If you are looking for a Beethoven Fifth Symphony that is fast and furious (rhythmically vital if with some poetic and softly-spoken moments), detail liberated (not least the Finale’s contrabassoon), featuring rattling timpani, brazen horns, expressive woodwinds, and vibrato-free strings, contrived dynamic tweaks (including subitos), and don’t mind shelling out for thirty minutes of music (a timing that includes repeats in the outer movements), then Teodor Currentzis might be your man, aided and abetted by the totally responsive MusicaAeterna, and well-recorded in Vienna’s Konzerthaus between July 31 & August 4 2018 (from concerts I assume, noises-off suggest so). Sony Classical 19075884972. Me? I rather like it. Surprising (in every sense).
MusicaAeterna & Teodor Currentzis – Beethoven 5 [Sony Classical]
Scrubbing subsidiary strings in the finale’s second subject – exciting. Cosmetically tweaked dynamics in the first movement, insufferable.
Which he does in his Tchaikovsky Pathetique where it is equally insufferable not to say unbearable on repeated listening, so I disposed of it!
Ghastly. It’s an egotistical, narcissistic ear bash of unrelieved tweakings of tempo, inflection, balances. The whole thing screams ‘look at me, look at me!!’. Nastily interventionist both technically and musically. The aural equivalent of being beaten about the head with a baseball bat. All about the conductor, nothing about Beethoven. Quick, pass me the paracetamol and my CDs of Furtwangler, Haitink, Karajan, Carlos Kleiber, Klemperer, Leibowitz, Mackerras, Manze, Norrington, Rattle, Toscanini, Walter…anyone, ANYONE except this over-hyped monstrosity which now serves as a rather decorative beer mat on my desk.
I could not agree more. I found it quite ghastly and not only cos it seemed engineered for immediate impact like a pop album X D
Indeed Gentlemen, but what SPIRIT!
My Sunday started off more than a tad gloomily, but 30 minutes of TC’s 5th left me feeling hugely uplifted, notwithstanding all the eccentricities.