Giovanni Antonini and Anima Eterna deliver Beethoven back to the future

A bracing, bold performance of Beethoven's Second Symphony highlighted the unmasked period instrument orchestra Anima Eterna Brugge's concert and recalled its founder Jos van Immerseel's remark that Beethoven’s music sounds less modern on the instruments of our time than it does on those of the early 19th century. As they (theoretically) should with such orchestras, the freedoms for ensemble were mostly controlled by the conductor Giovanni Antonini who emphasized long arcs of sound and phrasing while the players supplied the color, timbre, nuance and superb intonation.

The impressively large string section – 6-6-5-4-3 with the violins divided left and right, and the cellists on risers playing without endpins – provided a strong pulse and an inner engine with impressive surges in the cellos and bass and sudden accents in the violas which drove the music heroically and yet was plastic enough to be expressive as the music demanded in its sweeter sections. The performance was particularly authentic to Immerseel's philosophy so that, for example, the big challenge Beethoven throws to the strings in the fast passages were met not effortlessly as bland, modern instrument orchestras do but with risk-taking, death-defying brilliance. The woodwinds were exquisite and the French horns bold and noble, resisting the temptation to sound like "original instruments" by occasionally cracking forte notes, and there was no holding back the percussionist and his small wooden mallets.

Antonini took the Larghetto at a good graceful clip, as if he were following the Larghetto quasi andante marking in the composer's arrangement for piano trio; in so doing its tick-tocking unexpectedly revealed a kinship to the Maezel metronome movement in the Eighth Symphony. In the finale the carefree way the musicians played recalled concertante concertos of the composer's galante youth although the movement throughout could have used more of the power Anima Eterna Brugge and a different timpanist unleashed at the end. Antonini told me a few years ago that Beethoven "must be played with the fullness of emotional and intellectual range that actors invest in Shakespeare," and so it was.

The concert began with Rossini's Overture to L’italiana in Algeri which was "roguish", as Immerseel wrote in his program note, not least because in the original version which they played there was "a remarkable find", a bassoon and piccolo playing the same melody three octaves apart. After the Beethoven, Schubert's Fourth Symphony was impressively gorgeous, melodramatic and charming but nothing so revolutionary.

The audiophile recording revealed the differences between modern orchestral sound and what it could have been like in the early 19th century; the substantial weight in the low bass could be felt cumulatively throughout and in the Rossini particularly, the intimate phasing of the woodwind solos gave a sense of dialogue as real as if the characters were on stage themselves.

This performance was reviewed from the Evil Penguin TV video stream