Beethoven: The Complete Symphonies. This is a Box Set of all 9 Beethoven symphonies played by the Wiener Philharmoniker as conducted by Christian Thielemann. There are also documentaries for each symphony. These titles were released earlier as follows:
1. Beethoven Symphonies 1-3 (Grade: B-)
2. Beethoven Symphonies 4-6 (Grade: C)
3. Beethoven Symphonies 7-9 (Grade: B-)
All discs have 5.0 dts-HD Master Audio for the music, and 2.0 stereo sound for the documentaries.
If you are new to the Beethoven symphonies, this set could be a good choice. In the April 2020 issue of Gramophone, Symphony 9 from the set is called one of the best recordings ever made of that work.
This set is probably competitive with anything else that came before in CD. It would also be a bit better than the cheaper DVD version because the Blu-ray disc has nicer video resolution and maybe better sound.
But all of this is not good enough for us on this website. We want our symphony HDVD recordings to be made especially to take full advantage of HD video. So if you already have good recordings of the Beethoven symphonies in your library, why bother to buy this product that was, on the day it was released, obsolete and inferior to what it could have and should have been? Soon classical music lovers will be buying more Blu-rays (and Ultra Blu-rays) than DVDs. Then the industry will give us some Beethoven symphony HDVDs that we can be proud of.
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