BBC Music Magazine: outstanding; Fono Forum: outstanding. As a teenager Richard Wagner idolised Beethoven, even copying out the scores of the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies by hand. In 1831, aged eighteen, he completed a piano arrangement of the Ninth – a fascinating document of how the future master heard his model, since every piano reduction requires choices about what to keep and what to leave out. With a single pianist replacing the orchestra, the vocal forces are scaled down accordingly, and the result is a strikingly intimate view of the work: the first three movements take on the character of a piano sonata, making the entry of the voices in the finale all the more dramatic. Noriko Ogawa is the pianist, joined by soloists and chorus of the Bach Collegium Japan conducted by Masaaki Suzuki.