The correct tempo for Beethoven? Musicians, conductors and scholars have been tussling over that for centuries. It’s not unusual for musicians to disregard Beethoven’s much-discussed tempo markings and set their own pace.

US Cellist Jeffrey Zeigler has taken that disregard a step further in a new recording Slow Beethoven, a collaboration between a New York-based string quartet and The TANK Center for Sonic Arts, a recording studio and concert venue housed in a massive and extremely resonant disused water storage facility in the high desert of Colorado.

In June 2021, at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Zeigler (a former Kronos Quartet member) led Lara St. John, Miranda Cuckson and Milan Milisavljevic in an adagio movement, the fugue from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131.

As they played, they heard the sound of their performance resonating in the profound reverb of the Tank, in which sonic impulses may sustain for up to 40 seconds.

To allow each note and chord to ring out and fade in the Tank, the quartet had to slow the work radically, so that this short movement, some seven minutes long in the original tempo, took more than 45 minutes for them to play.

The result is...