Beethoven Complete Symphonies

Andris Nelsons has joined forces with the Wiener Philharmoniker to record Ludwig van Beethoven’s nine symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon. The release of their new album on 4 October 2019 will mark the start of the Yellow Label’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth next year. The Nelsons Beethoven cycle is presented in a specially commissioned deluxe box featuring the nine works on five CDs and a single Blu-ray Audio disc in TrueHD sound quality.

Over the past few years, Jan Willem de Vriend and The Netherlands Symphony Orchestra have made recordings of all the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. This box contains them all. Important classical magazines like Gramophone are enthusiastic about the series: "These are strong, thrustful performances which make sense in terms of the music in hand and the orchestra's own character and competence".

To mark their 30th Anniversary, Britten Sinfonia and Thomas Ades are releasing their acclaimed Beeethoven and Barry cycle as a box set.

Joe Hisaishi conducts Beethoven. Featuring Symphony No. 1 to 9 on five discs. Performed by the Future Orchestra Classics (Nagano Chamber Orchestra)

Franz Liszt’s project of transcribing all of Beethoven’s symphonies took him 25 years to complete. His approach retains a deep fidelity to the original score with piano writing that is sumptuously rich and always perfectly suited to the instrument and its possibilities. A celebration of music as an independent and absolute language, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is considered the perfect utterance of his musical philosophy, while the Second Symphony looks to the future as it wrestles with the conventions of symphonic tradition. Gabriele Baldocci’s second volume in this edition (CDS7771) was admired in ClassicsToday.com, in which the ‘Beethoven/Liszt ‘Eroica’ symphony transcription conveys an impressive, multi-levelled pianistic sheen’.

Beethoven’s symphonic cycle is one of the most quintessential in the Western classical canon. They chart a course from the influence of Haydn and Classical models in the early symphonies, through works of startling innovation and the birth of Romanticism, to his monumental Ninth Symphony for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Zubin Mehta conducts the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in these live recordings from 2021/22.

Beethoven‘s symphonies pose without any doubt one of the greatest artistic challenges to every conductor. Of the countless questions about what an authentic interpretation means, I am addressing only one here, namely the problem of Beethoven’s metronome markings. As we know, the first metronomes were built in Vienna during Beethoven’s lifetime and he did then give metronome markings to his pieces (retrospectively in most cases).

Eine einzigartige Sinneserfahrung: Marek Janowski dirigiert Beethoven: Es ist schon etwas Besonderes, selbst im übervollen Beethoven-Sinfonien-Katalog, wenn Marek Janowski und das WDR Sinfonieorchester eine Gesamteinspielung der Sinfonien Beethovens vorlegen: Einer der meist gefeierten Dirigenten unserer Tage und eines der renommiertesten deutschen Rundfunkorchester sind gerade gut genug, für Beethovens unerreichte Sinfonien.

Asahina Takashi (朝比奈 隆) was a Japanese conductor. He founded the Kansai Symphonic Orchestra (today the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra) in 1947 and remained its chief conductor until his death in Kobe. For some, Takashi Asahina was "the Karajan of Japan"; for others, his eminence was derived at least in part from his being the oldest conductor on the international scene; for others yet, he was quite simply an excellent musician, with a special sympathy for the classics of the Austro-German repertoire.

Asahina Takashi (朝比奈 隆) was a Japanese conductor. He founded the Kansai Symphonic Orchestra (today the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra) in 1947 and remained its chief conductor until his death in Kobe. For some, Takashi Asahina was "the Karajan of Japan"; for others, his eminence was derived at least in part from his being the oldest conductor on the international scene; for others yet, he was quite simply an excellent musician, with a special sympathy for the classics of the Austro-German repertoire.