Given that Renaissance and Baroque specialist Jordi Savall is not necessarily the conductor to whom one would first turn for Beethoven, he is nevertheless a great musician whose opinion is worth listening to in any repertory. As one might expect, he has some unorthodox opinions in this survey of Beethoven's first five symphonies (a complete set was planned but was at least temporarily cut short by the 2020 pandemic). Savall augments the 35 players of his Le Concert des Nations orchestra with 25 other young players for a ...
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Given that Renaissance and Baroque specialist Jordi Savall is not necessarily the conductor to whom one would first turn for Beethoven, he is nevertheless a great musician whose opinion is worth listening to in any repertory. As one might expect, he has some unorthodox opinions in this survey of Beethoven's first five symphonies (a complete set was planned but was at least temporarily cut short by the 2020 pandemic). Savall augments the 35 players of his Le Concert des Nations orchestra with 25 other young players for a total of 60, historically in line with what Beethoven would have expected. His tempos are blistering, based on the metronome markings from later in Beethoven's career. Beethoven, however, did not own a metronome when he wrote most of these works; Savall is extrapolating from the later ones. Also, Beethoven's metronome was a first-generation machine, and if one is to cite scholarly studies, as Savall does in his notes here, it is also necessary to cite the ones that have concluded that...
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