Word: beethovens
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...Immortal Beloved" tries to give us a sexy Beethoven, but the movie's plodding pace brings to mind another German composer. Like Wagner and bad sex, Bernard Rose's latest effort is boring, protracted and strangely anti-climactic...
...Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies (Archiv). What did Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies sound like in Beethoven's day? John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique try to show us by using gut-stringed fiddles, valveless horns and other period instruments, and by adopting brisk tempos. To listen to this electrifying set is to rediscover these revolutionary compositions in all their terror and wonder...
...boys told themselves, "Let's get on the radio, pretend it's John's basement and have some fun." Sometimes they fiddle with (or bollix up) the chord structure of the original tune. On a few songs they finesse the lyrics (George's vocal on Roll Over Beethoven alters "Dig these rhythm and blues" to "Dig these heathen blues") or finically polish the grammar (John's "You've really got a hold on me"). Some of their covers (Young Blood, Johnny B. Goode) sound sluggish, anemic next to the originals. But Paul's raveups -- his countertenor superscreaming on Long Tall...
Another result of the modernization of instruments is that tempos have become slower than Beethoven intended. The strings of his time simply could not sustain chords as long as the instruments of today can. Gardiner takes Beethoven's metronome markings -- once scorned as impossibly brisk -- at face value. The performances are therefore far nimbler than is typical, but such is the virtuosity of Gardiner's 60-piece orchestra that the music never seems rushed or scrambled. Listen, for example, to the famous finale of the Ninth / Symphony. The "Turkish march" usually sounds like an inappropriately comic intrusion in an otherwise...
...Beethoven's nine, as his audiences would have heard them...