Carmina Burana and Beethoven's 9th Symphony under Seiji Ozawa are different again. The recordings derive from two separate occasions. Orff's extravaganza features the youthful Ozawa with soloists Kathleen Battle, Frank Lopardo and Thomas Allen, plus the Shin-Yu Kai chorus from Japan. It's astonishing by virtue of the music's evergreen vitality and strangeness, something that comes over very well here. Ozawa gets visibly carried away by the music's rhythmic vigor, portraying pagan sensuality in the midst of medievan catholic Europe.
The Beethoven symphony, by contrast, was filmed just a couple of years ago with the by now gray-haired Ozawa conducting the Saito Kinen Orchestra and the Tokyo Opera Singers, plus four excellent soloists. The result is spectacular, most moving, and in every way a delight. It would be difficult to find a more wonderful version of Beethoven's Choral Symphony on DVD than this, and it's strong testimony to the belief that the future of classical music lies here in East Asia.
Stephen Kovacevich's CD of Beethoven's first three piano sonatas is so delightful I must have listened to it 10 times, perhaps more, over the last two months. These are youthful works very much in the spirit of Mozart, but whereas Mozart wrote his piano sonatas simply as exercises for his and other students, Beethoven -- who was destined to take the form to unprecedented heights of Romantic expressiveness -- elevated even this Mozartean vein to new levels of joyous playfulness. Later, performers tended to imbue them with the solemnity they associated with the composer's later style, but not so Kovacevich who plays them with an irresistible lightness and zest. This CD really is astonishingly fine, and it's impossible to recommend it too highly.
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