With his decades-long immersion in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his prodigious catalog of Bach recordings for BIS, Masaaki Suzuki might seem an unlikely interpreter of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, "Choral." Yet Suzuki previously proved his expertise in Beethoven with his superb 2018 recording of the Missa Solemnis and garnered praise for its clarity of textures, brisk tempos, and meticulous orchestral playing. True to form, Suzuki delivers Beethoven's final symphony with expected precision and ...
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With his decades-long immersion in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his prodigious catalog of Bach recordings for BIS, Masaaki Suzuki might seem an unlikely interpreter of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, "Choral." Yet Suzuki previously proved his expertise in Beethoven with his superb 2018 recording of the Missa Solemnis and garnered praise for its clarity of textures, brisk tempos, and meticulous orchestral playing. True to form, Suzuki delivers Beethoven's final symphony with expected precision and transparency and brings the work's cosmic grandeur into more human focus with the lean early-Romantic orchestra and the comparatively small but agile chorus of Bach Collegium Japan. Considering the majority of performances of the Ninth that employ a full-scale modern orchestra and a massive aggregation of singers, Suzuki's reduced forces still produce a robust sound that at the same time is crisply accented, detailed, and free of the heavy doublings and reorchestrations that pass...
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