Wilson Pereira writes, quoting John Eliot Gardiner:

>The huge advantage when you're directing a period instrument orchestra
>is that the instruments don't crash into each other, there isn't -
>as it were, a traffic jam of sonorities, such as builds up very easily
>with a modern symphony orchestra.

I found that very true of my set of Beethoven symphonies as recorded on
Nimbus by the Hanover Band (Goodman & Huggett conducting).  But unlike
Gardiner, who seems to feel that the greatest advantage is gained when
playing fast passages, I have found that the slow numbers profit even
more greatly.  Both the Third and the Seventh sound much more nobly, less
mawkishly, funebral than when, say, Kleiber wrings the tears out of them.

Denis Fodor