Music Library Reviews: Beethoven's Nine Symphonies
December 1, 2011
by: Chris Hathaway
BEETHOVEN: Nine Symphonies (complete); Overtures: The Creatures of Prometheus, op. 43; Leonore No. 3, op. 72b; Fidelio, op. 72a; Coriolan, op. 62; Egmont, op. 84; The Ruins of Athens, op. 113; Zur Namensfeier (Name-Day), op. 115 and King Stephen, op. 117. Riccardo Chailly conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, with (in the Finale of Symphony No. 9) Katerina Beranova, soprano; Lili Paasikivi, mezzo-soprano; Robert Dean Smith, tenor; Hanno Müller-Brachmann, bass-baritone and the Gewandhaus Choir, Gewandhaus Children's Choir and MDR Radio Chorus. Decca 4782721: five CDs, with 78-page booklet in three languages. > Available at Amazon.com
It is seldom that such an ingratiating experience with the orchestral music of Beethoven as this one comes along. Chailly's stated objective, in these recorded performances (done between 2007 and 2009) as well as in a series of concerts in London's Barbican Centre only last month, is — for the most part — to adhere to Beethoven's metronome markings. These were laid out by the composer (for the first eight) about 1817 and, in the case of the Ninth, a few years after its initial publication. It should be noted that metronome markings are just as relative as tempo indications: they need not be taken literally, for there are the variables of the hall in which the performance takes place, the ability of the musicians to sustain such tempi without it either seeming like very hard work or static and a thousand other variables. They are a point of departure, one aspect of how the piece should sound (much like an architect's conceptual sketch). Even Mr. Chailly admits to taking the slow movement of No. 9 slightly slower than Beethoven's prescribed marking, but his unfolding of the whole movement is airy and not unduly slow, and above all relaxed and unhurried. Chailly himself says that there is a temptation on the part of conductors to "indulge" in the sheer beauty of the music, especially in slow movements, at the expense of continuity and the big picture. He cited Willem Mengelberg's score of the sixth symphony, in which certain measures in the second movement (Scene by the Brook) had been re-barred by the conductor—something he said was "at the expense of the flow of the gentle 12/8, four-to-a-bar". This is not to say that Mr. Chailly's approach is rigid: quite the contrary! His sense of a musical phrase and of dynamic coloration is remarkable, as well as his remarkably intuitive feeling for the quality of rhythm, as opposed to speed. One of many instances is the g-minor martial variation in the last movement of the Eroica, where there is almost the impression of speeding up — while this conductor's vision of tempo unico within a movement is very much at play. He slows down and speeds up where Beethoven indicates, or where a slight holding back is implicitly appropriate if not explicitly marked.
What Chailly and his orchestra have done in these recordings is to bring home particularly two obvious but sometimes elusive features of Beethoven's orchestral music: first, the winds are more co-equal with the strings in enunciating and developing material, perhaps more so than in Haydn or in Mozart; second, the tempi and meticulously-noted dynamics were beyond the reach and technique of the largely ad hoc orchestras of Beethoven's time. Be it remembered that at the first performance of the now universally familiar Fifth, the orchestra got bogged down in the middle of the first movement and had to start from the beginning. It may very well be that orchestral technique has undergone a sea-change over the last half-century and more: from the opening Adagio introduction to the introduction of Symphony No. 1, there is a jackbooted militancy in the music-making. The bowed tremolos of the strings in the Allegro con brio which follows are clearly enunciated: it holds the stunning revelation that the only other conductor on records who adhered as closely to Beethoven's metronome marks in this symphony was Arturo Toscanini. Other conductors might wish to take slightly slower tempi, forfeiting nothing of the spirit of the music, with the aim of greater clarity. Chailly and his orchestra lack nothing in the way of clarity, in ensuring that every strand of sound worth hearing is brought into clear focus and that the musical intent of every phrase is clearly expressed. Or the second movement of No. 1, which some listeners might at first find unduly quick in Chailly's realization: it is marked Andante cantabile con moto, literally translated as "at a walking pace, singing, with motion" — which, in this rendition, it is in every sense. In the opening Allegro con brio of the Eroica, the pace may seem fast at first hearing; but everything makes perfectly good musical sense, and Beethoven's sonic structure is clearly revealed. Attention to seemingly minute details is never lacking. In a sense it seems reminiscent of Hermann Scherchen's early stereo recording of this symphony, made over fifty years ago, which for years was the fastest Allegro con brio on records. Scherchen's aim, like Chailly's, was to observe the composer's metronome mark. Even the Funeral March movement of the third symphony, marked Adagio assai yet moving along, lacks nothing in the way of gravitas and pathos. What is heard here, in the truest and highest sense, is a case of letting Beethoven be Beethoven.
In the second symphony, the same musical values apparent in the performance of its predecessor are still in abundance—perhaps even more so. Again, one must go back to Toscanini for comparison. The opening of the Larghetto of No. 2 is portentous: it displays an unusual range of string color, and Chailly's blending of the horns, winds and strings in this movement goes back to the best of the old masters. As is his wont, he observes every dynamic marking. The whole piece is a song. Chailly does not "indulge" but basks unabashedly in the beauty of the music. This is what happens when expressivity and ensemble precision become one. No less fine is the realization of this symphony's Scherzo, where that marvelous feeling of tempo unico, coupled with a keen awareness of sound and instrumental color, holds everything together. The same can be said of the concluding Allegro molto.
Tempo unico is the term Chailly used to characterize the opening Allegro con brio of No. 5, of which every bar has to do with those three Gs and an E-flat. There is an uplifting feeling of forward thrust throughout this movement. Even in the comparatively subdued, contrasting second theme — dissimilar to the pervasive head motif as it is — the feeling of organic unity which is so characteristic of Beethoven is never absent. After each fermata, there is no further pause or silence: not recklessness or relentlessness, but a compelling and driving feeling of forward motion. Even the sudden adagio mark and the ad libitum oboe solo do not seem extraneous. The slow movement of the Fifth has all the elements of song and sudden bursts of majesty one could want, and shows Chailly's total mastery of all aspects of rhythm and instrumental balance. The feeling of forward thrust goes even more to the mark in the third movement, which is linked without a break to the Finale. In this writer's estimation, Maestro Chailly has few peers in the realization of this music: working with an orchestra that has had this music in its blood and in its heart and mind since the music itself was new, and his serving a composer so handsomely in his quest to get everything out of the music that is in it results in a performance of stunning detail and shattering vividness. It is a realization of a musical work that is at once authentic and personal. The addition of three trombones and piccolo to the orchestral mix in the Finale is duly noted; no conductor on records has brought out the piccolo part as clearly Mr. Chailly has done, Just as much effective is the expressive device, perhaps unheard of in any symphonic work (up to that time) since Haydn's Symphony No. 46, of the return of the scherzo theme before the recapitulation. When the piccolo plays its own maggiore version of the famous motif of the first movement, it is unmistakably heard.
The sixth—Pastoral—likewise includes trombones; but, as in much of Fidelio and in the fifth symphony, they are held and reserve for strategic climaxes and are not included in the first two movements. Chailly, throughout this work, practices what he preaches about "indulgence". The expressivity comes from dynamics and orchestral coloring. In the slow movement, as noted earlier, he wants you to feel a leisurely four-to-a-bar. He wants you to hear often overlooked inner voices. The climax in the fourth movement—the thunderstorm sequence, in which the trombones and a piccolo first appear—is magnificently calculated. The finale—Shepherd's Song—is a rare, triumphant case of composer and executants working hand-in-hand, with a keenly felt emphasis on voice-leading.
The fourth symphony of 1806 has long been one of Riccardo Chailly's favorites, as it was a favorite of one of his long-past predecessors—Felix Mendelssohn, who chose it for his very first concert with the Gewandhausorchester. Again, this is a performance which causes one to look back to Toscanini. The tempo indications Adagio (slow) for the slow movement and Allegro ma non troppo (Lively, but not too much so) for the last are almost directly contradictory of their metronome markings. If Beethoven's tempi are followed to the letter here, the last movement is an endurance test for the orchestra. The secret, of course, is to take the shorter notes more lightly, especially in the upper string parts. One can easily see why Mendelssohn was attracted to this symphony.
The eighth, another Beethoven symphony misunderstood as a kleine sinfonie perhaps because of its comparatively short length in relation to Nos. 3, 5, 6 and 7, receives a brisk and energetic performance from Chailly and the Leipzig musicians. It is the only Beethoven symphony with a "real" Minuet instead of a Scherzo as its third movement, even though the corresponding movement of No. 1 is designated Menuetto, albeit with a very un-Menuetto tempo of Allegro molto e vivace. The Seventh, written at about the same time as the more concise but in no way minuscule Eighth, benefits in a different way from this same brisk approach.
It is in the Ninth Symphony, another widely misunderstood (and, throughout most of the nineteenth century, underplayed) work, that there are more revelations in store. Chailly sees the opening movement, with its not-part-and-parcel-of-the-times open fifth sonority that, for some listeners, seems to look forward to Bruckner, as part of Beethoven's anger: "[it] begins and heads straight for a monstrous catastrophe. Every shimmer of hope is immediately exposed as illusory". This is followed by a brutal scherzo at breakneck speed: like the first movement of the fifth or that of the seventh, it is a demonstration of Beethoven's uncanny ability to organize an entire sonata movement around a single rhythmic figure. The follows the ethereal, miraculously constructed Adagio—placed as an extended moment of tranquility before the eruption of the Finale. Chailly's borderline-extramusical interpretation of two brutal movements leading to a choral apotheosis in which the composer, through Friedrich Schiller's words, demands that all men be brothers (but, as a realist, knows that this isn't possible) reminds this reviewer of a man who had been exposed to practically no music except the determinedly neutral music of the "big band" era and its aftermath: he was given a record of a Beethoven symphony, terra incognita to him. Sampling it, he remarked, "He certainly sounds angry, doesn't he?"
Considerations of anger aside, there's a lot of excitement in this music, and Chailly's performance drives that home. The opening instrumental recitative, with its brief backward glances at the preceding three movements leading up to the orchestral introduction of the An die Freude theme, is marvelously laid out and the most meticulously planned performance of this work since—inevitably!—Toscanini's final performance of it nearly sixty years ago. There is a clandestine recording of Toscanini rehearsing the beginning of this movement prior to the March 1952 performances and recording, and he has only the ‘celli and basses play as he sings bits of the other instrumental parts: the attention to detail and the legendary Maestro's exquisite patience are awe-inspiring.
Chailly's decision to integrate boys and girls with the women of the chorus in the Finale on Schiller's An die Freude seems to lend much to clarifying the largely contrapuntal texture of the work, especially toward the end where the unison statement of Seid umschlungen, millionen and Freude, schöner Götterfunken are combined in an electrifying double fugue — one of two such to grace this movement: the earlier one (purely instrumental) comes on the heels of the heroic tenor solo (Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen). Chailly follows Beethoven's metronome mark for the tenor solo, introduced by a staccato contrabassoon grunt and then the sound of what German-speaking people in those days called "Turkish music" or "military music"—winds, trumpet (sotto voce, but not veiled and relegated to the background), bass drum, triangle and cymbals. At first hearing, it sounds "too fast"—most listeners are unaccustomed to the composer's tempo—but it gradually comes to make huge musical sense. The instrumental double fugue and the reprise, with a "busier" orchestral accompaniment, of Freude, schöner Götterfunken (still holding the same tempo which began the tenor solo), brings the revelation that the chorus members seem to be having an easier time singing their parts, and in a more connected and cantabile fashion than if it were slower! (Much has been said, especially by singers themselves, about the difficulties of singing Beethoven.) The best thing about anything in this set is that the spirit of Beethoven is taken more into account than the letter.
The overtures included here are interspersed with the symphonies in almost chronological fashion and benefit from the same approach taken toward the symphonies. Tempi tend to be on the brisk side, but nothing is ever lacking in the way of clarity. The Coriolan overture, especially, benefits from Chailly's sure sense of the quality of rhythm, providing (like certain places in the last movement of the Eroica mentioned above) an illusion of a slight speeding up when, actually, there is none. The bowed tremolo triplet articulation in the upper strings in King Stephen is not lost in hewing to Beethoven's tempo (compare this with George Szell, who preferred the Allegro at a slightly slower clip in order to draw attention to this detail). The boldness, commitment and high refinement of the playing, coupled with the conductor's exhaustive preparation and penetrating insight, make for exhilarating listening.
The Neue Gewandhaus itself is an ideal recording hall. The sound, in all varieties of texture and at every dynamic level, is always unaffectedly clear and well-defined. It seems an agreeably but not overly resonant space. Appropriately, Chailly has chosen to dedicate the album to Decca producer Andrew Cornall, "for thirty years of collaboration in the service of music". This set is a must-have for anyone interested in Beethoven's music. It is not just another set of the complete Beethoven symphonies.