Beethoven’s Eroica represents his symphonic declaration of independence from the domination of Haydn and Mozart. He spent two years composing it, polishing and refining each phrase until he had exactly what he wanted. The results must have proved startling to the symphony’s first hearers. Not only was it probably by far the longest symphony written up to that time but it had more daring innovations.

In presenting a new recording of one of the world’s most popular symphonies, the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, it is fitting that it should be conducted by a musician internationally acclaimed as one of the foremost Beethoven interpreters of our day, Josef Krips. All the dynamism of the music and its performance has been faithfully preserved through the magic of Everest sound.

This beautiful “nature” symphony receives an exquisite performance at the hands of a noted Beethoven interpreter. The composer’s sounds of nature are reproduced with like naturalness in Everest’s incomparable recording.
Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony lives up to its name in more ways than one. To begin with, it is the most relaxed of his nine symphonies. Sir Donald Francis Tovey has written of it that it “has the enormous strength of someone who knows how to relax.” Composed in 1808, hard upon the heels of the stormy, dramatic Fifth Symphony, it came as a sort of feminine companion to its definitely masculine predecessor.
It is not at all surprising that Beethoven should have written a work like the Pastoral. Throughout his life, his favorite pastime was taking long, solitary walks in the countryside, mostly in the vicinity of Vienna. It was during these quiet hours that he could commune with Nature, unhampered by his ever-increasing deafness. And it was these nature walks that inspired so much of his writing. Perhaps the most directly traceable manifestation of Nature’s influence upon the composer is the Sixth Symphony, with its imitations of the smooth-flowing brook, the bird-calls, the rustic peasant dances, the thunderstorm and the shepherd’s song.