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[Another of Signor Scardanelli’s TAS disappointments. Having perused "Confessions of a Marginal Man," the reader will recognize the author-in-confinement’s signature intemperance.] Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 Signor Scardanelli [March 1998. Originally appeared in La Folia 1:1.] BEETHOVEN Symphonies 1-9 · Luba Orgonasova (soprano); Anne Sofie von Otter (mezzo), Anthony Rolfe Johnson (tenor), Gilles Cachemaille (bass), The Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Révotunnaire et Romantique, John Eliot Gardiner (conducting) · Arend Prohmann, Karl-August Naegler (producers), Ulrich Vette (tonmeister) · Deutsche Grammophon Archiv Produktion 439 900-2; 5 compact discs.
Here are peformances of the period-restoration school to which like and unlike
endeavors are bound to be compared. We address our impressions to the hypothetical
reader for whom musical time travel has thus far proved jejune. In a word (well,
two), Byrd lives! These are remarkably lusty readings whose energies
and finesse turn in large measure on the knife-edge articulations of Gardiner’s
virtuoso ensemble, their meter-long, Francophone handle reflecting a view of
the repertoire as bold and daring conceptions - as something rather fresher
in spirit (ironically enough) than the bearing walls of the core repertoire.
Fancy names are one thing, the experience of listening quite another: revolutionary
these symphonies do indeed play, even and miraculously now; one listens for
the millionth time as if for the first to a body of works that strikes the listener
as a treasury of inestimable stature. Segue to sermonette: I give you DWEM, the Dead White European Male. He has been, they
say, too long in the saddle, this sexist, racist, imperialist pig. It’s
not without justification that ours is called the culture of complaint. (If
you’ve not read Robert Hughes’ book so titled, I heartily recommend
that you do.) Denying, or at best minimizing, the centrality and quality of
European culture, which includes, of course, its art music - for present purposes
the Austro-Germanic symphony, from Bach’s sons to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Hartmann, Henze,
and elsewhere and beyond - as a negative prop to militant feminism, Afro-centrism,
multiculturism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, and whatever present or emergent
-ism I’ve neglected is rather like pelting Chartres Cathedral with
m&m’s. Forget mankind. By way of Gardiner’s restorative readings,
one comes face to face anew with humanity’s Great (Polychromatic)
Hope: Beethoven the heaven-storming, Promethian humanist - who would doubtless
plotz on his mountaintop were he to learn what our politically correct intelligentsia,
as heirs to liberté, égalité, fraternité,
have done with their precious bequest. Evidence of a disintegrating center appears,
alas, in the relish pipsqueak academics take in savaging Western culture’s
core figures in the purely magical belief that in so doing they enlarge themselves
and their cranky little briefs. The melting pot, alas, topples; the stew rots
on the floor. Speaking of pots, parallels and rot, cannibals ate their enemies
not for sustenance but rather to acquire their power. I offer a defunct folkway
as allegory. Back in San Gimignano we played a game, if memory serves, called
chestnuts: a kid hardened a horse chestnut in vinegar for a week or so. (The
trees that grew in San Gimignano included horse chestnuts. Can’t say whether
they’ve survived. Don’t get around much any more.) Anyway, the local
giovinetti drilled them and passed a shoelace through, which they knotted
at the bottom, thus arming themselves for a combat consisting of whacking an
opponent’s chestnut, and getting his whacked in turn, until one or another’s
chestnut succumbed, a 20 killer, for example, acquiring the vanquished chestnut’s
dozen kills, thereby becoming a 32 killer. Quite staggering numbers of kills
would of course transfer to parvenu chestnuts, the old champs having simply
worn out. Any healthy nine-year-old can at present fell Muhammad Ali. Worse
still, Beethoven’s dead, and death, as we know, is a serious impediment
to declarations of self-worth. The task is up, inter alia, to Mr Gardiner and
his merry band of master players, whose insights, skills, and implementation
of scholarly enterprise strip these aural icons of their familiar patina down
to the electricity. Gardiner’s OR&R (better than half of whom comprise
the elegant and excellent English Baroque Soloists) go well beyond echt sonorities
to the heart of the music’s urgency and grace, a depth of penetration I’d
not before experienced in the authenticity movement’s approach. The first
great discovery, particularly from the Third Symphony on, is of a consummate
orchestrator who, in the care of a larger, later, and in a number of essentials,
rather different-sounding orchestra, appears at moments the ham-handed hun. As happens with masterworks, almost as proof indeed that such
they be, opportunities for interpretive disparity are as wide as the world.
A former TAS colleague didn’t much like the pre-publication Gardiner
Eroica Deutsche Grammophon laid on reviewers. I think he’s wrong,
but there you are. So let’s rather consider an ambitious project’s
sound. DG’s 4-D logo graces all performances save that of the Second Symphony.
I’ve a 4-D Deutsche Grammophon sampler that confirms, sad to say, what
the discophile knows, or should: Superior recordings have largely to do with
good engineering, hardware refinements a distant second. Philips’ Mercury
Living Presence sampler tells us, one, that Bob Fine was a gifted teckie and,
two, that by today’s standards his tools were crude. One hears distortion,
a restricted dynamic and frequency range, and remarkably convincing sounds,
with particular regard to soundstage location. These Archiv productions don’t
capture dimension as well; they are, however, exemplars of resolution, a quality
critical to the perception of a period ensemble’s rather brighter timbral
distinctions; one also hears string tuttis, for example, falling on the hard
rather than plush side of events. The recordings nicely capture the orchestra’s
weight: the low strings in Symphony No. 5’s first movement project a palpable
excitement. In the main, the set’s sound is not terribly distant from that
of the live experience. (Exquisite localization in an exquisitely dimensioned
space is very much a recording thing, as compensation, it has been suggested,
for the visual component’s absence. Close your eyes in a hall and your
perception of depth especially is likely to diminish.) Is the pre-4-D recording
of Symphony No. 2 in any way inferior? A tough call. If the Second reveals a
hair’s-breadth less resolution (as perhaps I think I hear it doing),
a good case exists for the 4-D system’s merits in capable hands.
To further befuddle judgment or deflect its application entirely, the Second’s
is the only performance to have been recorded in the Great Hall of London’s
Blackheath Concert Halls (in 1991). The venues total five, four in England and
one, of the Fifth Symphony, in Barcelona, as a "live" recording. One
and Three were likewise done "live" and are likewise free of the usual
evidence - coughing, stage fuss, applause. Given the multiplicity of the tonmeister’s
assistant engineers and sites, the technical aspect’s high standard is
one of the project’s commendable strengths. Whichever of the symphonies I listen to, I hear Gardiner sculpting
phrases for maximum suppleness, color, and form. He’s been called fussy.
I don’t think so, not here, anyway. Fussy interpretations could never hold
together so well, tending, as they do, to collapse under the weight of overwrought
ironing. Certainly, these are juicy performances, within a context of swiftness
we’re not accustomed to. The Ninth, for example, transpires in a jot less
than sixty minutes. (To repeat the old story, it’s the Ninth’s average
playing time that set the CD’s original length of just under 75 minutes.)
The open-ended search for the Ninth’s perfect performance may have more
than a little to do with this most innovative of Beethoven’s symphonies
want of coherence vis-à-vis its predecessors. The Scherzo’s gargantuan
unwieldiness and Adagio’s meandering tendencies, relative to the outer
movements’ riveting monumentality, arrive in sum at an incompatibility
that quite evaporates in the white light of the Dionysian finish, within which
we discover a marvelous surprise, the janissary music, alla marcia: Rather
than a troop-in-review, Gardiner takes it as a Frenchified lark, a novelty that
works. A richly variegated, magically integrated finale’s parts adhere,
thanks to a splendid conductor’s overview, an ideal vocal quartet, one
of the world’s great choruses, and masterful instrumentalists. With regard to Gardiner’s method and madness, we’ve
more than this Beethoven set to go by. The conductor, his OR&R, English
Baroque Soloists, and Monteverdi Choir have been long and busy on the scene.
The EBS’s Bach catalog is large. Particularly relevant is their performance,
with the Monteverdi Choir and soloists, of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis
[Archiv 429 799-2], Gramophone’s Record of the Year for 1991. For
once, this chauvinist magazine got it right. Gardiner’s is, I suspect,
the best recent performance on disc. But Beethoven again. A misgiving insinuates itself into any assessment of period-instrument groups. Will they, whatever they play, betray a signature ensemble? Is the "history" we’re hearing as much about interactive chemistry, or worse, a group’s pat style, as a period’s musical stamp? A disc released in ’93, Philips 434 402-2, offers G’s OR&R in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Having come to know these Beethoven performances, one doesn’t hear the OR&R as the same ensemble. It’s 1830, and the orchestra as a "classical" institution is in a condition of evolutionary flux that Berlioz turns to an atmospheric advantage no modern ensemble quite manages to capture. If gooseflesh be the measure, Gardiner’s last-movement reading, Songe d’une nuit de sabbat, plays hellbent for a bizarrerie that’s simply got to be right. Alas, an airless and gritty sonic precludes recommendation. A Fanfare colleague reports the Philips’ sound as good. Doctors, architects, and lawyers must pass license exams in order to practice; professional listeners needn’t. Nor do they seem to perish by attrition. The OR&R and Monteverdi Choir’s performance of the youthful Messe solonnelle is technically better. Scardanelli,
[More articles by Signor Scardanelli.]
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