Beethoven • Cherubini • Méhul Beethoven: Symphonies Nos 4 & 8; Cherubini: Lodoïska Overture; Méhul: Symphony No. 1 Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/Bernhard Forck Harmonia Mundi HMM902448.49 88:34 mins (2 discs)
The idea behind this programme is to interleave two symphonies by Beethoven with two other works by Paris-based composers, each work widely supposed to have been influenced by him, but in fact was not. Cherubini’s overture to his opera Lodoïska is a quite powerful pre-Romantic creation written in 1791 – the year that the young Beethoven settled in Vienna, having not yet found his true creative voice. The finale of Étienne Méhul’s Symphony No. 1 in G minor opens with a phrase seemingly alluding to a similar one in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth; yet both works were premiered at almost the same time in the composers’ respective cities, so neither can have influenced the other. Méhul’s intermittently attractive symphony in fact sounds like a more prolix response to Haydn’s minor-key manner rather than relating to Beethoven, but there is a genuine turbulence to its opening and closing movements that impresses.
All four works are given lithe and energetic accounts, excellently precise even at the generally speedy choice of tempos, and amount to a high-quality shop window for the current state of period-instrument performance. There are moments where an eyebrow can be raised, as in the main theme of the Adagio slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth: whether or not portamento would have been deployed in the composer’s day, its use here feels contrived. And in an otherwise likeable performance of the Eighth, the first movement is whizzed through in a way that’s close to perfunctory.
Malcolm Hayes