新建築 – 9月 2021

After the critical success of the first volume of Beethoven's symphonies, Jordi Savall offers us Symphonies Six to Nine. This latest publication crowns a nearly two-year world tour and confirms the extent to which the Savall renews our vision of these most famous works. The Concert des Nations shows that it also knows how to magnify the repertoire of the early 19th century.

These interpretations are enormously pleasurable and at times revelatory. Always clean and never showy, Giltburg’s pianism is ideally suited to late Beethoven, and his touch throughout is light and flexible…There are no histrionics in his treatment of Op. 109, and none in the variations of Op. 111 – no fashionable excursions into jazz – while Op. 110 comes over with a plainness and sincerity which warms the heart.

Seventy years ago, on the 29th July 1951, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at a concert marking the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival after seven years of silence following the Second World War. It was a momentous occasion, and the concert was broadcast by Bavarian Radio and trans¬mitted across the world, for instance by Swedish Radio. Using the analogue mono tape as digitized by Swedish Radio, the present disc reproduces the broadcast as it would have been heard by listeners in Sweden: we have chosen to not change anything, not to ‘brush up’ the sound, not to clean and shorten the pauses or omit audience noises within the music, but to keep the original as it was. In this way we hope to recreate the feeling of actually sitting in front of an old radio in 1951, listening to this important concert – a true historical document.