London Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips – Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 “Pastoral” (2013) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

London Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips – Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 “Pastoral” (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 40:50 minutes | 1,38 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Everest

This beautiful “nature” symphony receives an exquisite performance at the hands of a noted Beethoven interpreter. The composer’s sounds of nature are reproduced with like naturalness in Everest’s incomparable recording.
Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony lives up to its name in more ways than one. To begin with, it is the most relaxed of his nine symphonies. Sir Donald Francis Tovey has written of it that it “has the enormous strength of someone who knows how to relax.” Composed in 1808, hard upon the heels of the stormy, dramatic Fifth Symphony, it came as a sort of feminine companion to its definitely masculine predecessor.
It is not at all surprising that Beethoven should have written a work like the Pastoral. Throughout his life, his favorite pastime was taking long, solitary walks in the countryside, mostly in the vicinity of Vienna. It was during these quiet hours that he could commune with Nature, unhampered by his ever-increasing deafness. And it was these nature walks that inspired so much of his writing. Perhaps the most directly traceable manifestation of Nature’s influence upon the composer is the Sixth Symphony, with its imitations of the smooth-flowing brook, the bird-calls, the rustic peasant dances, the thunderstorm and the shepherd’s song.

Josef Krips’ cycle of Ludwig van Beethoven’s nine symphonies was recorded in 1960, originally on 35mm film for the Everest label, but this deluxe audiophile treatment was hardly apparent in several inferior-sounding reissues over the years. However, this situation has been rectified by Madacy, who reissued the Everest recordings in a fresh remastering from the original tapes. This recording is reasonably faithful to the professional but not fully polished sound of the London Symphony Orchestra, presenting the way it sounded before its rise to world-class status; the orchestra is quite smooth in a fairly reverberant acoustic that provides a pleasant aural effect. Krips may be grouped among conductors of the conventional approach to performing Beethoven that was prevalent in the mid-20th century, for his performances reflect a preference for a full-size orchestral scale, modern instruments, and homogenization of timbres. Interestingly, Krips’ tempos tend toward the fast side, which early music orchestras would later adopt as the norm for period practice, especially in Beethoven. These recordings of the symphonies are solidly played and consistently clear in reproduction, and first-time listeners seeking a bargain could hardly do better than to try this set. –Blair Sanderson

Tracklist:

01. London Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips – Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 “Pastoral”: I. Allegro ma non troppo (10:15)
02. London Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips – Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 “Pastoral”: II. Andante molto mosso (12:07)
03. London Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips – Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 “Pastoral”: III. Allegro (05:52)
04. London Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips – Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 “Pastoral”: IV. Allegro (03:25)
05. London Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips – Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 “Pastoral”: V. Allegretto (09:10)

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