„Faced with such an enormous choice of recordings of the Beethoven concerto, this one at least has a unique selling point in new cadenzas composed for David Grimal by Brice Pauset. Although they remain within the bounds of propriety, that for the first movement is unusual in its inclusion at its mid-point of an orchestral role with solo piano. Otherwise the performance, taken from a Dijon concert in 2010, is a rewardingly fresh reading of the printed score. Maybe the central Larghetto is a little slow, but the whole account has an unhurried feel, and Grimal’s long lyric lines are shaped with beauty and much affection.“ (David Denton, theStrad)

World premiere: the Fourth Symphony of Brahms without a conductor. Les Dissonances reinvent the musical practice through a participatory organization where all share the same artistic standards. Violin and orchestra are one, the interpretation of the work being carried both by solar violin David Grimal and intense listening to the structure of the work by all the musicians. The unique sound of this record is based on the use of period instruments by Les Dissonances, all brilliant soloists from major European orchestras.

Symphony no.3 in E flat major op.55, ’Eroica’: During the summer of 1802 in Heiligenstadt, Beethoven sketched, among other works, his Third Symphony, the composition of which took him a year. On 26 August 1804, he wrote to his publisher Härtel to announce the dispatch of ‘a new grand symphony’: ‘The title of the symphony is really Bonaparte . . . – I think that it will interest the musical public.’ Beethoven had long passionately admired the Consul Bonaparte, but he was to hate the Emperor Napoleon I equally passionately when he learnt of his coronation on 2 December 1804. His pupil Ferdinand Ries portrays the scene: ‘He ew into a rage and cried out: “He too is nothing but an ordinary man!” . . . He went to the table, seized the title page from the top, tore it up completely and threw [the score] on the floor.’ And so the work became a ‘Heroic Symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man’, acquiring the subtitle ‘Eroica’ for posterity.

At the first performance on 7 April 1805, the work impressed the audience with its extraordinary dimensions for the time in terms of duration and breadth, especially the opening Allegro con brio in sonata form, the recapitulation of which is announced by a dramatic dissonance between the strings and the horns. The Marcia funebre widens the palette for the expression of feeling, from the affliction of the theme in the minor mode to the brighter mood generated by the modulations into the major. The Finale is no longer content to play the role of a brief, lively conclusion, but leads us through a rich itinerary of variations on a theme that Beethoven took from his ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (The Creatures of Prometheus). Yet the first listeners rejected the work, which they deemed too long and muddled, reproaching it for the very thing that has subsequently gained it its renown: for disturbing the ambient Classicism and throwing the gates of the Romantic era wide open.

Symphony no.8 in B minor D759, ’Unfinished’: In 1823, Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828) received the Diploma of Honour from the Styrian Music Society of Graz. In return, he sent his friend Josef Hüttenbrenner, a member of the society, a new work dedicated to it and dated 30 October 1822. Passing from Josef’s hands to those of his brother Anselm, the manuscript lay forgotten in a bottom drawer until it resurfaced in March 1860. Josef Hüttenbrenner mentioned in a letter to the musician Johann Herbeck that his brother ‘possessed a treasure in Schubert’s in B minor symphony, which we consider the equal of the great C major Symphony, his instrumental swansong, and of any of Beethoven’s symphonies – only it is unfinished’. It is to Herbeck that we owe the resurrection of the work and its first performance in 1865.