Beethoven [Symphony] Symphonies—No. 7 in A, Op. 92 a ; No. 8 in F, Op. 93 b. Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century / Frans Bruggen.

Philips (Full price) (CD) 426 846-2PH (63 minutes: DDD). Recorded at performances in Vredenburg, Utrecht in a November 1988 and b November 1989 and in association with the TRN Group.

Selected comparison—coupled as above:

AAM, Hogwood (2/90) 425 695-2OH

Symphony No. 7—selected comparisons:

VPO, C. Kleiber (2/86) 415 862-2GH

LCP, Norrington (11/89) CDS7 49852-2

Symphony No. 8—selected comparison:

LCP, Norrington (3/87) CDC7 47698-2

The close but contrasted relationship between these two symphonies makes it a most desirable coupling; yet as one surveys the currently available CD versions of the coupling—and they in- clude Mengelberg, Furtwangler, Walter, Giulini, Abbado, Morris and Solti—it is clear just how difficult it is to bring off. Toscanini could do it, and Karajan, but RCA's Toscanini Collection couples the symphonies differently, and Karajan's celebrated 1962 recordings of the two symphonies are currently available only as part of a five-CD set (DG (CD) 429 036-2GX5, 1/90). In fact, Hogwood's big-band period instrument performances (L'Oiseau-Lyre) are as impressive as any you can currently buy: strongly-driven, tumultuous performances that portray Beethoven, warts and all, as the shock-haired revolutionary.

Bruggen also gives us radical readings; fiery and inspired, with a degree of individuality in the musicianship—in the phrasing, in the pacing, in orchestral balances—that we don't get from Hogwood or the rather more single-minded Norrington, whose EMI recordings of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies are also highly successful, but coupled separately. It's Bruggen's individuality which gives an outwardly impeccable account of the Eighth Symphony's Allegretto scherzando a slightly raffish air, an almost Hogarthian quality. Indeed, throughout this record there are a lot of surprises, suggesting an interpreter who, like the poet Cavafy, wears his hat at a slight angle to the universe. And, as I say, the performances can be electrifying. I don't think I have ever thought of the development section of the first movement of the Eighth Symphony, radical as it is, as having an Eroica-like capacity to disturb. Well, it certainly does here. Indeed, at this point the performance triggers a litmus-test response first proposed in the pages of the old Record Guide (Collins: 1955) with regard to Toscanini's 1952 NBC recording of the Ninth Symphony: "At the climax of the first movement... the listener has a strange sensation of being at the heart of a whirlwind: he feels impelled to leave his chair and pace the room".

Much of Bruggen's disc, then, is exciting and thought-provoking. Yet in one important respect it seems to be badly flawed. In a sentence: the forces used are dangerously small. It is not simply that Bruggen uses fewer than 50 players, as opposed to Hogwood who uses getting on for 100 (and that without infringing any important historical precedent); it is simply that Bruggen's forces seem so badly balanced, with an almost skeletal string band yielding time and again to the more penetrating brass and wind forces. It is this, of course, which helps give the performances their explosive force: the Seventh Symphony re-invented as an early nineteenth-century Rite of Spring. But often the music is travestied. The critical string exchanges in the coda of the finale of the Seventh Symphony go for next to nothing and after that the Eighth Symphony starts with the violins apparently silent. They are meant to play an octave C right at the start but we don't hear a peep out of them until the top C on the final beat of the first bar. When I recently heard Bruggen with a similarly sized band (the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) playing the Seventh in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, I put the inaudibility of the strings down to the fact that I was obliged to sit behind the orchestra. But on the evidence of this live Utrecht recording—quite closely balanced, with a vivid though nicely reverberant sound—the problem seems one of orchestral forces, not location within the hall. There is also something odd about the playing of Bruggen's string band. The slow movement of the Seventh Symphony is the one movement on the disc that palpably doesn't work. The playing seems slack-muscled and dynamically insensitive. This astonishing music, deeply fraught and shot through with tragic pathos, seems to be rather casually strummed into life.

Alongside Carlos Kleiber's Vienna Philharmonic (DG) the under-strength Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, some expert wind players notwithstanding, seem to be relative beginners in this music. Nor is the Bruggen performance notably more 'authentic' over matters of detailing. Kleiber splits his fiddles left and right (vital in parts of the Seventh Symphony, in particular the aforementioned coda of the finale), and he observes both the big outer movement exposition repeats. True, the VPO is not equipped with instruments of the period but with a conductor with Kleiber's ears at the helm this is not that much of a problem. What is important is that the VPO playing is full-bodied, well-balanced, virtuosic, articulate; and that it speaks for all of Beethoven's score and not just some tempting bits of it.
RO