Symphonies Nos. 1 and 8 (the first disc in this new Naxos cycle and reviewed on page 48) brought out the Keith Floyd in RO – “very much vin ordinaire … acceptable if the sun is shining, the bread is fresh and the cheese pungent”. The sun was shining gloriously when I heard this second disc, but I found No. 8 at least more than acceptable. As the insert-note says, there are some fine players in the Nicolaus Esterhazy Sinfonia, but they also add up to a fine band: disciplined, attentive and exceptionally well-balanced. Both performances will please those who like Beethoven’s orchestral textures to be lucid and multi-dimensional, rather than the blandly homogenized “paste” (to quote Pierre Boulez) we hear so often today: the end of the development of the Eroica’s first movement or the trio of the Eighth will demonstrate what I mean – and rosettes to the recording team for capturing it so faithfully.
The Eroica as a whole? I can go some way towards agreeing with RO here. Yes, Bela Drahos does tend to pull his punches at climaxes – disappointingly so in the Funeral March and the grinding fortissimo syncopations of the first movement development. But I never found his phrasing “mannered” – in fact the clarity of articulation came as a welcome surprise; in such key passages as the coda of the Funeral March, where the theme seems to disintegrate before one’s ears, I actually found it rather telling. Again, I’d agree that if you put these performances beside the likes of Roger Norrington and Gunter Wand, they can seem under-characterized at times, and there’s an electric, if somewhat unrelenting alternative for this coupling from George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra at a comparable price. But I can imagine this crisp, alert Eighth bearing up well on repeated hearings. Not a disc for the musical equivalent of the wine-snob, perhaps – but then, is Beethoven? '