No matter how weak the material -- and even Beethoven, for all that he was as the greatest composer who ever lived, had some incredibly weak material -- almost every volume in Deutsche Grammophon's 1997 Beethoven edition was incredibly well performed. Even something as trivial as a his Graduations Minuet from 1826 sounds magnificent when performed by Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. But what to do with the volume of songs? Some of Beethoven's songs are among his weakest material, his most sentimental, his most ...
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No matter how weak the material -- and even Beethoven, for all that he was as the greatest composer who ever lived, had some incredibly weak material -- almost every volume in Deutsche Grammophon's 1997 Beethoven edition was incredibly well performed. Even something as trivial as a his Graduations Minuet from 1826 sounds magnificent when performed by Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. But what to do with the volume of songs? Some of Beethoven's songs are among his weakest material, his most sentimental, his most saccharine, his most -- heaven help him -- conventional? And what do you do with the performances by soprano Adele Stolte in this volume? She gets the weakest material and sings it in a tiny voice with a tinier vibrato. She makes the good material sound bad and the bad material sound even worse. Her Sehnsucht (WoO 134) is just this side of unlistenable. And what to do with the performances by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and tenor Peter Schreier. The former's recordings of Beethoven's...
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