Beethoven: Symphonies & Concertos / Tan, Norringt

Norrington,Roger/Tan Melvyn/London Classical

Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9, Piano Concertos 1-5, Overtures

A 7 CD set of Beethoven's Best!
“We had to forge a brand new style, based not on recent tradition, but on the traditions of composers during their lifetimes,” says conductor Roger Norrington, describing the approach behind these ground-breaking interpretations of Beethoven’s symphonies and piano concertos. “We based our recordings on everything we knew about early 19th-century performance, style and tradition, and on the information the composer left behind … It's another kind of avant-garde – the music you thought you knew.” Roger Norrington got to grips with the works of Beethoven very early on, conducting the Fifth Symphony with an amateur orchestra at the age of twenty, but the immense progress made in the 1980s, as musicians and musicologists sought to recreate “authenticity” through a thorough knowledge of the use of period instruments, encouraged him to extend this process of renewal to Beethoven. For Norrington, creativity is essential to any performer on old instruments, for it is necessary to take risks in order to give life to the music. He bases his interpretation of the symphonies on instinct combined with available information, readily recalling that Beethoven, already 21 when Mozart died, and writing when Haydn was in full flow, was grounded in the school of the eighteenth century; and it is indeed by way of the eighteenth century that Norrington approaches Beethoven’s works, that is to say, with a new approach to expression, tempos not hitherto usually adopted, and new ideas about the orchestra, revealing a rich, unexpected world. In his recordings of the nine symphonies, made with the London Classical Players, a group founded in 1978, Norrington always respects the balance of the tempos the composer wanted. The instrument played by Melvyn Tan in the recordings of the 5 concertos is a 1983 copy by Derek Adlam of an 1814 wooden-framed fortepiano by Nannette Streicher. The clarity of the small, leather-covered hammers, particularly when accompanied by an orchestra using period-style instruments, emphasises the closeness of these concertos to the music of Haydn and Mozart, while allowing the listener to experience their bold originality afresh. Metronome marks for the concertos from Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny are observed, and the composer’s own cadenzas written in 1809 for Concertos 1–4 are used.

Price: $35.98