Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra ride America’s classical charts with Beethoven For All

Decca Records has released a box set of the com­plete Beeth­oven sym­phon­ies which marks the begin­ning of the Beeth­oven Pro­ject, an unpre­ced­en­ted series of Beeth­oven record­ings: all of the composer’s com­plete sym­phon­ies, piano con­cer­tos and piano son­atas, with Daniel Bar­en­boim at the helm.

Bar­en­boim says of the project,

I think the Beeth­oven sym­phon­ies with the Divan orches­tra is dif­fer­ent in the sense that there is a ter­rific amount of energy because of the youth of the people – but there is just as much rigour. The com­bin­a­tion of rigour with youth­ful energy is very strong.

The orches­tra is named after Goethe’s col­lec­tion of poems entitled West-Eastern Divan, a cent­ral work for the evol­u­tion of the concept of world cul­ture, and born out of a series of work­shops that Bar­en­boim held from 1999. This involved the col­lab­or­a­tion of young musi­cians from Israel, Palestine and vari­ous Arab coun­tries of the Middle East “seek­ing to enable inter­cul­tural dia­logue and to pro­mote the exper­i­ence of col­lab­or­at­ing on a mat­ter of com­mon interest”.

Beeth­oven For All – Sym­phon­ies 1–9 (avail­able for high-quality down­load at HD Tracks) is the first instal­ment in this highly anti­cip­ated series. Recor­ded in August 2011 in Cologne, the per­form­ances are truly remark­able com­ple­men­ted by the extraordin­ary sound qual­ity. A tech­nic­ally flaw­less read­ing of these beloved symphonies.

Nielsen Sound­scan — the offi­cial method of track­ing sales of music and music video through­out the United States and Canada — has Beeth­oven For All at the n°1 clas­sical spot, and it has even sneaked in to the Bill­board Top 200 chart.

Share