Beethoven Symphonies Complete by Michael Gielen

Michael Gielen has spent most of his long career being underestimated. The new-music world claimed him as one of its own — he played Schoenberg’s complete piano music as a pianist, conducted the premieres of works by Stockhausen, Henze, Ligeti, Pousseur, and Zimmermann, championed the difficult and the demanding with a tenacity that sometimes made audiences feel vaguely guilty for enjoying themselves. Then came his Mahler cycle, and suddenly people were paying attention in a different way. Now this: a complete Beethoven set that arrived without fanfare and deserves a great deal more.

It is not a flashy set. Gielen doesn’t traffic in flash.

What he offers instead is something rarer and, I’d argue, more valuable — the sense that a conductor of formidable intelligence has returned to these nine scores not to confirm what he already knows about them but to find out what he might have missed. That sounds like a commonplace; with Gielen it is a literal description of what happens. The internal balances are revelatory throughout. In the first movement of the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major — the Eroica — the inner voices emerge with a clarity that makes you realize how much muddy urgency most conductors have been selling us. The counterpoint breathes. The dissonance in the development section, that savage E-flat minor eruption, arrives not as a shock effect but as something structurally inevitable, which is of course what Beethoven intended and what so few conductors actually convey.

Tempos are swift but not provocatively so. This is not Norrington playing parlor games with metronome markings. Gielen moves because the music moves — because he understands that Beethoven’s rhythmic energy is not a property of speed alone but of weight, articulation, and the relationship between strong and weak beats. The Allegretto of the Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92, for instance — a movement that conductors from Furtwängler to Bernstein have occasionally turned into a funeral procession — here has genuine forward momentum without losing the tragic undertow. You feel the tread of it. The SWR orchestra’s strings keep the pulse absolutely steady underneath the woodwind lines, and the woodwind principals — especially in the Sixth Symphony in F major and the Second in D major — phrase with an improvisatory freedom that sounds completely natural and is obviously the product of careful thought.

The trumpets and timpani deserve their own sentence. They are vivid, present, physical — you feel the downbeat of the Symphony No. 5 in C minor in your sternum — but Gielen never lets them overwhelm the texture. Balance of this kind is a conducting skill that gets discussed less than it should, perhaps because when it works you don’t notice it consciously. Here you notice its absence everywhere else.

Repeats are observed generously, and rightly so. There is an old critical argument — not entirely wrong — that Beethoven’s exposition repeats are the composer’s way of insisting that you actually hear what he has done before he starts doing things to it. Gielen takes that argument seriously.

These are video recordings, made with the SWR orchestras over a period of several years and previously available in other formats. The audio is serviceable, detailed enough for the musical argument to register, though not in the same league as the finest studio Beethoven sets — Carlos Kleiber’s Fifth and Seventh remain sonic as well as interpretive benchmarks, and Harnoncourt’s period-influenced cycle with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe has a transparency Gielen’s recordings can’t quite match. But neither Kleiber nor Harnoncourt gave us all nine. Cycles are a different enterprise, requiring a different kind of stamina and a different kind of vision.

The video direction is another matter. Gielen’s conducting mastery is economical, inward-facing, clearly directed at the orchestra rather than the hall. There is nothing wrong with that — it is how many great conductors work. But whoever was calling the camera shots seems to have been watching a different concert. At the opening of the Fifth and the Ninth in D minor, op. 125 — two of the most recognizable moments in Western music — the cameras are trained on a narrow, not particularly illuminating slice of the orchestra, missing the director entirely. You want to see Gielen’s face at those moments. You want to know what he looks like when he gives that opening. Instead: woodwind players, partially obscured.

Never mind. Close your eyes.

What Gielen achieves across these nine symphonies is a coherence of vision that never becomes a straitjacket — the Eighth in F major, op. 93, gets its wit intact, the Ninth’s choral finale its cumulative weight. Renate Behle, Yvonne Naef, and Glenn Winslade handle their solo assignments with professionalism if not always distinction, and the chorus is committed. But it is the orchestral playing and the quality of the conductor’s thought that will bring you back to this set. Gielen knows every note of these scores. He also, somehow, keeps finding more in them. That is the gift — and it is not a common one.