Nearly twenty years after their acclaimed Beethoven Symphonies recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique returned to this repertoire for the first time last year, in a tour that took them to London, Philadelphia, Washington and New York. The concert in Carnegie Hall was broadcast live by WQXR, who kindly agreed to make the recording available to us to release on our label. Performing on period instruments, the ORR brings light, clarity and brisk energy, as well as a warm and genuinely thrilling sound. The Seventh, famously described by Wagner as the apotheosis of the dance, stands out by its sheer physical energy expressed in its many obsessively repetitive passages. The Fifth, often considered to be a deeply personal piece, also reveals echoes of revolutionary songs. The album is packaged in a digipack and contains a 36 pages booklet with original notes by BBC presenter and music journalist Stephen Johnson.
