Beethoven's little joke about Bach being no Bach (no ''stream'') but the ocean itself could equally well be applied to Beethoven. And this is a point that ought to be bome in mind before more period instrument chamber groups set sail in their flimsy craft to negotiate these huge and turbulent waters. Nor should the astonishing success of Norrington (EMI) and Bruggen (Philips) with many of the symphonies blind aspirants to the special nature of their achievement or the failure of several rival groups. And I mean failure. In ten or 20 years' time, collectors will be astonished by some of the praise heaped in the 1980s on the Beethoven performances of the Hanover Band (Nimbus) or Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music (L'Oiseau-Lyre). Norrington's players and Bruggen's have got close to Beethoven, technically and imaginatively, with a mixture of dramatic flair and scholarly guile. Even then, I don't much care for Norrington's 'remember this is only 1803' way with the first movement of the Eroica where the Furtwanglerish Bruggen is musically the more masterful; and there are times when Bruggen goes over the top as in his very grand, very slow reading of the first movement of the First Symphony. That said, both conductors have a sense of the scale of Beethoven's thinking and the kind of impact he can make sonically. With them, period horns and timpani don't scale down the drama, they often heighten it, and their engineers have not been afraid to give the perfommances a generously spacious acoustic where necessary.
Very little of this applies, alas, when it comes to Schroder and the American Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra. It is a light-weight band with often pallid-sounding strings and pale, or palely recorded, drums, plus a conductor whose way with the Eroica is frankly jejune. This is not to say that there aren't things on the record which go well. The last two movements of the First Symphony are often delightfully detailed and there are one of two fizzling transitions and variations in the Eroica. But there are a dozen moments in the first movement of the Eroica alone where orchestra and conductor are skippingly out of their depth, putting me in mind of that line of Tennyson's about a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million suns.'