Beethoven: Symphony No 3 album review – thrilling, but Minasi’s determination to shock often feels self-conscious

Ensemble Resonanz/Minasi(Harmonia Mundi)Riccardo Minasi radically reassesses the Eroica, bringing its acerbic innovation to the fore in a startling and compelling new recording that will surely prompt heated debate

In 1816, a young Franz Schubert took a swipe at Beethoven, accusing him of promoting a musical eccentricity that muddled “the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with howlings and the holiest with harlequinades” in order to “goad people to madness”. In this colours-to-the-mast recording, Riccardo Minasi demonstrates precisely what contemporaries were afraid of with a radical reassessment of the Eroica Symphony.

Looking to original sources, he strips away the modifications of centuries to lay the symphony before us in all its acerbic 19th-century innovation. The results are certainly startling. Antsy modern strings tear up the musical tarmac in the opening movement as period brass and percussion hammer nails into the coffin of Mozartian classicism. Dynamic markings are interpreted to the max as the funeral march shrieks and shudders, the scherzo gallops and the finale stamps its feet.

There’s a compelling weight to the Ensemble Resonanz sound despite just 21 string players. What there is not is a great deal of warmth, exacerbated by microphones that give the impression of being welded to the instruments themselves. While all those dissonances are thrilling, and the elastic phrasing is riveting, the determination to shock often feels self-conscious. Nevertheless, Minasi has a great deal to say, and there’s plenty here guaranteed to fuel a heated debate.