Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 1, 2 & 7 [2 CD]

Sony Classical will release the complete Beethoven Symphonies recorded by the Kammerakademie Potsdam (Potsdam Chamber Academy) and their principal conductor Antonello Manacorda. The cycle will be released in three stages over the next two years, launching with the first instalment with the First, Second and Seventh Symphonies on October 7, 2022. Symphonies 5 & 6 will follow later in 2023, with the complete boxset out Fall 2024. Beethoven has long played a central role in the concerts of the Kammerakademie Potsdam and yet until now he has been missing from the ensemble’s discography. But when the players performed all nine symphonies over a single weekend in 2014, they were already clear in their own minds that they would record them all one day: “The intensity of the preparations needed to perform this vast corpus of works within a relatively short space of time meant that this was a hugely important experience for us all,” Manacorda recalls. The recent pandemic provided players and conductor with an opportunity to make this wish come true. Manacorda explains the chamber orchestra’s unique sound “We perform on modern instruments. We use modern woodwinds but natural horns and trumpets and smaller, narrower-bore trombones. So it’s a combination of the old and the new. This allows us to perform works for larger resources without needing forty strings since it’s much easier in this way to create the right balance and achieve the correct degree of clarity.”