Beethoven: Complete Symphonies Staatskapelle Dresden & Herbert Blomstedt

The history of the musical partnership between Herbert Blomstedt and the Staatskapelle Dresden began over 50 years ago: in 1969 the conductor, who was born in the USA and grew up in Sweden, stood for the first time at the podium of the over 450-year-old Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden. To date, over 500 concerts have been added. It shows Blomstedt's great devotion and enthusiasm that he went behind the Iron Curtain in the middle of the Cold War and became chief conductor of the orchestra from 1975-1980. In addition to a Schubert cycle, he also recorded all the Beethoven symphonies for the GDR classical label ETERNA. As much as Blomstedt set great value upon the audio transparence of the orchestral fabric, he filled each of the nine Beethoven symphonies with life. After all, as he once described the main feature of these works, it is the music that wants to appeal to the listener. Hence, we are touched and swept along, flattered and captivated by Blomstedt and the Staatskapelle, with arcs of suspense and mood reaching from sublime to jagged, from grippingly impulsive to exquisitely beautiful and longingly cantabile. On the one hand, the musicians completely refrain from heavy romantic expressiveness in the process. On the other hand, the recordings lack that detached analytical "rationality" often found in radical readings and among the advocates of historical performance practice. For all his accuracy, Blomstedt's Beethoven always possesses human traits, ranging from sensitive to friendly. A perspective that is not at all surprising for such a conductor. Although he has been ranking among the world's first-class conductors since those Dresden years, he has preserved a warm-heartedness in his dealings with the orchestra setting him radically apart from many other colleagues behaving like despots. "To have governance over a hundred people, that was never my goal," was a phrase summing up his musical self-conception early on. The tapes on this recording, whose recording sheets in the booklet give an insight into the internal processes behind the scenes, have been remastered natively in analogue to carefully reproduce the original sound of the tapes.