Beethoven: Overtures & incidental music (with works by Haydn & Brahms)

A newly remastered collection of Decca and Philips recordings made by the under-rated Dutch conductor in Austro-German classics including a little-known account of Beethoven's Prometheus Overture.

The ballet music which Beethoven wrote to complement his overture was as little-heard in 1952 as it is now. Eduard van Beinum recorded eight numbers from the complete score, evidently enjoying the lighter side of the composer, as part of a growing and successful relationship with the London Philharmonic Orchestra now documented on Eloquence and complementing the work he did with his band 'at home', the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.

As Niek Nelissen's documentary essay details in the booklet, the LPO musicians were as keenly appreciative of Van Beinum's unfussily musical good sense as many listeners at home; they noted how he achieved orchestral discipline without resorting to the tactics of contemporary tyrants of the podium and encouraged a natural fluency of phrasing. Under him the overtures Egmont, Coriolan, Consecration of the House, Prometheus, Fidelio and Leonore III do not sound like some lesser form of symphonic music, but the exciting curtain-raisers Beethoven intended them to be and which put the listener in the mood for a dramatic story. These 1949-52 recordings are complemented by a previous Prometheus Overture set down in Kingsway Hall in November 1946, in the same sessions as an 'alert and biting statement' (High Fidelity, November 1952) of the 'Military' Symphony by Haydn.

This collection ends with the work that Van Beinum put on record more often than any other composition: the Haydn Variations of Brahms. This is the third of his four studio recordings, made with the Concertgebouw in 1952.