Word: beethovens
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...What did Beethoven's symphonies sound like to Beethoven? The composer was deaf for most of his creative life, so he heard his music in his head, but what sounds was he imagining as he wrote a score? And what did the music sound like to his listeners, before whose astonished ears Beethoven shattered the boundaries of the classical style and thus created the foundation of the modern orchestral repertoire...
...their splendid new recording of Beethoven's nine symphonies on the Archiv label, English conductor John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire & et Romantique aim to recreate the music of Beethoven as his audience experienced it. The brilliant and incisive Gardiner stands in the forefront of the original-instruments movement, whose adherents employ period instruments (originals and replicas) and the latest textual scholarship in order to play music as closely as possible to the way it was first heard. Having begun with the Baroque era, the movement has progressed to the 19th century. Gardiner already has a revelatory version...
...Beethoven symphonies are his most ambitious project yet. The nine -- which cover a technical and emotional range unmatched by the work of any other composer -- are the bedrock of the conductor's art, and rare is the maestro who has not committed the cycle to disk at least once. Gardiner, however, has set out to do something different with these familiar pieces...
...tend to hear Beethoven today as the precursor to the Romantics. Gardiner takes the opposite tack; for him, Beethoven is the natural successor to the classical school of Haydn (his teacher) and Mozart. After all, Beethoven did not know Bruckner and Mahler were on their way, but he certainly did know the music of his time, and Gardiner reveals (and revels in) Beethoven's links to it. In place of the weighty textures and stately pace that mark modern interpretations, Gardiner offers a Haydn-like sprightliness...
...years or so, as steel-stringed fiddles and machine-tooled valve horns replaced their forebears, the orchestra has achieved a golden sheen but at the expense of clarity. Instruments that are perfect for late- 19th century music do not necessarily suit 18th century compositions, not even those of Beethoven, who straddles the two eras. "Later instruments have a way of blurring the edges of the music," explains Gardiner. With original instruments, he says, "what you lose in opulence, you gain in extra transparency...