Choral & Song

In his anniversary year, the quest to record every note Beethoven wrote continues. This is the second recording of his canons and musical jokes in a few months, and that’s perhaps one more than they require.

Beethoven often scribbled snippets of music for friends and colleagues, whether as gifts or as appendages to letters. The conductor Thomas Holmes and his various Vienna performers give us a compilation of more than 50 of them, most being less than a minute long. There are puns on the names of friends, and a couple of numbers comparing Beethoven’s erstwhile violin teacher to a donkey; others are more respectful greetings addressed to patrons, even as high up as Archduke Rudolph. Some are puzzle canons, where the recipient had to work out when and at what pitch a second voice might enter.

They are worth hearing as a curiosity, but ultimately these throwaway miniatures are more interesting on paper than in the listening. Although the performances are aptly light-footed and the words clear, the singing often lacks the firmness and precision the pieces require. Naxos’s recording doesn’t make the voices sound well blended, and occasionally another take would have helped. Erica Jeal

PERFORMANCE ★★

RECORDING ★★★

This live recording of bizarrely follows not Handel’s score, but the mangled, truncated version of the oratorio that Nikolaus Harnoncourt made for his 1994 recording. Why? The sleeve notes tell us that conductor Leonardo García Alarcón regards it as ‘the best’. Yet Harnoncourt’s version scarcely counts as informed practice – among