Beethoven at the Barbican
The Barbican saw the end of one Beethoven cycle and the beginning of another in November. Bernard Haitink came to begin his performances of the symphonies with the LSO, while Iván Fischer returned with the Budapest Festival Orchestra for two concerts to complete the series of the Beethoven piano concertos begun in June, coupled with Bartók's major orchestral works. The LSO play at their best for Haitink, and his concerts inaugurated what is destined to be a genuinely distinguished cycle. He galvanised the strings, with the second violins and violas playing with an unusual alertness that added greatly to the sense of symphonic argument. Haitink is one of the few conductors to realise how the energy of the final movement of Beethoven's 7th must be driven from the double basses, and he wrought from the LSO a refined abandon that surpassed even that of the performance he gave in the same hall with the Dresden Staatskapelle as part of his 75th birthday celebrations. He returns in April to complete the cycle, which is also being recorded for release on CD by LSO Live.
Fischer's approach to Beethoven was in the grand tradition. In the June concerts, I occasionally found him fussy, as if he wanted to show off the sophistication of his players' phrasing, but now, in the 4th and 5th concertos, the orchestral playing was impeccable. Never, for instance, can the beginning of the slow movement of the 4th have sounded so dark and brooding, and it would have taken Claudio Arrau to live up to it. Instead, we had Richard Goode. I don't know if the hope was to produce an interpretative tension by coupling an orchestra of almost infinite tonal resource with a pianist of practically none, but in the event the real tension came from worrying whether Goode would manage to get through the stuff at all. He showed no rhetorical command of the music, and fast figuration had a disconcerting tendency to take him out of tempo altogether. My companion for the Emperor concerto suggested that a good question for a musical quiz might be to name at least 100 living pianists who could have given a more commanding performance of it. More pertinent, perhaps, would be to ask why none of the perhaps four or five who might have done justice to Fischer and his orchestra was engaged to do so.
Even Goode's Beethoven, however, was not enough to detract from the magnificence of Fischer's Bartók. Classical music offers few pleasures as satisfying as hearing these players in this repertoire. The rarely heard ballet The Wooden Prince, "a symphonic poem for dance" as Bartók described it, was written after Bluebeard's Castle but is much less concentrated and can easily seem sprawling and overblown in the wrong hands. Fischer, however, is one of those conductors who is able to secure playing of seeming spontaneity precisely because it is so disciplined—each episode had its own convincing character without diminishing the momentum of the whole. Both here and in the Music for Strings, Fischer was unusually alive to Bartók's wit and playfulness, as well as his lyricism and melancholy. Was there a greater 20th-century composer than Bartók? After listening to these concerts, it was difficult to think so, and it certainly gave a welcome respite from the endless helpings of Shostakovich which we seem to be fed these days.?
Skipping to the good bits Radio 4's Saturday Review allows a guest reviewer to choose a non-topical subject for the panel to talk about. On one of the editions in November, John Cole, the BBC's former political editor, picked Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy in the final movement of the 9th symphony. Like its Newsnight cousin, Saturday Review is generally innocent of any sense that classical music might play a role in the kind of mildly cultured life that includes visits to the theatre, the art gallery or the bookshop, and the presenter Tom Sutcliffe's attempts to grapple with Beethoven demonstrated again how far an appreciation of classical music has become divorced from the cultural mainstream. Sutcliffe, who is often a subtle and amiably unpretentious critic, found the piece different to how he remembered it: being made to listen to it again "and with a certain amount of concentration," it turned out it to be "a much more extended piece than the great choral hymn you tend to remember it as." Can one imagine that if Cole had chosen a 19th-century novel, Sutcliffe would suggest that he normally read books without really attending to them? ("Dickens is really interesting if you concentrate a little while you're reading him.") Concluding the discussion—most of which was about Schiller's and Beethoven's politics rather than the music itself—he alerted any listeners who wanted to "cut to the chase" that on his recording the setting of the Ode to Joy comes "about 15 minutes into the last movement." So that's all right then: you don't need to sit through all that boring orchestral material—let alone the first three movements—just fast forward until the voices come in. Again, one wonders whether a reviewer who had given the same advice about The Cherry Orchard or Citizen Kane would be invited back. It will be fun to hear what happens if some future guest decides on The Ring, though this is no doubt unlikely. The last time I switched on Saturday Review, the choice was The Best of the Ink Spots.
The Barbican saw the end of one Beethoven cycle and the beginning of another in November. Bernard Haitink came to begin his performances of the symphonies with the LSO, while Iván Fischer returned with the Budapest Festival Orchestra for two concerts to complete the series of the Beethoven piano concertos begun in June, coupled with Bartók's major orchestral works. The LSO play at their best for Haitink, and his concerts inaugurated what is destined to be a genuinely distinguished cycle. He galvanised the strings, with the second violins and violas playing with an unusual alertness that added greatly to the sense of symphonic argument. Haitink is one of the few conductors to realise how the energy of the final movement of Beethoven's 7th must be driven from the double basses, and he wrought from the LSO a refined abandon that surpassed even that of the performance he gave in the same hall with the Dresden Staatskapelle as part of his 75th birthday celebrations. He returns in April to complete the cycle, which is also being recorded for release on CD by LSO Live.
Fischer's approach to Beethoven was in the grand tradition. In the June concerts, I occasionally found him fussy, as if he wanted to show off the sophistication of his players' phrasing, but now, in the 4th and 5th concertos, the orchestral playing was impeccable. Never, for instance, can the beginning of the slow movement of the 4th have sounded so dark and brooding, and it would have taken Claudio Arrau to live up to it. Instead, we had Richard Goode. I don't know if the hope was to produce an interpretative tension by coupling an orchestra of almost infinite tonal resource with a pianist of practically none, but in the event the real tension came from worrying whether Goode would manage to get through the stuff at all. He showed no rhetorical command of the music, and fast figuration had a disconcerting tendency to take him out of tempo altogether. My companion for the Emperor concerto suggested that a good question for a musical quiz might be to name at least 100 living pianists who could have given a more commanding performance of it. More pertinent, perhaps, would be to ask why none of the perhaps four or five who might have done justice to Fischer and his orchestra was engaged to do so.
Even Goode's Beethoven, however, was not enough to detract from the magnificence of Fischer's Bartók. Classical music offers few pleasures as satisfying as hearing these players in this repertoire. The rarely heard ballet The Wooden Prince, "a symphonic poem for dance" as Bartók described it, was written after Bluebeard's Castle but is much less concentrated and can easily seem sprawling and overblown in the wrong hands. Fischer, however, is one of those conductors who is able to secure playing of seeming spontaneity precisely because it is so disciplined—each episode had its own convincing character without diminishing the momentum of the whole. Both here and in the Music for Strings, Fischer was unusually alive to Bartók's wit and playfulness, as well as his lyricism and melancholy. Was there a greater 20th-century composer than Bartók? After listening to these concerts, it was difficult to think so, and it certainly gave a welcome respite from the endless helpings of Shostakovich which we seem to be fed these days.?
Skipping to the good bits Radio 4's Saturday Review allows a guest reviewer to choose a non-topical subject for the panel to talk about. On one of the editions in November, John Cole, the BBC's former political editor, picked Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy in the final movement of the 9th symphony. Like its Newsnight cousin, Saturday Review is generally innocent of any sense that classical music might play a role in the kind of mildly cultured life that includes visits to the theatre, the art gallery or the bookshop, and the presenter Tom Sutcliffe's attempts to grapple with Beethoven demonstrated again how far an appreciation of classical music has become divorced from the cultural mainstream. Sutcliffe, who is often a subtle and amiably unpretentious critic, found the piece different to how he remembered it: being made to listen to it again "and with a certain amount of concentration," it turned out it to be "a much more extended piece than the great choral hymn you tend to remember it as." Can one imagine that if Cole had chosen a 19th-century novel, Sutcliffe would suggest that he normally read books without really attending to them? ("Dickens is really interesting if you concentrate a little while you're reading him.") Concluding the discussion—most of which was about Schiller's and Beethoven's politics rather than the music itself—he alerted any listeners who wanted to "cut to the chase" that on his recording the setting of the Ode to Joy comes "about 15 minutes into the last movement." So that's all right then: you don't need to sit through all that boring orchestral material—let alone the first three movements—just fast forward until the voices come in. Again, one wonders whether a reviewer who had given the same advice about The Cherry Orchard or Citizen Kane would be invited back. It will be fun to hear what happens if some future guest decides on The Ring, though this is no doubt unlikely. The last time I switched on Saturday Review, the choice was The Best of the Ink Spots.
