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.

The shape-shifting composer

Lars-Erik Larsson: Symphony no. 3, Three Orchestral Pieces, Adagio, Musica permutatio

That Lars-Erik Larsson withdrew all three of his symphonies after they were first performed shows a certain lack of confidence in his own abilities as a symphonist. On the evidence of three successive CPO recordings with Andrew Manze conducting the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra this seems more a sign of imposter syndrome than any compositional weaknesses, though to be fair Larsson was working in the shadow of a daunting range of Nordic symphonies, from Stenhammar, Nielsen and Sibelius to contemporaries such as Holmboe and Pettersson, and in between, Atterberg. Larsson is best known for his rhapsodic, pastoral orchestral pieces and suites, but the Third Symphony, premiered in 1946, is especially full of the same appealing melodies and dynamic pacing one finds in his better known works, though not developed quite as freely. We have in this symphony, perhaps, just a bit of what some athletes call 'the yips', a tightening-up with a resultant loss of fluency.

In his Gramophone review of the first disc in this series, Guy Rickards calls Larsson "a musical magpie", and that continues here. Right from the beginning he makes reference to the insistent rhythms of the Scherzo to Schubert's 9th Symphony. Christoph Schlüren, in his detailed and informative liner essay, mentions both Beethoven's 5th Symphony and Borodin's 2nd in the same context. By the way, the impressive waltz-like second theme of the 1st movement was "borrowed" by George Duning for the jaunty main theme for his Bell, Book and Candle film score from 1958, though he adds bongos. I expect this is just a coincidence, since it's very unlikely this music had made it to Hollywood then. It's a fun game to track down these quotes, in both directions, and I don't believe his homages diminish Larsson's music especially. In the end the performance of Manze and his players won me over.

Rickards also mentions that Larsson "flitted between styles throughout his life," and we have two surprising pieces here - the 3 Orchestral Pieces, op. 49, and the Adagio, op. 48, that show his experiments with what Schlüren terms a "free twelve-tone style." These manage to compress the usual Larsson material into a much tighter construction and a darker than usual mood, but still with more than a bit of the Larsson charm. I found the Adagio especially appealing, though it's striking how optimistic Larsson sounds here, in what one might consider Allan Pettersson territory.

There's a further stylistic shift with the final work on the disc, the Musica permutatio, which was also the final work of Larsson's life. Freer harmonically, it's very much a learned work, with impressive contrapuntal passages. It was premiered in 1982, four years before Larsson's death.

This disc will be released on October 5, 2018.