Are there recordings of beethoven

Yehudi Menuhin's reputation is legendary in the classical world, but this superb recording comes from a period when his musical life was striding into pastures new.

As the 70s arrived he was regularly recording with Ravi Shankar and Stephane Grappelli among others, but this collaboration Wilhelm Kempff is as solid as Beethoven gets. For accuracy and innovation, we salute this fantastic recording of the complete symphonies by Emmanuel Krivine and La Chambre Philharmonique. Our resident Beethoven expert John Suchet had the following to say about it: "It's a different, stripped-down sound for the symphonies that Beethoven himself would have recognised.

Alfred Brendel has recorded so many Beethoven works over the years that it's difficult to select just one. In fact, he recorded all of the piano concertos more than once too, but this version link below of the Emperor with Bernard Haitink conducing was the first.

These scintillating historical recordings are fascinating accounts of some of Beethoven's most interesting string quartets. The quartet ramps up the Russian influence Beethoven's commissioner was a member of the Russian nobility , but still manages to eke out maximum emotion in the slower movements.

Aside from the fifth symphony, Beethoven openings don't get much bigger than this. Richard Chailly, however, rattles through it and sounds like he's having an absolute ball - look out for the explosive ending. Artur Schnabel was the first pianist to record the complete piano sonatas, so since his versions have been seen as fairly definitive.

Interpretations come and go, but they're all influenced by the professionalism and prowess of Schnabel. Martha Argerich has a reputation for being an unpredictable personality, but one thing you can bank on is her reading of Beethoven's third piano concerto.

With some gentle reigning from conductor Claudio Abbado, she gets the best out of the second movement especially. To tackle all nine Beethoven Symphonies is something of a rite of passage for any conductor worth their salt.

They've all done it, but few match Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic for enthusiasm and consistency. With three soloists of this high calibre sharing the stage in one concert is quite something, but to have them playing on the same work is fairly unheard of.

Couple them with Herbert Von Karajan and what have you got? A flawlessly intuitive recording, especially on the heart-rending second movement. Recordings taken after that date were given extended protection in and thus cannot be digitized. Aware of this rule, I only undertook to upload recordings which were taken before the date in order to fully comply with the law. Despite that precaution, the process that followed presented a number of unexpected challenges.

The first video I uploaded to YouTube promoted the website where my digitized copies of public domain recordings are available to download. In this video, I explained my project while examples of the music played in the background. Less than three minutes after uploading, I received a notification that there was a ContentID claim against my video.

ContentID is a system, developed by YouTube, which checks user-uploaded videos against databases of copyrighted content in order to curb copyright infringement. This system took millions of dollars to develop and is often pointed to as a working example of upload filters by rights holders and lawmakers who wish to make such technology mandatory for every website which hosts user content online.

However, these claims ignore the widespread reports of its often flawed execution. Under Chailly the Leipzig players never sound less than their eloquent selves The project comes to us in two distinct forms. I marginally prefer them. They are a touch broader yet, paradoxically, a degree or two tauter. The exceptional quality, both musical and technical, of this, the first set of the nine in the history of the gramophone to be released as a single cycle, took the symphonies to audiences old and new across the globe; and did so in well-assimilated readings that refuse to date.

With this exceptionally exciting new record, Roger Norrington joins Frans Bruggen and John Eliot Gardiner among a small elite of musicians working with period instruments whose interpretations of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven can stand comparison with the best we have had on record on modern instruments during the past 20 or 30 years.

The works Norrington has selected to launch this projected Beethoven cycle are, it must be said, shrewdly chosen.

They suit Norrington's temperament and musicological preoccupations unusually well. Like his revered seniors, Norrington has learnt conducting in the opera house.

Though he conducts Beethoven's music with the verve of a young man who has just discovered it for the first time, he is in years 53 this month an experienced musician with the kind of control over rhythm and argument which was always the hallmark of the very best kind of operatically trained musicians. Norrington's way with Beethoven — which is recognizably Toscaninian in some of its aspects - is mapped out in his own sleeve-note where he states as his aim the recapturing of much of "the exhilaration and sheer disturbance that his music certainly generated in his day".

Like Toscanini, Erich Kleiber, and others before him, Norrington achieves this not by the imposition on the music of some world view but by taking up its immediate intellectual and physical challenges. Sound interests him a good deal. Throughout these two performances the contributions of horns, trumpets and drums most rivet the attention the introduction to the Second Symphony's first movement is glorious ; by contrast, the woodwinds have, to modern ears, an almost rustic charm, a naif quality which technology and sophisticated playing techniques have to some extent obliterated.

What really fascinates Norrington, though, is rhythm and pulse and their determining agencies: 18th-century performing styles, instrumental articulacy most notably, bowing methods , and Beethoven's own metronome markings. In his sleeve-note annotations, Norrington is somewhat cavalier on the metronome question. Beethoven's metronome marks are printed alongside the movement titles but having set this particular hare running, Norrington declines to explain why some of his tempos fall short of those advertised.

In fact, the metronomes are good in the Second Symphony, the Larghetto apart, and in the middle movements of the Eighth, but not in the Eighth's quick outer movements. That said, Norrington strives to get as near to the metronome as is humanly possible consistent with instrumental clarity. He plays the first movement of the Eighth at nearly 60 bars to the minute the metronome is 69 which is quicker than Toscanini or Karajan; and he takes the finale at arround 74 the metronome is The second movement is spot on: as witty and exact a reading as you are likely to hear.

It must be said that at these tempos Norrington stresses the anxious, obsessive side of Beethoven's artistic make-up. I can well imagine Sir Thomas Beecham opining from some celestial vantage point that the music was quite as vital and rather wittier at his rather more considered tempos; but in Beethoven urbanity is not everything.

In the Second Symphony Norrington does make the music smile and dance without any significant loss of forward momentum, and he treats the metronome marks more consistently than Toscanini who rushed the Scherzo or Karajan who spins out the symphony's introduction , whilst sharing with them a belief in a really forward-moving pulse in the Larghetto again an approach to the printed metronome if not the thing itself. More seriously, he lacks real control of his band.

The sound he draws from his players is turgid and unwieldy and his readings seem random and cavalier alongside Norrington's astutely judged readings. The recordings are warm and vivid and generally well balanced. The fff climax of the development of the Eighth Symphony's first movement is slightly underpowered, which is odd when the horns and trumpets are elsewhere so thrillingly caught; perhaps, in the Eighth, the recording could have been a shade tighter and drier in order better to define the playing of the London Classical Players.

None the less, this is the most interesting and enjoyable new record of a Beethoven symphony I have heard for some considerable time. Richard Osborne March, This is a great performance, steady yet purposeful, with textures that seem hewn out of granite. Once or twice they cause a slight buzz of distortion for which EMI apologise in their booklet. There is no exposition repeat, and the trumpets blaze out illicitly in the first movement coda, but this is still one of the great Eroicas on record.

As Karajan announced to Klemperer after flying in to a concert performance around this time: 'I have come only to thank you, and say that I hope I shall live to conduct the Funeral March as well as you have done'. Richard Osborne April, His account of the Fifth also bristles with character.

Where the Fourth is concerned, I confess to a bias in favour of readings which match Apollonian loveliness with Dionysiac drive. Toscanini blazed the trail with his glorious BBC SO recording; Karajan followed in with a Berlin performance of unimaginable grace and fire; and Rattle was not far behind with his Vienna Philharmonic account.

Metronome marks are important but not mandatory. Transparent textures and a rigorous way with dynamics also feature. It comes as no surprise to find these marvellous Budapest musicians moving the Pastoral Symphony downstream along the Danube from the woods by Heiligenstadt to the countryside beyond Buda. It is all-pervasive. Not that his tempi are at all Toscanini-like.

The effect is not unlike the entry of the solo violin in the Benedictus of the Missa solemnis. Aptly so, since it ushers in a reading of the finale which is unashamedly devout.

Not even Karajan attempted to re-enact the miracle. Which is not to say that the Budapest performance is a carbon copy of the Karajan. In fact, he presses on beyond that all-informing pulse in the finale. Richard Osborne January It is interesting to reflect that in there was not a single entry under the name 'Kleiber, Carlos' in The Gramophone Classical Record Catalogue. I still remember the sinking feeling I experienced — a mere tiro reviewer on Gramophone — when I dropped into the post-box my word rave review they had asked for of what struck me as being one of the most articulate and incandescent Beethoven Fifths I had ever heard.

In Germany, they would probably have spiked the review. There is, after all, more than a hint of triplet-rhythm in Carlos Kleiber's conducting of the opening motto, a point — eagerly seized on by some German reviewers — which I had omitted to mention in my word encomium.

The performance doesn't stale, though it is the first movement that stays most vividly in the memory. I had forgotten, for instance, how steady — Klemperer-like, almost — the Scherzo and finale are.

But then in a sense he was fortunate. And he could as well have been cleaning up for the future. So palpable is the excitement of these live performances that it almost comes as a shock that the applause has been excised.

I was out of my seat at the end of the Seventh and I can only assume that a patch was made of the final pages, because no audience could conceivably have contained itself. From the very start, the cut-to-the-bone immediacy of the sound puts you up close and personal to the performance, lending a granite strength to the crunch of those chords and the rosiny resilience of those striding string scales. The dancing flute theme is really up-tempo and the blare of natural horns at the tutti brings an earthiness, a rawness, to the proceedings.

The hair-raising reiterations of the finale, driven to the point of exhaustion — the most exhilarating kind of exhaustion — are accentuated by the immediacy of the sound, and the penultimate piledriving climax and coda are absolutely thrilling, with brazen horns again dominating His reading is generally glorious and it remains one of the finest accounts of the work ever recorded.

The brook flows untroubled and the finale is quite lovely, with a wonderfully expansive climax. The recording is splendid. It goes without saying that no one ensemble can unlock all the secrets contained in these quartets. They offer eminently civilised, thoughtful and aristocratic readings.

Their approach is reticent but they also convey a strong sense of making music in domestic surroundings. Taken in isolation, however, the Quartetto Italiano remain eminently satisfying both musically and as recorded sound. In Opp 74 and 95, they more than hold their own against all comers. These are finely proportioned readings, poised and articulate. The gain in clarity because of the remastering entails a very slight loss of warmth in the middle register, but as recordings the late quartets, made between and , can hold their own against their modern rivals.

Not all of these received universal acclaim at the time of their first release. The opening fugue of Op is too slow at four-in-the-bar and far more espressivo than it should be, but, overall, these performances still strike a finely judged balance between beauty and truth, and are ultimately more satisfying and searching than most of their rivals.

Review of Vol 3 - The Late Quartets: Late Beethoven is all about contrasts: prayer and play, structural logic and emotional candour, relative convention and daring. All this conceived in the prison of deafness, perhaps the greatest of all musical miracles. Readers who know these works have little use for such guidelines and yet interpreters have to think harder; they need to convey what at times sounds like a stream of musical consciousness while respecting the many written markings.

Attenuated inflections are honoured virtually to the letter, textures carefully differentiated, musical pauses intuitively well-timed and inner voices nearly always transparent. They do Beethoven proud and no one could reasonably ask for more. Rob Cowan May Try the first movement of Op 18 No 2 at 3'56": this could be one person playing.

I love the crispness of the Andante scherzoso and the cannily calculated crescendi at the start of the finale.

Rob Cowan February The Gramophone Award in the chamber-music repertory went to the Lindsay Quartet's set of the late Beethoven quartets and it is a measure of the inexhaustibility of these great works that they have also claimed 's vote.

The Alban Berg are the first to give us them on CD, and the medium certainly does justice to the magnificently burnished tone that the Alban Berg command, and the perfection of blend they so consistently achieve. In terms of sheer technical address, tonal finesse and balance, they enjoy a superiority over almost every other ensemble of their generation.

Indeed some listeners, particularly those brought up on the Busch or Vegh Quartets, may find the sheer polish of their playing gets in the way, for this can be an encumbrance; late Beethoven is beautified at its peril. But so far as sheer quartet playing is concerned, it is likely to remain unchallenged. Robert Layton Up to a point the length of a review should denote importance — and were this the case, this notice ought to occupy many pages! This is an indispensable set — as revealing of the Beethoven quartets as Schnabel is of the sonatas, and if it were ever correct to speak of any performances as definitive, this is an instance when one might be tempted to do so.

The Busch's Beethoven set standards by which successive generations of quartets were judged — and invariably found wanting! Their insight and wisdom, their humanity and total absorption in Beethoven's art has to my mind never been surpassed and only sporadically matched, even by such modern ensembles as the Vegh and the Lindsay!