Beethoven’s Wind Octet has a pleasing, domestic character that Classical Winds portray engagingly, with close recording highlighting the keen edge of their period instruments. By contrast, this new recording from the Netherlands Wind Ensemble (reverberantly recorded in the spacious surroundings of the Waalse Kerk, Amsterdam) here underlines the work’s indebtedness to the serenade tradition with more polished elegance. They generate a greater feeling of forward impetus in the fast movements and the mellifluousness of their modern instruments in the Andante gives the music’s inherent expression a beautifully focused atmosphere.
Beethoven’s Piano and Wind Quintet owes much to Mozart’s similarly scored Quintet, K452, and Murray Perahia accentuates the strong Mozartian flavour of the Beethoven Quintet in his excellent account with members of the English Chamber Orchestra. Aided by superbly balanced recording, Perahia’s finely wrought phrasing, aptly matched by sensitive playing from the wind instrumentalists, synchronizes exquisitely with the music’s clean, classical lines. On the present disc, Peter Donohoe and the Netherlands group emphasize Beethoven’s own personality with faster tempos and more extreme dynamic contrasts.
The wind ensemble arrangement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which completes this programme, is a real tour de force. Here, the Netherlands’ rich timbral sonorities vividly express the exuberance of the outer movements, dramatic contrast in the Allegretto and tautly sprung rhythmic vitality in the scherzo, frequently revealing detail often unnoticed in the familiar orchestral version.'