Legendary audiophile Beethoven from Minnesota

Beethoven: Leonore Overtures, Fidelio Overture, The Ruins of Athens

Terry Pratchett, whose aphorisms are on the same level as those of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, once said, "Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong." Beethoven's orchestral music is so dramatic, but he only managed to write a single opera, and for that he came up with four different overtures, in a remarkable display of compositional dithering. What failed to fail to go wrong in Beethoven's operatic career?

First of all, Fidelio is a remarkable work, though Beethoven laboured mightily to complete it in a version he felt good about, creating lots of hard feelings along the way. It's not as if Beethoven's compositional career has any dead spots in it. If he didn't write a great deal of vocal music, he obviously made up for that with instrumental, chamber, orchestral and sacred music at the highest level. So here's the first answer: he was busy writing other kinds of music.

Secondly, there's a difference between dramatic music and theatrical music. Opera is a collaborative art, and Beethoven is the least likely person to succeed in working with others. It's maybe only because we have Mozart's example at hand that we think Beethoven should have produced other operas besides Fidelio. It wouldn't be until Wagner that someone as self-centered as Beethoven succeeded in creating both quantity and quality in his operas. But Wagner is perhaps sui generis, and besides, he had Beethoven as a musical model.

Listening to the three Overtures to Leonore, I thought about those DVD "deleted scenes" commentaries, where movie directors explain why scenes were cut. When he moves from the 2nd to the 3rd Overture, Beethoven tightens up his material and jettisons everything that doesn't move things along. This isn't to save time, but to allow him to introduce a very dramatic recapitulation (the two pieces are virtually the same length - around 14:20 - on this recording). In any case, with the Leonore Overtures we have three splendid concert works that refer to the dramatic feeling of Fidelio, without in any way becoming a potpourri of themes or "opera without words".

In 1980 Vox released a 3 LP VoxBox set of Beethoven's orchestral music for the stage played by the Minnesota Orchestra, conducted by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. This was one of the projects produced and engineered by Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz of Elite Recordings, who made some of the most impressive sounding classical discs ever. We finally have one of those LPs - comprising the 3 Leonore Overtures, the Fidelio Overture, and the Overture and some incidental pieces from The Ruins of Athens - available on CD, transferred in 192 kHz, 24 bit High Definition sound, from the original analogue tapes.

Though I don't call myself an audiophile, I certainly appreciate the lifelike orchestral sound presented in this project. And I definitely think that this is Beethoven playing of the highest order. In Leonore 2 and 3, Skrowaczewski has his musicians hitting on all cylinders; he takes things at a feverish pace at times, sure that his fine musicians can follow. I've focused on those two works, but the others on this disc are wonderful as well. There are a couple of bonus tracks that are really fun: the Turkish March and March and Chorus "Schmückt die Altäre" from The Ruins of Athens. The latter features the choir of the Bach Society of Minnesota.

This is orchestral virtuosity of the highest order. I look forward to more of these splendid Vox Audiophile recordings in the near future.

This album will be released on March 24, 2023.