This set of
Beethoven
's nine by conductor
Gabor Takacs-Nagy
took shape in an unusual way. There was no plan to record a set, but as his interpretations of the symphonies with the
Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra
began to accumulate, listeners realized that something special was happening, and live performances over 13 years were remastered into a whole. Mastering engineer
Ian Watson
deserves credit for shaping diverse sound environments into a coherent entity, and there is very little audience noise other than well-deserved applause and cheers at the end. The real news is not the sound but the performances, which are extraordinary.
Takacs-Nagy
was a violinist and frequent quartet player before he turned to conducting, and these are very much a chamber music player's interpretations, with any passage in which instruments answer each other given a crackling edge. He takes fast tempos in the outer movements, with which the 30 or so players of the
Verbier orchestra
keep up without fail; the slow movements are elegantly lyrical. Really, there are insights in nearly every movement -- the earlier symphonies respond wonderfully to the chamber treatment -- but sample the
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 ("Pastoral")
, whose programmatic elements are almost palpable. Certainly, there are some unorthodox things, one being the Mussorgskian bass of
Mikhail Petrenko
in the finale of the
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 ("Choral")
, but there is nothing that hasn't been carefully thought through. A marvelous set that seems likely to take its place among the greats. CD buyers and some online listeners get a discussion between
and
biographer
Jan Swafford
that offers additional insights into the music. ~ James Manheim