In 1816, the 19-year-old Schubert watched Beethoven's music with a kind of horrified fascination, complaining that the Eroica muddled "the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with howlings and the holiest with harlequinades." Minasi treats that complaint as a design brief. This is a recording that wants to restore the symphony's power to offend. The weapon of choice is the period-instrument ensemble deployed at modern ferocity. Ensemble Resonanz's 21 string players don't play clean — they tear. The opening movement has an antsy, coiled energy that makes most modern-orchestra readings sound like they've been upholstered. Period brass and percussion don't blend in; they interrupt, punctuate, nail things down. The dynamic markings are taken at literal face value, which in Beethoven's hands means sudden drops and surges that feel violent rather than rhetorical. The funeral march is the centrepiece and the test case. Minasi makes it shriek and shudder rather than process solemnly. That's a defensible interpretive choice — Beethoven's march is not Handelian state ceremony — but whether the results illuminate or simply agitate depends entirely on your tolerance for dissonance as argument. The scherzo gallops rather than bounces, and the finale stamps with something close to contempt for the gentility the form once assumed. The recording's real achievement is the ensemble's weight-to-size ratio. Twenty-one string players should sound thin; they don't. There's a density to the Resonanz sound that keeps the readings from tipping into brittleness. The elastic phrasing in particular — phrases that breathe and stretch rather than march in step — is frequently riveting, and it's here that Minasi's historical research earns its keep rather than merely announcing itself. But the microphone placement is a problem. Close-miked strings in this repertoire trade warmth for forensic clarity, and what you gain in textural detail you lose in the sense that this music is about something bigger than its own surfaces. Warmth isn't sentimentality — it's part of how the heroic mode works emotionally, and its absence makes the determination to shock feel like an end rather than a means. Minasi has genuine things to say about what this symphony sounded like before two centuries of reverential handling smoothed it out. The question is whether the message gets delivered or just performed.
