Beethoven: The Symphonies Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		0.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		5.0

Beethoven: The Symphonies Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 2, 2016

When you hear one of Beethoven’s symphonies as frequently as even casual music lovers tend to do nowadays, it’s easy to relegate the music to “sonic wallpaper” status, not really paying attention and giving the experience a dismissive “sure, whatever” response. If there’s any conductor and orchestra that can wake the average listener up (so to speak), it has to be Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, here in a legendary series of recordings of the entire Beethoven symphonic cycle which were originally released stateside in 1963.

Probably because Beethoven symphonies are such a regular part of classical music programming (both in concerts and on the radio and/or streaming services), it’s hard to realize how revolutionary many of his works were when they were first premiered. I remember to this day one of my college theory professors trying to get us boneheaded students to “hear” how innovative Beethoven’s use of a “V7 of V7” to open his first symphony must have seemed to 19th century audiences, but alas for those of us raised in the wake of dodecaphony and modernism, it was probably a losing strategy. Revisiting these iconic works may not in fact be exactly “revelatory” in a conceptual sense, but the performances are visceral a lot of the time, and I’d personally argue that these versions are more consistently forceful than either of von Karajan’s subsequent recorded tours through the Beethoven cycle.

Beethoven: The Symphonies Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

There's no real "video" content here, other than a static menu which offers a picture of von Karajan wielding his baton, along with a "Start" button, under which is another title which states "Tracklist", and then the numbers of each track. Because I'm a little slow on the uptake at times, it took me a minute to realize that clicking on "Tracklist" brings up a superimposed submenu on the left side of the screen that details the actual individual symphonies' movements with their tempo assignations.

Beethoven: The Symphonies Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Beethoven: The Symphonies is (are?) presented on audio Blu-ray courtesy of Decca (by way of Deutsche Grammophon) with robust sounding LPCM 2.0 audio (96/24). Clarity is outstanding throughout all nine symphonies, and some moments like the oboe solos that are so evocative in the Fifth and Seventh symphonies, sound impeccably nuanced and colorful. There's just a very slight compressed sound to some of the tutti passages, especially in sforzandos where everyone is putting a lot of energy behind their playing, but I have to assume this is traceable to the source recording, and that the high resolution of this new version simply makes it more apparent (listen, for example, in the tutti passages of the second movement of the Seventh to hear this anomaly). Fidelity is superb and dynamic range enticingly wide. One of the "side benefits" of the storage space of a Blu-ray disc is that audiophiles get to have all nine symphonies on one disc. As someone who is old enough to remember the huge LP sets of yore (including the LP version of these recordings), and the only slightly less voluminous CD or SACD releases that came later, this is a wonderful example of the marvels of modern technology.

Beethoven: The Symphonies Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Three tracks are appended to this release which feature von Karajan rehearsing three movements of the Ninth with "the band". Unfortunately, you need to speak German to understand what he's saying (my rudimentary knowledge of the language was enough to get that he was discussing rhythms a lot of the time, and was polite enough to repeatedly say "please"). The disc is housed in a CD sized "digibook" which includes a nicely illustrated booklet with essays in several languages (including English).

Beethoven: The Symphonies Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Kudos to Universal Music Group for continuing to mine its impressive back catalog for audio Blu-ray releases. These performances were iconic in their day and have easily stood the test of time (and lots of subsequent versions by other legendary conductors, not to mention von Karajan himself). Nicely packaged and sounding fantastic, Beethoven: The Symphonies easily comes Highly recommended.