Fresh Beethoven takes from a fine conductor

Beethoven: Symphonies 5 & 7

All right, 2020 is indeed the Beethoven Year, marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth. But I wasn't planning on turning Music For Several Instruments into an all-Beethoven blog. We'll see how things go in January, but in the meantime I'm really enjoying listening to the Big Guy as we see out the year and the decade: the Late String Quartets from The Brodsky Quartet, the superb complete Piano Sonatas by Igor Levit, and now this fine new disc of Symphonies from the NDR Radiophilharmonie under Andrew Manze.

Back in 2010 Manze talked with Michael Cookson about his transition from conducting while playing the violin in Baroque repertoire, where he made his early reputation:

But there comes a point with the repertoire when you cannot do that anymore. For me the point came with Beethoven and so to go any further meant I had to put the violin down and conduct. I was always interested in a wide repertoire, not everything, but a wide repertoire.

A decade later, Manze is settled in with the superb NDR Radiophilharmonie, and he's indeed exploring a wider repertoire: most notably the Mendelssohn symphonies in a marvellous series for Pentatone. In this new recording of two of Beethoven's greatest symphonies you can almost hear the pre-figured Mendelssohn echoing in the background. Manze is driving the two-way street between the Classic and Romantic here, proving once again Jorge Luis Borges' axiom: "Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." This doesn't mean that Manze adds Romantic excrescences to Beethoven, any more than he transfers anything more than a feeling of lightness and an extemporaneous freshness from the early music with which he was once almost exclusively connected. The Fifth Symphony has plenty of drama, but light and dark have equal weight in the great slow movement. One has the feeling that Manze is leading his fine instrumentalists through Beethoven's score without any special agenda of his own; hence his fresh takes sound organic rather than contrived.

Peter Ackroyd, in his marvellous book Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, sees this point of view as something typically British:

What manner of imagination is this? It is one that eschews purity of function for elaboration of form, that strays continually into anecdote and detail, that distrusts massiveness of conception or intent, that avoids 'depth' of feeling or profundity of argument in favour of artifice and rhetorical display.

Manze's Beethoven, I would argue, is firmly in this British tradition of pattern and elaborate decoration, and thus outside the 'profound' tradition of Beethoven conductors, German especially (Furtwangler, Klemperer, Karajan). But as Hugo von Hofmannsthal once said, "Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface." The fact that Manze is leading a German orchestra down this different path - not radically different, but different nevertheless - shows the close bond he has built with his NDR players since he took over the band just over five years ago. One looks forward to more Beethoven from the same source, as well as more varied repertoire in the future. Which repertoire? Surprise us, Maestro!

This disc will be released on January 10, 2020.