Turning his back on the long tradition of weighty, large-orchestra Eroicas and on the Wagner-Bulow-Strauss school of interpretation, Hogwood here presents the work in a trenchant, straightforward reading with a 44 - piece orchestra of period instruments. (That was roughly the number common in Vienna at the time of its creation, and was suitable for the astonishingly small dimensions—54' X 24'—of Prince Lobkowitz's music-room where its early performances were given.) But though disregarding the ''accumulation of irrelevant nonsense based on misguided attempts to relate it to its title and superscriptions, cancelled and retained?—Basil Lam's resounding words, not mine—a plea is entered for 'authentic listening' as well as authentic performance: the Viennese audiences would have known the theme of the finale from Beethoven's very successful ''heroic-allegorical'' ballet The Creatures of Prometheus of a couple of years earlier (and from its use in his Contretanze), and the argument is advanced that alert listeners would have seen the filling-out of the bare bass line and the gradual application of musical artifice (variation, fugue, development) as closely reflecting the plot of the ballet, where after stealing fire from heaven Prometheus breathes life into two statues and with Apollo's help initiates them into the mysteries of the arts and the emotions.
The fact that this performance is directed from a (virtually inaudible) fortepiano results in an absence of the rubatos and idiosyncratic 'interpretations' which many conductors have felt it incumbent upon them to provide; but in no way does it imply the ''machine-like rigidity'' of which RF complained in Hogwood's recording of Beethoven's first two symphonies (L'Oiseau-Lyre 414 338-1OH; CD 414 338-2OH, 3/86) or any absence of nuance—indeed, observance of all dynamics, marked or implied, is meticulous; and though it may startle the fans of Furtwangler et al. to hear the B flat subject at bar 83 of the first movement taken in strict time, there is nevertheless a subtle ebb and flow throughout which sounds extremely natural. The steady onward tread of the Funeral March (taken less slowly than by, say, Klemperer) is most effectively paced. The small orchestra employed allows a splendid clarity of texture, and clean proportions that are unusual; and except for slightly obtrusive trumpets the recorded balance is admirable. (But the famous horn 'false entry' in the first movement is so pianissimo that it really does sound as if he had come in by mistake --which is what poor faithful Ferdinand Ries thought at the time.) It goes without saying that the first-movement repeat is played, but none of Wagner's 'improvements' of wind octave around bar 658.
I found this a most refreshing performance, which without lessening the symphony's romantic and epic quality arouses little of the common feeling of disparity between the two halves of the work. '