Complete mish-mash of styles. This so doesn't work.

Ah, you gotta love the promotional folks at SONY. I can just hear them around a corporate table, with coffee cups and donuts at their elbows: "Let's get some of our big names together and let them have a go at Beethoven!"  

What could possibly go wrong.

There is such an embarrassing, clashing, mish-mash of styles heard among the performers as played on this disc, I am amazed they were able to make it all the way through before falling apart. The disparity between the orchestra's attempt at "authentic" playing and the soloists's highly romantic approach is laughable. It sounds so odd and so very wrong to hear the orchestra playing without vibrato, with lean, grating string sound, and then to hear the solo violin and cello enter with richly voluptuous tone with full vibrato. That just doesn't work. Either go authentic or don't. Trying to slam the two disparate approaches together is so misguided, it just makes no sense.

One wonders what the pianist was thinking (playing a modern piano) listening to it all cobble together. Perhaps he felt like watching a train running off its tracks - there's nothing to do about it. Although, I suppose he could have said something, you know, like, "What are you all doing?"