Thanks for the lead on the Jordi Savall Beethoven. We have seen Savall every year for almost a decade (except for this past year during Covid). He comes to Cal Performances in Berkeley every year, usually with a different set of musicians and their original instruments, different groups that he has formed over the years. They have ranged from one other person playing a special baroque or earlier drum, to a large ensemble of original instruments and singers. He is a real musicologist, finding great music from obscure (to me at least) composers, usually from the 17th and earlier centuries. His most recent performance was the Monteverdi Vespers which combines a pretty large (for Savall) instrumental ensemble with singers. I have several of his Alia Vox recordings (on SACD including multichannel hybrid). So Beethoven and even Mozart is very intriguing.
One of our friends got to know him and his wife Monserrat Figueras, a wonderful soprano who performed with him. She died in 2011 and he went into a deep depression. He recovered and we began to see him shortly after that.
Concerning the Beethoven symphonies, when our daughter was in our local youth orchestra in the early '90's (and I played in it with one other parent - last stand of the violas), we had a new, young conductor. Among the pieces we played was the Beethoven Pastorale symphony. The tempi were much faster than my audiophile standard (the Bruno Walter Columbia Symphony recording on the TAS Super Disc list). I asked the conductor, who was just out of conservatory training about the tempi and recommendations for recordings - he told me he was using the metronome markings on the score and to get the Roger Norrington recording, which had come out only a couple of years earlier. I think this was the first of the HIP recordings of Beethoven. It was quite amazing, having middle school and high school students playing Beethoven at the original tempo. They didn't know they couldn't do it. We also played the Stravinsky Firebird Suite, Tchaikovsky's 3rd Symphony, Rossini's William Tell Overture (where I learned to play spiccato bow!) and many other pieces.
Larry
