Beethoven's Choral Symphony

Is Beethoven’s Choral Symphony the greatest piece of music ever written? It’s there or thereabouts as far as I’m concerned, and it’s been that way now for many decades. A towering piece of invention with an overarching structure, a staggering opening, a beautiful slow section and a final movement which changed music for ever. Immense power combined with great warmth and humanity, it always leaves me speechless.

I’ve heard it a few times during my lifetime, not too often I have to say. This is NOT background music to be played on an iPod as you jog around the local park. It demands and deserves your full and undivided attention. The best performance I ever heard was at the end of the Beethoven Cycle which Simon Rattle gave as his last concerts with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in around 1995. It made such an impact on me, I can still hear it today.

The LSO taking the applause.
(There's definitely something going on
between the Piccolo and the Horn Player!)

In my life, a fair amount of water has flowed under a reasonable number of bridges since that performance, and tonight was the first performance of the 9^th I’ve been to since that night. A few days ago, I trooped off to Symphony Hall to hear it performed once more, this time performed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Sir John is at the vanguard of the revival of early music, and its playing on instruments of the time. His performances are often described as “blowing the cobwebs” off the music, with consistently faster tempi than those perhaps we (certainly I)have become accustomed to experience over my lifetime.

The curse of music – the record, CD or LP – comes into play here. Ever since I became addicted to music I have bought recordings to play when ever I wanted. The inevitable downside of this is that it is all too easy to imprint a “standard” recording - one which becomes the definitive performance - into one’s brain. So, when someone comes along with a different way of performing it, you have to approach it with an open mind, something which is often not easy since you may have heard your “standard” performance hundreds of times. Anyway, I flung the doors of my mind open as far as possible and hinged them back as I set off for Symphony Hall.

There’s almost a classic programme which is played when the Choral Symphony is performed. Beethoven’s 1^st Symphony is often used as the first part of the programme. Written about 20 years apart, the two works document and demonstrate the vast distance Beethoven moved the whole of music over his life time. His First Symphony is a homage to Haydn and Mozart, and his last, two decades on, sits literally in another world. This comparison shows the power, the vision and the importance of the man, and why to me he is simply the Greatest Artist the world has ever known.

The 1^st Symphony suited Sir John’s style perfectly. It was lively but with a great degree of power and muscle, and it showed up the LSO’s virtuosity quite superbly. His conducting places significant demands on the orchestral players, but they handled it with great panache. I can’t recall hearing it played any better than this.

Now the Choral Symphony is a beast of very different shape and dimensions, literally music from another age. The LSO’s forces were not massive, as Sir John’s approach was for precision, accuracy and fleet of footedness rather than the huge orchestras I have been used to. He positioned the violins all across the front of the soundstage, and sited the deeper Strings on the left rather than the right. The Monteverdi choir numbered “only” about 40 strong, which was about 25% of the size of the forces under Rattle’s baton 15 years ago. For reasons I for one couldn’t understand, the four soloists sat on chairs on the far left of the orchestra, almost as if they were on the Naughty Step for musical misdemeanours unknown to the audience. Surely, they were not going to perform their roles, which are central to the last movement, from the wings? Intriguing.

There were a lot of extremely good things about the performance, but, sadly, I was not won over. Maybe it’s my inbuilt “Ludditeness”, I don’t know, but it all seemed a bit of a rush. The LSO’s playing was terrific, giving the aura of a powerful car under the conductor’s baton, which responded instantly to his every demand. A special mention is in order here for two of the players. Firstly the percussionist who I thought had a fantastic touch and a great technique. Secondly the Piccolo player, a lady who sat on the stage unmoved for almost all of the performance like an admiring groupie for the woodwind player next door. When her time came, she stood up and her little set of pipes soared way above the rest of the orchestra – she played it extremely well.

I enjoyed the precision and beauty of the playing, but to me, this is music which needs space to breathe. The slow movement wasn’t that slow. It is a piece of serenity to me in the midst of some of the most tempestuous music you can find, and here it seemed to lack that air of stillness I want from it. I’m sure Sir John, who is 3 years older than I am, would look over his glasses, muttering something about “fuddy-duddy”, but it didn’t work for me.

The last movement took on the air of a man who had glanced at his watch and had realised that if they got a bit of a Wiggle on, they could just about make it onto the earlier train home. It rocketed off at a hell of a rate, and when the soloists each walked onto the centre of the stage, mid performance (very distracting I have to say), I felt they were hanging onto the conductor by his coat-tails. They then, as their individual contribution was over, trooped off to their seats in the wings. All too “Brian Rix” farce for me, and quite unnecessary and theatrical. It took something away rather than adding to the performance.

The whole performance was all very virtuosic, but in its tumultuous surge, to me it lost the essential importance, size and impact of the composer’s message. This is after all one of the greatest and most powerful moments in all music, and the speed it was played, whilst giving a real sense of forward motion, seemed to me to leave the essence of the music behind in the rush. Perhaps it was just me, but Sad.

So there you go. The whole place rose as one to applaud the evening, as I did. You couldn’t fault the energy, the precision or the passion of the playing. I just wanted a bit more grandeur and space.

Tabs:

beethoven, choral symphony, eliot gardiner, symphony hall, lso

CBSO PLAYS VERDI's REQUIEM

If I’ve got any regular readers left after my somewhat sporadic and random postings of the last few months, they will have seen a theme within the posts developing about various concerts I’ve been to during the year. Earlier in 2011, I decided to go to a few more such events than I’d managed in previous years, and these occasions have tended to turn into short pieces here.

Two weeks ago I jumped on the train to Birmingham, had a decent supper in Carluccio’s in Brindley Place and rolled up at nearby Symphony Hall to hear the first concert in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s 2011/12 season. They had decided to go for broke and start with Verdi’s Requiem, one of the greatest pieces of religious music ever written.

WHAT A FABULOUS SIGHT - THE CBSO AND CHOIR
Click to Enlarge

I wrote a piece a while back about the various ways the major composers over the past five centuries had tacked the Requiem Mass. In classical music terms, it’s a bit like climbing Everest, with some composers following well-trodden routes and others carving out new ways to the summit. Between them all, they have written some of the most moving music the world has ever heard, and Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, first performed in 1874, is one of the very best.

Verdi’s main claim to fame is a staggering series of Operas, some of the best known ever written. His melodic writings have often transcended the relatively limited appeal of the original operas they came from and various sections from them have become iconic and popular shorter pieces known by many people who ordinarily would profess no knowledge or even liking for opera.

He wrote almost exclusively for the Operatic theatre, and there are at least 28 major melodramatic works to his name. On a visit to the city of Parma in Emilia-Romagna in late 2010, I went to the Opera House there, and they were in the middle of performing every single one of them, a different one on each day for 28 days without a break!

In the middle of this outpouring, he produced his Requiem, and you do not have to be any form of genius to recognise that it is as near as you will ever get to an Opera with a religious text to it. It is written for a vast orchestra, four soloists and a large double choir, and contained within its pages is some the loudest unamplified music ever written. The “Dies Irae” which is famous all over the world, is written to scare the living daylights out of you, so I’d got my new Hearing Aids tuned to 11 for the night to ensure that I got full sonic value from the evening’s performance.

I’d managed to get a fabulous seat, in the centre of the front row of the circle, and as I sat waiting expectantly the massive orchestra and choir of around 150 people were spread out completely filling the large stage in front of me. The place was totally packed out, and you could feel the expectation. Because of the large scale of performers needed, it is not a work that gets performed every day, and the CBSO is one of the world's “great” orchestras, so this was going to be a bit special.

The work has one of those fantastic openings, where the audience, as soon as the Conductor raises his baton, falls into complete silence. And I mean complete silence. There were over 2,000 people there, and you could have heard a pin drop. The expectation was incredible. After what seemed like an age of absolute nothingness, you gradually made out the sound of the strings playing the introduction of the Kyrie as softly as they possibly could, and I for one could feel the hairs on the back of my neck grabbing at me as this happened. Fantastic.

The second section after the Introit and Kyrie is the Dies Irae, and Andris Nelsons, the CBSO’s Latvian conductor blew the roof off the Hall with an incredible volume of sound. Good old Verdi. Even though it is such a well known piece of music now, when it’s played live with such immense forces, it does have an amazing effect on me.

The soloists were extremely good and the chorus was very together and responsive. It’s a piece with no intervals and lasts around 85-90 minutes, at the end of which I felt quite drained. Some people pooh-pooh it a bit as “just another opera” it but I think it is an extraordinarily affecting work, bizarrely as Verdi was an atheist. Yes, it wrings and tugs at your emotions, but what on earth is wrong with that. It’s supposed to do precisely that.

A very good night indeed.

I loved it.

Tabs:

cbso,
verdi requiem,
symphony hall

OPERA NORTH - DAS RHEINGOLD

 THE CAST AND THE ORCHESTRA TAKE THEIR OVATION

Click to enlarge

46 years ago, I had just begun studying Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial College in London. Presumably as an attempt to expand the minds of the students and ensure that at least some of them ceased to be complete Philistines, they offered a set of lunchtime lectures on a range of subjects far removed from Engineering.

I soon found myself immersed in a series of talks on Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I learnt about leitmotivs together with a smattering about the German and Scandinavian legends which form the basis of the vast story. The main thing the lecturer wanted to explain however was the music, and the way Wagner moved the tonality of music on over the 25 years or so it took him to write it. Listen to music before him, and after him, and there is no doubt that Wagner changed the sound of music for ever.

Although I dutifully went to all the lectures, I’m afraid, at the age of 19, the lure of other student activities, mainly those involving the many pubs which littered Knightsbridge and Chelsea, took over my social life, and, as a result, the next stage in my exposure to Wagner’s Operas lay dormant for several decades.

Until, that is, last night.

I had booked to see the first of the four Ring Cycle Operas, Das Rheingold, which was being performed in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. Opera North, based in Leeds was taking on the enormous undertaking of performing the four works, one a year ending in 2014. It was described as a Concert performance, and I confess I didn’t quite understand how it was all going to work.

I had chosen a ticket up in the circle where the whole stage was laid out in front of me. The orchestra, which being Wagner, was definitely of the Full Fat variety and  completely covered the stage. He wrote his music for huge forces, and here laid out in readiness, as well as the normal complement of instruments, were six Harps, a hugely augmented Brass section and a range of anvils and other percussion which would be brought into play during the evening. In front of the players there was a narrow strip, maybe 8 feet wide which, I presumed, was going to be the “stage” for the singers.

Das Rheingold was the shortest of the four operas, although it lasts for about 160 minutes - Without a break.

The music is continuous for the best part of two and three quarter hours. It starts with one of those spine tingling moments when you’re not sure if the first bass sounds are actually there or not. One minute the Hall is in total silence, and the next there is a sound of almost "somethingness" which, Oh so gradually, emerges and becomes the orchestral Introduction and Prelude.

From that moment, I was swept away, only coming back to earth nearly three hours later. The orchestra played beautifully under its conductor Richard Farnes. The Opera company clearly faced a dilemma over how to stage it, without any scenery or any costumes. They solved it by dressing the cast up in varying forms of evening dress or lounge suits for the men and long, dark dresses for the female singers. Above the stage were three vast projection screens, onto which were fed various image sequences, suggesting the mood or location of the current action. We had water, clouds, high mountain peaks and underground caverns, as well as molten metal bubbling away. Also appearing from time to time was the odd caption imparting a bit of story telling information.

The singers were uniformly excellent, although I thought Fasolt (James Creswell), one of the two giants, who, to me at least showed a startling resemblance in both dress and manner to the Kray Twins, was exceptional. He had a voice which was both beautiful and strong and he came across as extremely “Giant-like”. The German Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke who played Loge as a devious character with more than a hint of Graham Norton about him on occasions, was also terrific to watch and listen to.

The Hall itself added greatly to the enjoyment of the evening. Every time I go there, I am astounded at the acoustics of the place. From the quietest, almost soundless passages to the enormous climaxes, where you hoped someone was holding the roof of the Hall on, the clarity and subtlety of the music was perfect. Every instrument could be placed individually, from the gentle harps to the “calico ripping” brass.

I thought Richard Farnes paced the music excellently. To my ears, it had an open feel to it, and it all flowed in an uncoloured way which allowed the textures to breathe and develop naturally. The climaxes were quite breathtaking and hit me almost physically.

I was worried that the sight of such a huge orchestra in front of me would impose itself and always be in your mind, but in truth, it just disappeared from your thoughts as you concentrated on the singers.

It’s a small gripe but I don’t think the large screens worked as well as they might. To me, the images were neither Fish nor Fowl, and when, sporadically, a piece of information appeared and disappeared, I found it all a bit distracting, in a Powerpointy sort of way. With the whole work being sung in German, there were half a dozen or so large LCD TVs littered around the Hall, displaying the English translation. Unfortunately, they were all mounted at the front of the auditorium, so the poor souls up in the Gods (ie me) were just unable to read them. There was clearly room for a couple of additional screens closer to the back of the Hall, and this would have been much more helpful. Personally, I would have been quite happy if they’d projected the words directly onto the centre of the three screens, and everyone (ie me again) could then have read them without difficulty.

However, that is a minor point. The time simply rushed past, and I was completely carried with it all away into another world for the evening. Beautifully played, beautifully sung, it was an absolute and utter triumph. Very powerful and quite overwhelming. 

I caught the last train home to Shrewsbury, after walking to the station in the pouring rain, with the music still driving its way around my brain. I’m writing this a day later, and it’s still there. I’m already onto the website to book early for next year. By the time the story is finished, it will be 50 years from the time I took my first steps at University to learn about this glorious music, so - Roll on 2014.

Tabs:

opera north,
das rheingold,
wagner
symphony hall