<<  -- 2 --  Peter Dale    Fresh impressions

The Turners don't attempt to reproduce all that -- How could they? But they have absorbed it deeply into their musical thinking nonetheless, and the results, without ever seeking deliberately to shock or straining after some novel interpretation masquerading as 'authentic', are as impressive as they are convincing. These performances are not revelations of a Beethoven obscured under the patina of accumulated performance traditions so much as Beethoven subtly but eloquently speaking, as it were, in his own first person rather than in the deferred third person of a professional interpreter. The mysteriousness of the slow introductions, for example [listen -- track 5, 0:01-1:04], comes over not as the fumbling in a tonal fog (that the mystical school of thought seems to favour), nor as the wilful obfuscations of a solitary genius hell-bent on ignoring his own audience and addressing himself only to 'the music of the future', but rather as the deliberately calculated preliminary to unavoidably difficult listening. As a result, one's ears are that much more alert to what follows: extraordinary adventures in remote modulation [listen -- track 4, 1:36-2:41], form shaped by dynamic differentiation as well as by the conventional means of variation and recapitulation, moods of thought as well as of feeling, and (let it be said) quite demanding extremes of both [listen -- track 3, 0:00-0:57].

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