Beethoven's nine symphonies -- what can one say? The greatest body of orchestral works ever composed? Probably. The most performed body of orchestral works ever composed? Certainly. The most recorded body of orchestral works ever composed? Absolutely. Not only has virtually every conductor recorded a Beethoven cycle, some of them have gotten to record it multiple times: Abbado, Bernstein, Solti, Karajan, and Haitink, among others. What does this proliferation tell us? Usually nothing about the music that hasn't been heard before, but sometimes something about what the conductor thinks about the music. These performances with the London Symphony Orchestra recorded in 2005 and 2006 tell what Bernard Haitink thinks about the greatest body of orchestral works ever composed. And what does Haitink think? Pretty much nothing that hasn't been thought before. His tempos are neither too fast nor too slow, but straight down the moderato. His dynamics are neither too loud nor too quiet, but right in the mezzo. His textures are clear and lucid. His colors are blended and smooth. His interpretations are solid and sincere. But what does Haitink tell us about what he thinks about Beethoven's symphonies? Pretty much nothing except that he is an experienced conductor with a superb baton technique who keeps his opinions to himself. The London Symphony's playing is enthusiastic but too often ragged around the edges for comfort. LSO Live's recording is transparent but the perspective seems to shift from work to work -- sometimes the strings are too far away, other times the brass are too close.© TiVo

The violinist Leonidas Kavakos has many strings to his bow: an acclaimed soloist, he conducts orchestras – his first love – and is a chamber musician. This double album bears witness to the skills of this musical polymath who knows his Beethoven. He functions here both as soloist and conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, which boasts over 60 musicians. In line with the practices of the composer's lifetime, this choice highlights the "egalitarian" style of the concerto's writing. While a virtuoso piece for sure, this score is more than just a pedestal for the soloist: the latter works closely with their peers, and shares every theme with them. Leonidas Kavakos gives a magisterial performance at the head of this impressive orchestra and brings forth some sumptuous nuances from the players, commanding their sustained and close attention. Heir to Viennese Classicism, Beethoven opened the way to the Concertos of Brahms or Sibelius, in which the solo violin often accompanies the orchestra with acrobatic embellishments. As agile as he was at the start of his career, the soloist doesn't perform Kreisler's famous cadence, but rather brings to life what Beethoven published for piano. This moment of complicity with the orchestra continues in camera in the Septet, Op. 20, the first score of the kind, in which the musicians sound like a small orchestra; and then finally in the 6 National Airs with Variations, Op. 105 for piano and flute (or violin ad libitum). Commissioned by a Scottish publisher when Beethoven was composing his Ninth Symphony, these miniatures for amateurs sound just as fresh as their dancing melodies. A very fine record which shows Beethoven in a less stormy light than usual. © Elsa Siffert/Qobuz

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was much admired by Haydn, Mozart, as well as young Beethoven, who piously treasured his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments. The two men never met (Beethoven was eighteen when Johann Sebastian’s son passed away), but there are many affinities between them. Both of their works span the transition between two eras of music, and both shared a passion for harmonic exploration and formal studies, combined with a love of the bizarre. It was therefore only right to bring them together on the same album. In his first two symphonies, Beethoven created a world of his own, drawing on the relatively recent history of the musical form that Carl Philipp Emanuel and Joseph Haydn had helped to shape and develop fifty years earlier. Although the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Beethoven presented here have little in common, they have a similar air of audacity and novelty about them, traits which have been wonderfully showcased by the musicians of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin under the baton of their “konzertmeister”, Bernhard Forck. An exciting example of mirroring works released by Harmonia Mundi as part of its monumental Beethoven edition commemorating the composer’s birth and death dates (2020 and 2027). © François Hudry/Qobuz

Beethoven’s output for fortepiano and violoncello is fascinating because it covers every period of his career, from early to late, with references to Bach in Op. 69 and Op. 102 No. 2 and an especially innovative and amazingly modern musical language. For this complete set, which includes the Variations on a theme from Handel’s "Judas Maccabaeus" and the Variations on a theme from Mozart’s "Die Zauberflöte", Nicolas Altstaedt was keen to record on an instrument with gut strings, a Guadagnini from Piacenza dated 1749, and using a Classical bow. Alexander Lonquich, his faithful recital partner – they been inseparable companions since the day Altstaedt replaced his teacher Boris Pergamenschikow for a concert of Beethoven sonatas with Lonquich at the Beethovenfest in Bonn in 2004 – here plays a Graf fortepiano of 1826. The combination of these instruments produces a finely balanced sound and exceptional tone colours. This recording is Nicolas Altstaedt’s first for Alpha as a soloist. Others will follow, in very different genres, for eclecticism is the hallmark of this musician, among the most promising of the new generation. © Alpha Classics

With its first of two Genuin Aufnahmen, the Trio Boccherini proves that Beethoven's String Trios are more than technical exercises by the composer along the way to writing quartets. Opus 9 is a rarely recorded and performed early work by the master, and yet they already reveal Beethoven in his entirety, as it were, in a tonally condensed form. The ensemble, comprising of members from three different continents, bring together diverse aspects of their musical experiences, culminating in this colorful yet unified interpretation. © Genuin

Issued complete for the first time, a new recording of Franz Liszt’s iconic piano transcriptions of the nine Beethoven symphonies. As the Italian pianist Giovanni Bellucci remarks in an extensive booklet introduction, this album is the fruit of study over the past 20 years and more, into the worlds of both Beethoven and Liszt and their meeting point in these transcriptions where the Hungarian composer sought to honour his forebear as the original leader of an artistic movement we now think of as Romanticism, where the composer places himself at the front and centre of his works. Liszt’s transcriptions diverged from the ready-made arrangements which publishers rapidly produced and reprinted to meet the demands of amateur and domestic audiences. Here, the symphonic world of Beethoven is not merely experienced as a distant echo but translated into the idiom of the virtuoso piano which swept across Europe during the latter half of the 19th century, led by Liszt and Clara Schumann. Thus in these performances, Bellucci seeks a kind of fidelity to the Romantic age of the transcriptions rather than the Classical age of the original works. Taking broad tempi and probing deeply into textures which, after all, condense the soundworld of an entire orchestra into the span of ten fingers, Bellucci presents an individual and compelling new vision of works which renew themselves at the hands of each new generation’s interpreters. The cycle reaches its climax with the Ninth, recorded live at the 2014 Lisztomania Festival in France, with the participation of the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno and soloists Hana Škarková, Lucie Hilscherová, Michal Lehotský and Martin Gurbal. Other studio sessions have taken place in the famous Salle de Musique at La Chaux de Fonds in Switzerland, between 2018 and 2021. "In completing the project", Bellucci remarks, "I would like to borrow Franz Liszt’s words and make them mine, albeit just for a moment: "The piano is, for me, what the frigate is for the sailor, indeed, perhaps even more, because the piano is my word, is my life". In transcribing the 9 Beethoven Symphonies for piano solo Franz Liszt (1811-1886) not only made these symphonic masterworks available for domestic use but also demonstrated his immense creativity, insight, knowledge and pianistic resources. The work of a true genius, these transcriptions reveal the essential language and message of Beethoven, written down in pianism of the highest quality and difficulty, in this sense still valuable today. It takes a pianist of near superhuman powers and virtuosity to do justice to these scores. Giovanni Bellucci is such a pianist. Not only he "plays all the notes" but he is able to recreate the grandeur, drama, lyricism and intimacy of the original, presenting a monument made up of countless details. © Brilliant Classics

Due respect is rarely given to Beethoven's Septet, which he completed in 1800 - preceded by two first piano concertos, ten first Sonatas for piano, half a dozen quartets, and finished around the same time as the First Symphony - but had the composer wanted to, he could have made this Septet into a symphony in its own right, such is the richness and depth of the material, not to mention its forty-minute running time. What's more, Toscanini performed it in 1951, giving the string parts to the NBC Orchestra, without changing the structure of the wind section (clarinet, horn, bassoon). That said, its architecture across its six movements, is more like that of a serenade than the standard form of a symphony, which might explain how infrequently it is performed these days, beyond its unusual formation. The final movement contains one of Beethoven's smoothest themes - the second - with a level of emotion that prefigures the immortal theme of the Ninth. The soloists of the Montréal Symphony Orchestra don't hold back. To complement the rest of the programme, they offer us  Till Eulenspiegel einmal anders (Till Eulenspiegel, different for once, in our best english!), a delicious re-writing of a symphonic poem by Strauss for the same seven musicians who perform Beethoven's Septet. We only regret that this adaptation has made several pointless cuts to the score, on an album that only lasts 48 minutes - we could have easily enjoyed the entire Till. But there we are. © SM/Qobuz

Three world-class soloists gathered in Paris to celebrate the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, in the year that marks the 250th anniversary of his birth, and recorded the only two Beethoven Trios for Piano, Clarinet and Cello, his Opus 11 and Opus 38. This is the third album for Paraty label by Filipe Pinto-Ribeiro, one of the great European pianists of his generation and artistic director of the DSCH – Shostakovich Ensemble, who now appears with celebrated clarinettist Pascal Moraguès, first Solo Clarinet of Orchestre de Paris since 40 years, and acclaimed cellist Adrian Brendel, which discography includes a Beethoven monographic album with legendary pianist Alfred Brendel, his father, with a reference recording of Beethoven Sonatas for Cello and Piano. This album was recorded at La Seine Musicale, near Paris. © Paraty

This recording landed on classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2023, and several factors combined to place it there. One is the sensitive ensemble work throughout from the trio of violinist Veronika Jarůšková, cellist Peter Jarůšek, and pianist Boris Giltburg. Jarůšková and Jarůšek are members of the fine Pavel Haas Quartet, but the trio, as such, is quite new, and Giltburg, moreover, is better known for virtuoso repertory than for chamber music. One would never know it from the seamlessly executed conceptions and transitions, with Giltburg in no way spilling out of the texture. Another factor is the presence of the first two Dvořák trios, early but by no means immature works. Recordings of them are not common, but hear the absolutely characteristic opening of the Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 21, with its pentatonic melody; handled as sensitively as it is here by Jarůšková, the work is the equal of any of the later trios. Lastly, there is the fresh reading of the Piano Trio, Op. 90 ("Dumky"), one of Dvořák's most popular works. Several movements receive interesting interpretations. Consider the beginning, where the Lento maestoso designation is applied to the movement as a whole, with the opening chords kept consistent in tempo with what follows. This diverts the emotional center to the beautifully sad counterpoint between the cello and violin as the movement continues. The sound from the Wyastone Estate is warm but a bit close up, one of few complaints, and this is a major chamber music release that will yield a great deal of satisfying listening.© James Manheim /TiVo

Constantly shifting from the most impulsive exuberance to the most restrained meditation, from the most intense passion to the most innocent tenderness, this programme forms a representative panorama of Schumann’s chamber music. Going beyond the Piano Trios, which already give us a fully rounded account of Schumann, the Trio Wanderer have invited their favourite partners to join them for their interpretation of two supreme masterpieces, the Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet. © harmonia mundi