…Once again, Järvi and his band have captured Beethoven's wilful and often irascible character, rhetoric, polemics and sheer genius in fully-charged performances which also reveal his deep humanity. They certainly should number among the elite.
The Karajan Official Remastered Edition comprises 13 box sets containing official remasterings of the finest recordings the Austrian conductor made for EMI between 1946 and 1984, which are now a jewel of the Warner Classics catalog. This 6-CD box presents Karajan's first recording of the complete Beethoven Symphonies, made in the early 1950s with London's recently-founded Philharmonia Orchestra. The recording of the 9th Symphony is available here in stereo for the very first time, taken from original unreleased tapes.
Reinhard Goebels Aufnahmeprojekt "Beethovens Welt" erhält begeisterten Zuspruch in der Presse: "Zum Beethoven-Jahr keine neuen Lesarten von Beethovens Werk zu bieten, sondern Raritäten aus seinem Umfeld, ist eine Idee, wie sie typisch ist für Reinhard Goebel, den unermüdlichen Entdecker."(Rondo)
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’.