Simon Rattle’s first set of the Beethoven symphonies appeared from EMI (now Warner Classics) in 2003. Recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic and using Jonathan Del Mar’s then newly completed edition of the scores, it was a much-hyped release, which never quite lived up to all the fuss around it. The latest version, based on a cycle that Rattle conducted in the Berlin Philharmonie concert hall last October, comes in the usual lavish packaging from the Berlin Philharmonic’s own label, with the set of five audio CDs supplemented by a Blu-ray audio disc containing all the symphonies in uncompressed studio-quality sound, and two further video discs of the concerts from which they are taken.
It’s a curious collection of performances, though. From the start, it’s clear that this is going to be Beethoven viewed entirely from the perspective of 19th-century high Romanticism; even in the 1st Symphony, the world of Haydn has been left far behind. But the explosive climaxes, the sometimes vertiginous speeds – in the scherzo and finale of the 5th, and in the finale of the 7th, for example – seem to be relentlessly insistent and are at a cost to the music’s moments of wit.
Nothing in these performances can stand in the way of Beethoven’s symphonic revolution, it seems, and Rattle’s account of the Eroica is arguably the highpoint of the set, when his approach and the music’s intent converge most convincingly. Unexpectedly, though, the 9th is the biggest disappointment, curiously underpowered and rather routine, while the way in which Rattle, nowadays, tends to mould and overmanicure phrases means that even the Pastoral Symphony seems less spontaneous, and much more knowing than it might.
Technically, of course, the performances are immaculate. But for all the fine string playing, the sometimes outstanding solo contributions from the Berlin Philharmonic’s wind players and the sudden moments of vivid characterisation that Rattle undeniably comes up with, these performances don’t hang together as a set, as a coherent view of what Beethoven the symphonist was all about and of the musical journey charted by these works.
Among recent modern-instrument cycles, they don’t come close to matching those on Claudio Abbado’s 2008 set, also with the Berlin Phil, for poise and radiant transparency, or Riccardo Chailly’s from 2011 with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, for sheer energy and intensity. If Rattle’s earlier set was a work-in-progress, then this one seems curiously incomplete, too.
