This week’s podcast is the third of a four-week cycle. This week will review recordings of Beethoven’s nine symphonies from the last one hundred years. This will be followed next week by letting our AI protagonists discuss the most significant recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies. The podcasts are all accompanied by extracts from the Symphonies. This week’s recordings of the Eroica Symphony are performed by The Czech National Symphony Orchestra and published by the Musopen Kickstarter Project under a Creative Commons PDM 1.0 Licence and hosted at classicals.de I hope you enjoy this week’s podcast, and if you do, please come back next week for the last podcast in the cycle, or if you have not done so, catch up with the previous podcasts.

This week's podcast is the second in a cycle of four in which our AI protagonists discuss Beethoven’s 9 Symphonies. Using the same sources as the Hi-Fi Hobbyist did last week, our AI protagonists select and rank their favourite three symphonies, and then go on to justify and debate their choices.

Whose choice will resonate with you? The Hi-Fi Hobbyist, or one of our AI protagonists?

It is perhaps appropriate, given the subject matter, that this cycle of podcasts about Beethoven’s symphonies is the most ambitious the HiFi Hobbyist has yet produced.

This week's music accompanying the podcast is the final movement from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The first part covers the section where Beethoven revisits the themes from the preceding movements and effectively rejects them. The second part introduces the Ode to Joy theme, and the podcast concludes with the glorious conclusion to the movement, the Symphony, and Beethoven’s Symphonic output.

The recording is provided by the European Archive of Music, hosted at musopen.org and made available in the public domain.

Enjoy the debate and stick around to listen to the conclusion to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at the end of the podcast.

This week’s podcast is the first of a four-week cycle. This week we will review Beethoven’s nine symphonies and choose a top five. This will be followed next week by letting our AI protagonists discuss the symphonies and the Hi-Fi Hobbyists ranking.

After that, the following week’s podcast will consider some of the greatest recordings of Beethoven’s 9 Symphonies cycles, both from a musical and audio perspective, as befits a Hi-fi hobbyist podcast. The four-week cycle will conclude with an AI discussion of the different recordings.

The podcasts are all accompanied by extracts from the Symphonies. This week’s recordings are performed by performed by The Fulda Symphonic Orchestra, who were recorded live on March 10, 2002 at the Grosser Saal der Orangerie. The recordings are provided by classicals.de and used under Creative Commons - Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.

I hope you enjoy this week’s podcast and if you do, please come back in future weeks for the later podcasts.