The complete performance of the symphony was well worth the rental for me. It helped having all the visuals, at least most of the time, making this into effectively a music video of the Eroica. The visuals helped when they portrayed the reactions of the players and listeners to the music, but they were distracting when portraying the lame side stories, such as the young male servant making eyes at the girl, etc. I guess the point of that was to show that mundane life goes on even at momentous events such as this one which changed the music world forever. It's fun to imagine that everyone actually present was floored by what was being played, but only a few really got it, such as Haydn, Ries, a couple of the women, and of course Beethoven himself.
But it's ludicrous that any orchestra, no matter how competent, could run through the piece that well on first sight. Even if they could play all the notes and markings they couldn't stay together without a conductor, at least not for that long. Beethoven is portrayed as out of the room or seated much of the time, so wasn't much help except when he wanted to be. And the transition from falling apart after about 20 bars to flawlessly executing the whole work on the next try was especially ridiculous.
Ian Hart was embarrassing, clumsily trying to patch together pieces of Beethoven's character into an incoherent whole. He entirely misses the soul of the man, which Gary Oldman captured breathtakingly well in Immortal Beloved. You'd think Hart would only need to study Oldman's performance a bit and he would have done much better, but maybe Oldman just made it look easy.
The movie would have been better if it had been a straight-to-DVD project, with the movie portion showing a more realistic first performance with more mistakes and musical misunderstandings, and saving the flawless performance for the bonus feature, letting the viewers know it's highly idealized in order to allow undisturbed enjoyment of the music and how it might have affected those who first heard it.
This is a must-see for Beethoven lovers and will be very rewarding for anyone interested in music appreciation.
But it's ludicrous that any orchestra, no matter how competent, could run through the piece that well on first sight. Even if they could play all the notes and markings they couldn't stay together without a conductor, at least not for that long. Beethoven is portrayed as out of the room or seated much of the time, so wasn't much help except when he wanted to be. And the transition from falling apart after about 20 bars to flawlessly executing the whole work on the next try was especially ridiculous.
Ian Hart was embarrassing, clumsily trying to patch together pieces of Beethoven's character into an incoherent whole. He entirely misses the soul of the man, which Gary Oldman captured breathtakingly well in Immortal Beloved. You'd think Hart would only need to study Oldman's performance a bit and he would have done much better, but maybe Oldman just made it look easy.
The movie would have been better if it had been a straight-to-DVD project, with the movie portion showing a more realistic first performance with more mistakes and musical misunderstandings, and saving the flawless performance for the bonus feature, letting the viewers know it's highly idealized in order to allow undisturbed enjoyment of the music and how it might have affected those who first heard it.
This is a must-see for Beethoven lovers and will be very rewarding for anyone interested in music appreciation.