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Hey, Zarlino - I finally heard Honeck's Beethoven Ninth

You were right! Pretty ghastly!

Those girlie-man dynamic taperings he keeps imposing (especially in the first movement) add an air of unwelcome effeminacy to the music - Beethoven is no longer shaking his fist at the gods, rather, he's gotten into finger painting! ;-)

And the tempos are just faster enough than usual that you sense the discomfort of the players in maintaining them. Every so often, they'll lapse back into a very slightly slower tempo, only to be gear-shifted back to the faster tempo with the start of a new phrase - to me, the Pittsburgh players don't sound convinced by Honeck's tempos at all.

And Honeck's emphasis and accents on the larger, pounding beats in the last movement loses the detail of the rhythmic subdivisions to be heard in just about any other performance of this work I know of. Occasionally, unnatural details get nervously pushed to the fore, and some sections are so fast and bound to the large beats that they sound not like Beethoven's Ninth, but like the Nazi Blitzkrieg into France. Ugh!

I heard this recording via stereo 24/192 streaming on Qobuz, and it sounded to me like Soundmirror had really lost the focus, with the strings often overwhelmed by the rest of the orchestra, and the tympani thwacked out with hard sticks (which I don't necessarily mind) but with enough of an undamped ringing to interfere with the subsequent notes in other instruments every now and then. In short, NOT a good sound. Maybe it sounds better in its original MCh DSD256 guise.

Honeck has definitely gone off on the deep end with this recording - I didn't read his booklet notes however. Maybe he's got elaborate justifications for all this crap. When you hear something as bad as this Beethoven Ninth, it can make you go back and reconsider your previous, favorable estimations of the conductor's work.


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Topic - Hey, Zarlino - I finally heard Honeck's Beethoven Ninth - Chris from Lafayette 17:55:23 05/03/21 (37)

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