Perfomances of Beethoven's Symphony No.6

Hello,

I just started working on a paper for my music class that is due in a weeks time; the objective of the paper is to take a piece by Beethoven and compare three different performances of that piece. I've decided to use the 6th Symphony mainly because I have a great performance by the Boston Symphony orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein on DVD which I want to use.

However I'm looking for two more performances of the piece and I was wondering if anybody on this fine forum could recommend any performances by specific orchestras and conductors that they enjoyed and found interesting.

Since this piece is considered one of Beethoven's most programmatic I was thinking of maybe focusing on how different performance treated these extra musical features like the bird calls and the storm. I wanted to see how far different conductors tried to evoke extra musical imagery or whether they tried to keep it strictly musical, if that makes sense.

This is just an initial idea though and no approach to this paper will really be concrete until I finally find two other performances which I want to use.

If anybody has any thoughts on the 6th symphony or noticed anything interesting about specific performances they have heard I would love to hear about it, anything that will spark any ideas in my mind is welcome!

Thanks for reading this and I hope to hear from you soon,

Pete.