Beethoven: Symphony No 3 "Eroica" (1987) [Blu-ray]

The Dutch conductor and recorder player Frans Bruggen, who died in 2014, based the structure of his fifty-plus member Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, specialists in the music of that era, upon the famous luxury orchestras that flourished in Mannheim, Paris and Vienna in the eighteenth century.

Founded in 1981, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century consists of approximately fifty-five musicians from all over the world. The orchestra is specialised in the music of that era and the musicians play on period instruments or copies of them. This spectacular rendition of Beethoven’s „Symphony No. 3“, live recorded at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, has won them international acclaim. Beethoven originally dedicated the „Eroica“ (1804) to Napoleon, who at the time was re-drawing the map of Europe as comprehensively as this epic symphony was to re-define the architecture of music. It was only belatedly that the composer realised that ‘heroes’ with absolute political power easily turn into tyrants and tore up the dedication.