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Beethoven — Symphony No. 7

Sony Classical, 2021 CD

Their recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 is the long-awaited sister-recording to Teodor Currentzis’ and musicAeterna’s Beethoven Symphony No. 5 album. Recorded at the Vienna Konzerthaus in August 2018, both albums are the Russia-based musicians’ seminal contribution to the composer’s 250th anniversary celebrations.

For Currentzis, the Seventh has ‘the greatest form ever achieved in a symphony’. He compares its structural perfection to that of the Athenian classic, the zenith of Classical architecture in which every proportion and every refinement of scale is placed in the service of a spiritual beauty honouring the city’s protector, the goddess Athena.

Stern Magazine

"Let's imagine we knew nothing of Beethoven… And now we put on this CD: the 7th Symphony, conducted by the wonderfully mad conductor Teodor Currentzis…We will think after only a few minutes: this music is the greatest thing in the world. We would never want to hear anything else."

Rob Cowan, Gramophone Magazine

“extremely singular view of the work”
“an absorbing listening experience”
“an authentically personal viewpoint”

Helmut Failloni, Corriera Della Sera

"He shows a telluric power in conducting and the music takes every drop of his sweat. It is through rigour, the ferocity of study, an exuberant talent and an uncommon sensitivity (sometimes misunderstood as vanity or presumption) that Currentzis arrives at the dream".

Julian Haylock, BBC Music Magazine

“Currentzis takes us to Seventh Heaven”
“This is where Teodor Currentzis really comes into his own, revealing a panoply of ear-tweaking figurations and colourations. This is especially crucial in the finale, whose manic repetitions can easily become monochromatically grinding and frenetic rather than subtly nuanced. At a moderate tempo, Currentzis presents a radical viewpoint, which is more ramped-up Haydn than Tchaikovsky in embryo.
Throughout, rather than adopting a headlong interpretative profile, Currentzis inflects Beethoven’s indelible invention with an at times startling range of articulation that bristles with spontaneous relish. Rather than cossetting us in a warm bath of reassuring musical semantics, Currentzis offers up a bracing tingling cold shower."

Other records

Verdi — La Traviata — Fragments. Part one

Sony Classical, 2021

Beethoven — Symphony No. 5

Sony Classical, 2020

Mahler — Symphony No. 6

Sony Classical, 2018

Tchaikovsky — Symphony No. 6 “Pathétique”

Sony Classical, 2017