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Beethoven · Complete Symphonies · Staatskapelle Dresden · Colin Davis

Posted By: platico
Beethoven · Complete Symphonies · Staatskapelle Dresden · Colin Davis

Beethoven · Complete Symphonies · Staatskapelle Dresden · Colin Davis
APE+CUE 1.7 GB | MP3 HQ (Tracks) 703 MB | Booklet | EASY CD-DA 12 | No Log | 1995



Symphony No 1, Op. 21. Symphony No 2, Op. 36. Symphony No 3, 'Eroica', Op. 55. Symphony No 4, Op. 60. Symphony No 5, Op. 67. Symphony No 6, 'Pastoral', Op. 68. Symphony No 7, Op. 92. Symphony No 8, Op. 93. Symphony No 9, 'Choral', Op. 125. Egmont, Op. 84 - Overture Leonore, Op. 72.

Sharon Sweet sop · Jadwiga Rappé cont · Paul Frey ten · Franz Grundheber bar
Dresden State Opera Chorus · Staatskapelle Dresden · Colin Davis


There has not been a Beethoven cycle like this since Klemperer's heyday, or Bruno Walter's, a sequence of performances that is echt-Beethovenian as successive generations of Austrian and German musicians would have understood the term and yet which is informed at the same time by an imaginative vision that derives not from some arcane activity – reading Goethe or taking solitary walks by night in the Herz mountains – but from a certain sense of fundamental wholeness, the conductor and his fellow musicians sufficiently at ease with themselves and the music they are playing to render the task of performing it nothing less than a physical pleasure and a private joy.

It is easy to forget nowadays how physically gratifying Beethoven's music can and should be. (Can you imagine Beethoven quarrelling with Robert Frost's lines, ''Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better''?) We have a tendency in this country to find sensual gratification, the sound source itself, suspect; which perhaps explains why we have of late become more addicted than most to the slimline, high speed, prosily talkative Beethoven of the so-called authenticists. (What is called in Robert Tear's new book – Singer Beware; Hodder & Stoughton – ''technical brilliance, muscular vapidity, and spiritual ignorance''.)

The trick, of course, is to marry sound with substance which is where this new Dresden cycle of the nine symphonies is a locus classicus of good practice. I can think of no orchestra – not even the Berliners, the Vienna Philharmonic or Masur's Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra – who play Beethoven with a richer, fuller, darker, warmer sound than the Staatskapelle Dresden. The Berliners playing for Karajan in his 1976 set (listed above) produced a rich, visceral sound, but one that related to a rather different performing tradition, the Toscanini influence still glistening through. Davis is clearly more a Klemperer man. (Klemperer in his prime, that is; not the Klemperer who, as Robert Tear – a great fan – cheekily reveals, was actually asleep during the recording of one of the choruses for his EMI set of the B minor Mass.) Like Klemperer, Davis has mastered the difficult trick of sustaining broad tempos and infusing them with a rhythmic impetus – now dancing, now marching, now simply bowling along – which is unforced, unflagging and utterly at ease with itself. One of the great joys of the new set – perhaps the great joy and one that will commend it to a wide constituency of more mature collectors – is the feeling of inevitability about so much of the music-making. Not once did I find myself bothering to consult metronomes or tempo markings. Not once did I get even remotely hot under the collar about a choice of tempo that in another context might have led to the immediate need for a change of shirt.

By giving himself and the players, and the music, time to sound and to breathe, Davis is also able to reproduce as beautifully as I have ever heard it reproduced, the written phrasing of the music. How mannerly this all is, like a great actor bothering to ensure that we hear every word as the verse rhythms rise and fall. And what a rich cargo of melodic beauty it brings with it, too. It is here that the analogy with Bruno Walter comes in, for he was one of the last conductors who really made the Beethoven symphonies sing in a way that befits this great master of articulate song. Walter was also a man of temperament, not afraid to shape a paragraph rhetorically to his own ends. Davis does this too at times. And again it usually seems 'right'. Not right for all time, but right in its own way now, true to itself. Gunter Wand in his fine RCA set rarely takes this kind of risk. Harnoncourt does so rather more frequently but in a way that often sounds arbitrary and which becomes irksome on repeated hearings.

Go back to Davis's earlier – nay, his earliest – recordings of the Beethoven symphonies and you will realize what a long and steady process of maturation has taken place. It is years since I played his famous old RPO recording of the Seventh Symphony (HMV, 6/62 – nla). Indeed, I had invented in my mind's ear an elegant gazelle of a performance, deftly despatched by Beecham's old orchestra. In fact, repeats apart, it is very similar to the newer performance, a steady, broad-based reading, albeit a vital one. What the Dresden performance has is a far greater power and concentration of tone achieved without detriment to the music's overall impetus. It takes a lifetime to learn how to marry these two elements, though, as I say, it is an aspect of the conductor's craft that in this country we rarely consider, and all too rarely admire. Some of Davis's earlier BBC SO Beethoven recordings for Philips had this quality – there was a fine Eroica (9/71 – nla) and a superb Fourth Symphony (4/76 – nla) offsetting a badly under-nourished Fifth (11/74 – nla) – but neither the BBC SO's playing nor the early 1970s LP recordings were remotely comparable to the splendours we have here on the new Dresden set.

The sound is glorious, full and forward and beautifully clear, with just enough reverberation to allow the music its necessary aura. Davis's old knack of allowing winds and strings to speak on equal terms is very much in evidence throughout. That in itself is a prerequisite of a good Beethoven sound. But I have also never heard a better focused bass-line than we have here. This is partly a matter of positive microphone placings but it is also something to do with the supremely accomplished playing of the Dresden cellos andbasses: full-bodied yet wonderfully maneuvrable too. There are times when their playing alone gives sufficient pleasure. I don't much care for the sound of the Dresden clarinets (the Brymers and Bernard Waltons of this world have taught us to listen for something altogether smoother and less reedy) but oboe, flute and bassoon all ravish sense. Karajan always used to say that the entire wind section of the Vienna Philharmonic played better when the flautist Wolfgang Schulz was on duty and I suspect that the Dresden orchestra take inspiration – certainly takes something of the lovely ochre colour of their wind choir – from the principal bassoon. At the first intimations of the 'joy' theme in the finale of the Ninth, it is the bassoon's gurgling descants that gives real pleasure. The rustic musician who drowsed his way through the peasants' merrymaking is here newly roused to the pleasures of a contented life.

The Pastoral Symphony is a joy from first to last, a performance to set beside those of Klemperer (EMI, 8/90), Boult (EMI, 4/78 – nla), Bohm (DG, 4/95), and more recently Giulini (Sony Classical, 5/94). All it lacks is the proper old-fashioned division of the violins left and right. (The Seventh lacks this, too, but the recording is so good, it is at least possible to hear the two groups as separate entities.) I like the way Davis's storm moves slowly across the landscape, as storms tend to do. There are other places where a potentially controversial steadiness brings fresh insights: the oboe-led Poco andante towards the end of the finale of the Eroica ushering in what is almost a Mahlerian backward glance to the great Funeral March, or the second movement of the Eighth Symphony not so much replicating the new-fangled metronome as anticipating Mahler's jangling rustic excursion at the start of his Fourth Symphony. As for the Fifth Symphony, Davis circumvents its aggressively heroic elements by playing the first movement, with its germinal four-note idea, as though it were the work of Haydn in seven-league boots. The scherzo is played with a Furtwangler-like slowness (is our leading Berliozian thinking here of Berlioz's phrase about the scherzo having the ''gaze of a mesmeriser''?) but the finale, denying all kinship with what has gone before, has plenty of its own life-enhancing Schwung.

Is anything, then, amiss in the cycle? Well, Davis does not do a great deal with the First Symphony, that cussed little curtain-raiser whose first movement seems to grumble and grouse, whatever the tempo. The Second Symphony, by contrast, is gloriously done. As the cycle progresses, there are a few lapses, the odd orchestral raspberry, that may or may not be there as an earnest of the musicians' humanity, their essential fallibility. There is an overlit piccolo in the finale of the Fifth, and I am still a little baffled as to why the recording of the Fourth Symphony is for no very good reason marginally more reverberant than the others. In the finale of the Ninth, the choir and to some extent the soprano and alto solos are too backwardly placed. Davis allows time for the words to be articulated, yet we have to strain to hear them. The tenor is excellent, but one has heard the baritone solos better sung (to put it mildly). At a first hearing, I thought the orchestra was doing all the work in the Ninth's first movement. I later revised my opinion, though this is not quite the apotheosis of Davis's intense, steady, visionary, singing way with Beethoven I had hoped for.

The performances of the overtures Egmont and Leonore No. 3 reveal in microcosm the set's qualities. Both are miniature music-dramas charged with extra-musical meaning, but they are often carelessly played by conductors and orchestras. Too few conductors get the balance right between the dramatic and the symphonic elements in the music. Davis is able to adjudicate between the two elements in masterly fashion, not least – one comes back finally to this – because of the strength and purity of the orchestral response: a steady pulse buoyantly articulated; fabulous, soft pianissimos; sforzandos that are properly stressed and sounded; fortissimos that are burnished and fullbodied. Here, as in Klemperer's performances or Walter's, codas and victory symphonies are triumphant homecomings rather than sudden acts of military conquest.'
Reviewed: Gramophone 12/1995, Richard Osborne


CD 1
1. Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21 - I. Adagio molto - Allegro con brio (9:37)
2. Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21 - II. Andante cantabile con moto (8:37)
3. Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21 - III. Menuetto. Allegro molto e vivace (3:32)
4. Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21 - IV. Finale. Adagio - Allegro molto e vivace (6:14)
5. Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92 - I. Poco sostenuto - Vivace (15:06)
6. Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92 - II. Allegretto (9:44)
7. Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92 - III. Presto - Assai meno presto (10:30)
8. Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92 - IV. Allegro con brio (9:13)

CD 2
1. Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36 - I. Adagio molto - Allegro con brio (13:16)
2. Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36 - II. Larghetto (11:25)
3. Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36 - III. Scherzo. Allegro (3:53)
4. Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36 - IV. Allegro molto (7:00)
5. Symphony No. 8 in F, Op. 93 - I. Allegro vivace e con brio (10:08)
6. Symphony No. 8 in F, Op. 93 - II. Allegretto Scherzando (4:10)
7. Symphony No. 8 in F, Op. 93 - III. Tempo di menuetto (5:13)
8. Symphony No. 8 in F, Op. 93 - IV. Allegro vivace (8:12)

CD 3
1. Symphony No. 3 in E flat, Op. 55 - Eroica - I. Allegro con brio (18:59)
2. Symphony No. 3 in E flat, Op. 55 - II. Marcia funebre (Adagio assai) (17:33)
3. Symphony No. 3 in E flat, Op. 55 - III. Scherzo (Allegro vivace) (6:01)
4. Symphony No. 3 in E flat, Op. 55 - IV. - Finale (Allegro molto) (13:06)
5. Egmont Overture in F minor, Op. 84 - Sostenuto, ma non troppo - Allegro (9:06)

CD 4
1. Symphony No. 4 in B flat, Op. 60 - I. Adagio - Allegro vivace (11:57)
2. Symphony No. 4 in B flat, Op. 60 - II. Adagio (10:02)
3. Symphony No. 4 in B flat, Op. 60 - III. Allegro vivace (6:02)
4. Symphony No. 4 in B flat, Op. 60 - IV. Allegro ma non tropo (7:09)
5. Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 - I. Allegro con brio (7:58)
6. Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 - II. Andante con moto (10:40)
7. Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 - III. Allegro (6:03)
8. Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 - IV. Allegro (11:19)

CD 5
1. Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 - I. Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande: Allegro ma non troppo (12:31)
2. Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 - II. Szene am Bach: Andante molto mosso (13:53)
3. Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 - III. Lustiges Zusammensein der landleute: Allegro (5:49)
4. Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 - IV. Gewitter - Sturm: Allegro (4:18)
5. Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 - V. Hirtengesang. Frohe und dankbare Gefuhle nach dem Sturm: Allegro (9:42)
6. Overture - Adagio - Allegro (14:40)

CD 6
1. Symphony No.9 Choral - I. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso (17:26)
2. Symphony No.9 Choral - II. Molto vivace (13:44)
3. Symphony No.9 Choral - III. Adagio molto e cantabile (15:34)
4. Symphony No.9 Choral - IV. Presto (6:36)
5. Symphony No.9 Choral - V. O Freunde, nicht diese Tone (0:55)
6. Symphony No.9 Choral - VI. Allegro assai (2:46)
7. Symphony No.9 Choral - VII. Alla marcia. Allegro vivace assai - (4:39)
8. Symphony No.9 Choral - VIII. Andante maestoso - Adagio non troppo, ma divoto (3:38)
9. Symphony No.9 Choral - IX. Allegro energico, sempre ben marcato (2:17)
10. Symphony No.9 Choral - X. Allegro ma non tanto (4:12)