It doesn't require too much imagination to hear an orchestra in your head as you listen to Beethoven's warm-hearted Septet of 1799, and indeed his First Symphony followed just the following year. Then beyond its symphonic qualities, there's its moments of delicious chamber intimacy, plus the ear-tickling novelty of its groundbreaking scoring for clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double bass. All in all, to say that it gives chamber players plenty to get their teeth into is an understatement, and perhaps especially those chamber players whose “day job” is in an orchestra – that's to say, giving musicians whose daily music making is all about the interplay between strings, brass and woodwind, a rare opportunity to take those skills into the one-to-a-part chamber domain. This live recording, made in August 2020 in the Concert Hall of KKL Lucerne (the Lucerne Festival being one of the few that managed to mount a live offering in Covid Year) certainly bears that theory out. Nimble, joyously interactive (just listen to the close duetting going on in the fourth movement variations), it delivers both on grandeur and profundity, and intimacy and humour.
Before we get to the Beethoven though, we're treated to the “Nannerl-Septett” divertimento a young Mozart wrote twenty three years earlier in Salzburg, probably in celebration of his sister's name day. While his Salzburg years are full of divertimenti written for the court's garden festivities, this is an especially ebulliently frothy one – something the Lucerne soloists bring across with naturalness and elegance over a beautifully shaped reading whose own sweet chamber delicacy is contrasted by zinging echoes of the operatic world Mozart was by this point also increasingly making his mark in.
Heard live, this concert must have represented a wonderful moment of highest-level escapism from the world's troubles. Now the rest of us can now enjoy it too, with the added benefit of being able to press “Repeat”. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz