Beethoven Symphonies HIP

[Expresso]

I've just noticed that i don't have any HIP Beethoven symphonies 
Which ones should i try? Harnoncourt, Zinman, Norrington or someone else?

I'm not interested solely on box sets, i might pick single CD's from many conductors.

[Valentino]

If you have an AV-setup, the film Eroica is a must. You get the symphony as a seperate performance, and it's  with ORR/Gardiner in a newer multi-ch. recording, not the one in their complete cycle on Archiv. The band is small, 5-4-3-2-2, if I remember correctly, and the reading is - dare I say badass?

[Harry]

I've just noticed that i don't have any HIP Beethoven symphonies 
Which ones should i try? Harnoncourt, Zinman, Norrington or someone else?

I'm not interested solely on box sets, i might pick single CD's from many conductors.

Zinman/Gardiner/Hogwood/Ter Linden/Norrington, all have their merits.

[Mark]

If you have an AV-setup, the film Eroica is a must. You get the symphony as a seperate performance, and it's  with ORR/Gardiner in a newer multi-ch. recording, not the one in their complete cycle on Archiv. The band is small, 5-4-3-2-2, if I remember correctly, and the reading is - dare I say badass?

If anyone's interested, I stripped the audio tracks from that DVD so it plays as four MP3 files. I could upload these at some point if requested to.

[Valentino]

What bitrate, Mark?

[Mark]

What bitrate, Mark?

I did them at 192kbps MP3, but I could always redo them at a higher bitrate. Though not today, as I'm off out shortly.

[Mark]

Valentino, try this: the first movement - http://rapidshare.com/files/40962942/01_Opus_Arte_Beethoven_Symphony_No_3.mp3.html

[Lethevich]

Compared to Haydn and Mozart (f.eg) there doesn't seem to be as many good choices for HIP Beethoven symphonies.

Norrington is nice, not consistent (I didn't enjoy his approach to 6 and 9) and sometimes a little odd, but engaging. M's thread reminded me, I must rebuy his cycle - one of the few things I regret giving away. IMO this is a good cycle to own as an alternative view, but not quite so much as a "middle ground" choice.

Gardiner seems more of a hybrid style, ditto Harnoncourt (as he often is), Goodman's apparently has poor recorded sound (a shame, as his Haydn is great). Hogwood is the one that seems to have most potential to me, but I am waiting for reviews to compare the incoming Immerseel cycle with it before I make a choice.

Edit: Although I may be impulsive and grab the Hogwood anyway if I run into more people advocating it. It seems that Hogwood can't do much wrong in anything, judging from critical and fan reception.

[Don]

I've just noticed that i don't have any HIP Beethoven symphonies 
Which ones should i try? Harnoncourt, Zinman, Norrington or someone else?

I'm not interested solely on box sets, i might pick single CD's from many conductors.

Keep in mind that Zinman does not use period instruments.

[Hector]

Keep in mind that Zinman does not use period instruments.

Nor does Harnoncourt but, strictly speaking, both are "Historically informed" although some would view this term as meaning "performed on period instruments."

Norrington, Gardiner and Bruggen have their moments and Hogwood turns in a magnificent 7th.

Norrington for the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th and 9th, perhaps.

[hornteacher]

There are good and bad points to all cycles but my personal favorites are:

For HIP on period instruments: Gardiner

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=2164


For HIP on modern instruments: Mackerras

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Drilldown?name_id1=858&name_role1=1&comp_id=3821&bcorder=15&name_id=56265&name_role=3

[Don]

There are good and bad points to all cycles but my personal favorites are:

For HIP on period instruments: Gardiner

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=2164


For HIP on modern instruments: Mackerras

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Drilldown?name_id1=858&name_role1=1&comp_id=3821&bcorder=15&name_id=56265&name_role=3

Those two are also my top choices.

[Mark]

Another yes from me on the Mackerras.

[SonicMan46]

There are good and bad points to all cycles but my personal favorites are:

For HIP on period instruments: Gardiner

For HIP on modern instruments: Mackerras

Those are the two sets that I own; also have Zinman (just a great bargin price!) - 

[SimonGodders]

Another yes from me on the Mackerras.

and available for under a tenner for the set from Amazon UK!

[M forever]

Mark, the Mackerras set isn't really "HIP". Not just because it isn't on period instruments. That's not even the most decisive factor.

But to understand what is "historically informed performance" and inform others about it, one must first be informed about "historically informed". Which is, of course, theoretically anyone who knows a little about the history of the music and its historical context. But that's obviously not what is meant here.

"Historically informed performance" isn't just about smallish orchestras, quickish tempi, oldish instruments, or hardish timpani sticks either. Nor is it about using less or no vibrato. It's much more complex than that. There is a lot of "historical uninformedness" about that complex subject.

Too complex to go into it here in detail. Mackerras is one of the best "historically informed" conductors out there, and he has delivered many highly "historically informed" performances, on old instruments as well as on modern ones.
But this set isn't one of them. One could maybe call it "historically aware". But it's basically more a "modern classicist" view that he takes here rather than a "HIP" one.
Why that is, I don't know. Maybe he decided he was tired of superficially "HIP" readings which grew on every corner back then and he wanted to present a more timeless view of the music from the point of view of someone who is aware of the wide spectrum of interpretive approaches but decided it was time for him to leave all that aside and take a look at the compositional substance alone. But again, I don't know what he had in mind. But that is what it sounds like. What it doesn't sound like at all is "HIP".

Nor is Zinman a "HIP" cycle. He takes a very smilar approach but makes it look more "HIP" by tacking on a few superficial "HIP" elements here and there. If one likes that or not, is up to each listener. But it's not "HIP".

Nor would I call Gardiner particularly "HIP". Yes, he plays on old instruments and he does all the other things which superficially look "HIP". He choses quickish tempi, and he has the hard timpani sticks and all that. But what is almost completely missing from his cycle is the rhythmic flexibility, the rhetorically inflected phrasing, and other stylistic elements which are far more important to being "HIP" than the hard sticks. Why that comes from a conductor who has given us superb "HIP" readings of a lot of things, his outstanding recordings of Mozart symphonies, for instance, I am not sure either. My feeling is that Gardiner was looking for a way to set himself apart from all the other "HIPsters" who had sprung up everywhere in the meantime, all those people who felt that a few sets of gut strings were all you need to be "HIP". I suspect he wanted to create a "perfectly balanced" and "centered" "HIPpish" view, a kind of idealized, summarized, "timeless HIP" view.
I think he totally failed. What we have here is an astonishingly mechanical, sterilized and glossy run-through of the 9. Accident free and uncontroversial. One may like that, but it's not a real "HIP" performance, that's for sure.

Being "historically informed" means being aware of the vast spectrum of interpretive means which may or may not have been applied to the music at the time. Since we don't have recordings, we can't really decide "exactly" how they played back then, and that probably changed a lot depending on the given circumstances anyway.

Being "historically informed" means knowing about all that and, based on that knowledge, making *interpretive decisions*, not avoiding them, like Mackerras, Gardiner, and Zinman mostly do.

There are tons of superficially "HIPpish" contributions, but only very few truly "HIP" ones from people who have the vast background knowledge and artistic courage to make such decisions.

Among them is the ever provocative and happily controversial Sir Roger Norrington. His first traversal of the symphonies with the London Classical Players is a real trip of discovery both into the sonic world of period instruments and an large scale stylistic experiment based on what he felt was the real point of Beethoven's symphonic writing. Namely not to create timelessly esthetic masterpieces as the centerpiece of a classical canon, but to create highly dramatic, stirring, operatic musical declamations of *ideas* which transcend purelu esthetic musical values.
That was indeed what a lot of Beethoven's contemporaries felt, too, and so did the following generations of composers who felt that Beethoven had made it clear once and for all that music should not just sound good, but have a deeper content and meaning. Beethoven's music created shockwaves in the musical world which were felt even a century later and propelled a lot of other composers to seek deeper meanings in music themselves.
Now, all that is taken as a given and the Beethoven symphonies have collected a lot of dust, sitting in their place of honor in the middle of the musical pantheon. Some interpreters wipe of a little of that dust sometimes, but few bother to try to bring them really back to life and relase shockwaves like they once did.
Sir Roger explicitly set out to recreate those seismic events and remind the listener of the immense power of the music. In order to do so, he made a lot of very controversial, but bols interpretive decisions rather than playing it safe. Some of those decisions may make sense, some may be over the top, some may just be wrong, that is for everyone to decide, but at least he went out there and took the trip.
Which is why this cycle is, with all its quirks and faults, and some obviously wrong decisions, one of the few truly "HIP" cycles and something everybody should encounter at one time.

Christopher Hogwood didn't go quite that far, but his approach with the Academy of Ancient Music is just as valuable for different reasons. Or maybe more value, that is hard to decide.
Hogwood attempted more than anyone else, including Norrington, to actually go back to the sonic and stylistic substance of the music not as it may have been conceived ideally in Beethoven's mind, but as it may have actually sounded.
He doesn't postulate as much as Norrington what the music *should* sound like, his approach is more that of a competently manned workshop trying to piece the music together from carefully researched and prepared elements to see what it actually *did* sound like. He doesn't assume what it should be like, he doesn't decide to present the music from one perspective or another, he just goes ahead and investigates as much as possible what it really could have sounded like. That includes playing the symphonies in the orchestrations that are known to have been used for the first performances. That means that some of them are performed by a rather small contingent of players, some of them by a very large ensemble with doubled winds and very big string sections.
As such, his cycle is less one man's vision of historical Beethoven performance than a compendium of what we really know about instruments, playing practices, and performance conditions of the time.

As such, as refreshing as a dose of Norrington's theatralics or Gardiner's distancedly idealized classicism may be once in a while, I think that Hogwood's is by very far the best and most valuable of all cycles played on period instruments.

Maybe only until Immerseel comes around, I don't know yet. But he might be highly interesting, too.


Forget The "Hannover Band" or whatever they called themselves. There were just too many people with old instruments on the loose in London and too many buyers for "authentic" recordings back then.

Forget Brüggen. Somebody should tell him that applying baroque performance practice to Beethoven symphonies only makes the whole "HIP" thing as ridiculous as some say it is. Here it is.

Don't worry about Abbado and Haitink or all the other people in this context who suddenly completely "rethought" their ideas of Beethoven under the impression of the "HIP" movement. Their results are highly enjoyable but not at all "HIP" either.


Probably the "HIPpest" of them all is Harnoncourt, not at all surprisingly. His performances of the symphonies with the COE on modern instruments (and some "HIP" timpani and brass) but with a vast palette of truly "authentic" stylistic elements are probably among the stylistically most complex and multi-layered readings of anything I have ever heard. It is not even possible to sum up just how complex his approach his and from how many angles he reaches his interpretation at the same time, almost like a 3D version of these symphonies where almost everything else only happens in one or two dimensions.
Harnoncourt's readings reflect literally a lifetime of intensive study and practical performance of centuries of musical heritage leading up to these symphonies. But at the same time, his awareness of both the "before" and the "after" and his seamless blending of "old" and "new" make these truly "modern" readings, taken from the point of view who really understands where that music came from and what life it has led since the composer created it.
I know a lot of people don't "get" that at all. I don't either. I get parts of it, more and more, but I know there are many elemens that I haven't fully understood yet. But that's OK. That's why we have that on disc and can return to it again and again, and figure out a little more each time.

Unless you just want nice music to doodle in the background. Then all the above doesn't matter.

[lukeottevanger]

Just want to register my appreciation for this mammoth post, M. A fantastic and fascinating read, thank you 

[M forever]

Have you actually read all that? 
Sorry about the length of the post. That subject gets on my nerves a little since it comes up all the time but most people don't even have the slightest freaking clue about what "HIP" actually is. So the short version of my post would have been "People, why do you keep talking about "HIP" when you obviously don't even have the slightest freaking clue about what "HIP" actually is?".

But that would not have been very constructive. I felt it was more constructive at least to try to sum up a few of these things.

[SonicMan46]

Just want to register my appreciation for this mammoth post, M. A fantastic and fascinating read, thank you 

Just finished M's detailed post - agree w/ Luke and thanks for the extensive & provocative comments - enjoyed - 

[rubio]

A very interesting read, M. I must say that I really enjoy Harnoncourt's Beethoven set.