sharing Norrington's predilection for the long appoggiatura at bars 223 and 227, always a heartrendingly beautiful effect when it's brought off well in such a context. Norrington's treatment of the slow movement, quicker than usual, with little or no vibrato in the melodic line, is explained in the booklet note as the realization of what is alleged to be the literal meaning of adagio, ''at ease''. Frankly, I am happier with the result—expressive but clear-sighted—than the argument, though the point about the interrelationship between the metronome marks for first movement, second movement, and finale is not without interest, even if in practice Norrington moderates the metronomes in the quick movements more than he does in the Adagio.'
I say 'set of performances' rather than 'cycle' because though there are no doubt compelling commercial reasons for parcelling the performances up into a six-CD set, the idea of a 'Norrington cycle', immutably there, is alien to the whole concept. One of Norrington's strengths is the passion with which he holds ideas that he acknowledges to be provisional. Indeed, this feeds into the interpretations themselves which can be terrifyingly actual precisely because they present Beethoven skirmishing with his own doubts, skirmishing with the provisional accommodations between life and art—which is the tag Ars longa, vita brevis in the older sense of life being too short for even the greatest master ever to be fully master of craft, let alone his destiny. Certainly, there is nothing here of the 'cycle' as a summarizing statement, of a musician looking back, wisely and steadily, over a lifetime's experience of these inexhaustible works. This, too, is a valid approach, finely realized by men like Weingartner and Klemperer, but it is obviously not Norrington's.
Like any cycle, the Norrington has its ups and downs. Surprisingly, given the essentially dramatic, sometimes rugged nature of his conducting, it is the even-numbered symphonies that are consistently successful: the Second, Fourth, Sixth and Eighth are all outstandingly well done. The First and the new Fifth are also excellent, but I have some reservations, primarily technical, about the new Seventh, and about the Eroica and the Ninth. The first two movements of the Eroica are rather lightly treated and though the reading of the Ninth is full of revelatory thinking in the first three movements there is an element of the hairshirt about Norrington's sometimes very brusque and in one instance very leisurely, reading of the finale's various sections. In other words, three of the discs—Symphonies Nos. I and 6, 2 and 8, and 4 and 5 merit a place in any Beethoven collection. But the remainder of the readings trigger the recidivist in me simply because I feel that Furtwangler or Klemperer found far more in the first movement of the Eroica, whilst Toscanini's Beethoven Seventh (RCA), or Carlos Kleiber's (DG), are, quite simply, better played.
But what of the new Seventh? The reading itself is predictably enterprising, most obviously in the Allegretto which is taken swiftly, at the metronome, but phrased and articulated almost as though it were an arioso, an unusual idea persuasively realized. By and large, the performance and the booklet notes are well co-ordinated, but I was relieved to find that Norrington doesn't treat the third movement trio like an old Austrian pilgrim's hymn. Toscanini pointed the way here over 50 years ago but many conductors still trudge lugubriously through this fine trio. Where I have doubts about the new Seventh is with the recording and to some extent the playing and interpretation of the outer movements, in particular the finale. True, the recording has none of the Brucknerian reverberations of the Hanover Band's Nimbus version but it is fairly spacious and far back at times, inclining to fogginess and greyness round the edges. Perhaps Norrington asked for something rather grand. Certainly, his reading, unpredictably, is more epic than dynamic (''muscular prowess'' is a phrase used by Wyn Jones in the booklet). At times it is almost Klempererish without, quite, Klemperer's (at best) astonishingly inevitable rhythms. Carlos Kleiber is less weighty, more dynamic, but he is also more or less the authenticist with the first and second violins, crucially in the symphony's coda, divided right and left. It's here, and at other nodal points in the symphonic drama, that Kleiber and the VPO simply outplay Norrington and the LCP, and DG's engineering is better focused than EMI's. With Kleiber the string sound is cleaner, the tuttis are less bluntly sounded, and where the EMI performance can seem to have a certain dynamic sameness about it Kleiber's is electrifying, not only in the antiphonal swording of the fiddles in the coda, but in the dynamic grading as Beethoven, deploying very conservative forces, sweeps in the coda to his firstever symphonic triple forte, down to a subito piano nine bars later, and then back up to another triple forte on a crescendo steeper than any Rossini ever dreamed of.
The record of the Seventh Symphony also includes a clean, unfussy account of the Coriolan Overture and a performance of the Egmont Overture which is excellent in the Allegro and coda but strangely neglectful of the dramatic and programmatic elements. At the violin's dramatic cut-off, Egmont's death, the articulation is lightweight and the succeeding silent fermata (which Furtwangler always held for an age, to remarkable effect), is absurdly brief. The Overture's introduction, an astonishing 24-bar essay in discord, the pathos of suffering, and, possibly, the specifically Spanish nature of the terror, is also swiftly dispatched, with the minims in bars two to four jauntily foreshortened on the dubious premise of their being marked staccato.
With the coupling of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies we return to another outstanding release, with excellent playing—what range and potency the period horns and basses have in the Fifth Symphony!—and, to my ears, cleaner, more immediate recorded sound. Once, Norrington improvises a detail, a swell on the fermata in the reprise of the exposition, that might work in concert but which threatens to pall on record, but the reading is dramatic and cogent in the first movement, rich in incident in the second, powerful and ennobling in the fourth. In the third movement, Norrington restores the five-pan structure Beethoven clearly had it in mind to establish at this point in his symphonic career, with a repeat of the scherzo and trio from bar 234. This isn't a first on record—Loughran gave us the repeat in his 1978 Enigma recording (nla) and it is there on Hogwood's rather disappointing L'Oiseau-Lyre performance but it is welcome.
The reading of the Fourth Symphony is full of energy and wit, which, by and large, is how I prefer it to go, though this tends to be a minority view, with conductors often drooling over the slow introduction and playing the finale in the light of the ma non troppo marking. In the finale, Norrington is quick and vivid but he leaves space enough to let the ruminative cross-currents through, a kind of dissident conservative lobby that tends to remain smugly silent when the conductor opts for a more leisurely tempo. As Norrington plays the movement it is very brilliant, very eventful, and very amusing. The symphony's slow introduction is flowingly paced with no loss to its sense of mystery and the Allegro con brio is just that, and as exhilarating as it always is when it is played with pace and flair. Comparable performances would be the pre-war BBC SO/Toscanini (EMI—on LP only) and Karajan's 1962 DG Berlin account (mid-price CD), with Karajan sharing Norrington's predilection for the long appoggiatura at bars 223 and 227, always a heartrendingly beautiful effect when it's brought off well in such a context. Norrington's treatment of the slow movement, quicker than usual, with little or no vibrato in the melodic line, is explained in the booklet note as the realization of what is alleged to be the literal meaning of adagio, ''at ease''. Frankly, I am happier with the result—expressive but clear-sighted—than the argument, though the point about the interrelationship between the metronome marks for first movement, second movement, and finale is not without interest, even if in practice Norrington moderates the metronomes in the quick movements more than he does in the Adagio.'
Beethoven: Complete Symphonies
Beethoven Symphonies
Beethoven: Orchestral Works
Beethoven: Orchestral Works
Beethoven Symphonies
Beethoven: Complete Symphonies
Beethoven Symphonies
Beethoven: Orchestral Works
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