Two sets of incidental music here show Beethoven turning to as a professional theatre composer, only sometimes transcending the fairly narrow limitations of what was required of him and revealing the hand of glory. The overture to The Ruins of Athens has few outings these days, and is certainly worth the careful attention it receives here from Claudio Abbado. There follows a series of less distinguished numbers, to a text cobbled together by Carl Meisl, who was rewarded for his not very creative pains by one of Beethoven’s unmannerly puns on his name – “He’s good with the chisel [Meissel], but as a sculptor?”. The curious and the devoted can hear some vigorous choruses, a duet with Sylvia McNair and Bryn Terfel bewailing the occupation of Greece by the Turks (we are, in 1822, in revolutionary times), and among other numbers a melodrama touchingly spoken by Bruno Ganz as the old High Priest who then acquires a striking rejuvenation in the vibrant tones of Terfel. No revelations should be expected by those interested in seeking out this little-known work, but it is certainly of curiosity value and is given its best advocacy by Abbado and his artists.
Leonore Prohaska was recently recorded for Koch by Karl Anton Rickenbacher, who played the splendid orchestration of the Op. 26 Piano Sonata funeral march more threateningly but less tragically than Abbado does here. Sylvia McNair sings the Romance in somewhat fragile tones that suit its touching nature well, and Karoline Eichhorn recites against the appalling coo of the glass harmonica.'