Beethoven had clearly every intention of making the toffs sweat and skip a good deal when he wrote his 12 Contredanses for the 1800–01 Vienna season, at least, so Tilson Thomas seems to suggest in a wonderfully vibrant account of the dances which brings out in full measure the rhythmic verve and off-beat humour of these fleeting miniatures. The seventh dance provided material for the Prometheus Ballet Music and, by devolution, the finale of the Eroica Symphony; which is why as an appendange to the Eroica the fill-up, though irreverant, is by no means wholly irrelevant.
The style of the Contredanses happily invades the St Luke's playing in the Scherzo and finale of the Eroica. It is all delightfully spirited, that is until we reach the oboe-led Poco Andante where Tilson Thomas slows down to a tempo that is Furtwangler-like in its summoning up of the reverential mood. This has always been one of the problems with Tilson Thomas's cycle. Though played on a chamber-music scale, there is little evidence that much else is being thought through in a new way. Though tempos are often on the brisk side the use of modern instruments carries with it modern or obviously post-Beethovenian practices. Violins are not divided left and right, texts retain nineteenth-century accretions.
In fact, it is best to treat the performance as though it was a slimmed down Cleveland or New York ensemble. That way, we can relish the general vitality of the reading and, in the Funeral March, a blend of clarity and espressivo intensity that reveals Tilson Thomas's kinship with the American, as opposed to Europeanized, Bernstein. That said, the first movement of the Eroica has here scale (the exposition repeat is taken) and energy, though not much anger, pain, or anguish. The oboe phrases after the development's central climax, ''a song of pain after the holocaust'' as Bernstein once graphically put it, go here for very little.
The recordings, made in 1986 in the Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University, are first rate.'