Over the past year, Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic have given festival treatment to the symphony cycles of Schumann, Brahms and Sibelius. Rather than simply weaving the symphonies into a year’s worth of traditional concert programmes, they have performed the cycles in a single block, usually over the course of only a few days; and if the individual evenings have lacked the satisfying balance of a well-chosen programme, the chance to focus on the oeuvre of a particular composer has proven popular with audiences in Berlin and elsewhere, and has fuelled the release schedule of the orchestra’s recently-launched in-house record label.
It was only a matter of time before the orchestra turned their attention to the symphonies of Beethoven. Yet if one were compiling a list of living conductors with an affinity for that greatest of…
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