Not making history

The rationale of the Resound Beethoven project is about what a wine expert would call terroir; it's a historical reconstruction of the original venue for important premieres of orchestral works from the composer's lifetime. I've bought in to the concept to some extent, though I preferred the theatrical Egmont Music of volume 3 to the much more demanding 3rd Symphony in volume 4. For the 9th Symphony the original venue is no longer in place, so we hear instead a recording from the Redoutensaal at Hofburg Vienna, where the second performance took place on May 23, 1824. But this is in a sense moot, since because of his deafness Beethoven would have heard this music in a completely different venue: his head. All bets are off, I think. When we think of a Platonic Ideal of the 9th Symphony living in Beethoven's head, how this music sounded in a long-ago venue seems less important. Instead, we can imagine a direct line from Beethoven's head through his score and nearly two hundred years of performance traditions to the mind and imagination and musical skills of a conductor and a group of musicians. The music on this disc has some plusses, most especially in a rather good slow movement, which combines a child-like simplicity with subtle atmospheric effects. But the rest of the work sounds very square compared with the powerful rhythmic thrust - I want to say swing - of Toscanini. It seems very rustic when we put it next to Karajan's polish and cool elegance. And it's lacking entirely in the glimpses of the other world that Solti brings, especially when Jessye Norman sings. The sense of place looms large in certain famous performances of the 9th Symphony, none more momentous and historic than the Christmas Day 1989 Leonard Bernstein concert with an augmented Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, as the Berlin Wall came down. There Bernstein and his musicians made history, but only because the spirit of the time lifted them up and inspired them. But without a more compelling and engaging performance no venue will make a big difference.

This disc will be released on March 24, 2017.

Clean and Stylish, but Static Beethoven

Last May I raved about the 3rd volume in the Resound Beethoven series, where Martin Haselbock and the Orchester Wiener Akademie performed the Egmont music and the Consecration of the House Overture in the hall in which the music had been premiered. With the latest volume the stakes have risen, though. I consider the Eroica Symphony the greatest symphony ever written, and there are a string of performances that I worship: Klemperer, Walter, Szell, Karajan, Giuilini in the big-band group, and Bruggen and Harnoncourt on the HIP side. How do Haselbock and his Vienna group compare, forgetting for a moment their completely apposite venue (the Eroica Saal at the Palais Lobkowitz)?

Listen to this great live performance with the Orchestra of the 18th Century conducted by Frans Bruggen:


It's clear that Haselbock doesn't bring anything close to that excitement from the beginning. Furthermore, Tom Service praises both Bruggen and Otto Klemperer for "the cumulative momentum that builds from the first bar to the last" in the ground-breaking 1st Movement. I don't feel the momentum, which I think really does explain why these Klemperer and Bruggen move me so much. Thanks for that explanation, Tom! Haselbock turns in a clean, stylish performance, but it's curiously static. I'm still impressed with the concept of hearing Beethoven's music in the space in which it was first heard, and the contrast between the Symphony and the Septet on the 2nd disc does help to define the acoustic space. But music of this greatness really requires something special when it comes to interpretation.

The problem with concerts

In 1923 Paul Valéry wrote an article entitled "Le problème des musées", in which he decried the move of artistic objects from places of worship to museums:

Je perçois tout à coup une vague clarté. Une réponse s’essaye en moi, se détache peu à peu de mes impressions, et demande à se prononcer. Peinture et Sculpture, me dit le démon de l’Explication, ce sont des enfants abandonnés. Leur mère est morte, leur mère Architecture.

I thought of these "abandoned children" when I listened to the latest Resound Beethoven disc, which attempts to re-settle Beethoven's works, ill-housed in alien modern concert halls, back to their mother's bosom: the very halls and theatres where they were first heard in old Vienna. Context is provided when we listen to a concert that's recorded in the very space in which it was first heard.

This latest twist on Historically Informed Performance is really only another approximation, since of course we'll never precisely bridge that two-century gap between the performance of the Consecration of the House Overture at the opening of the Josefstadt Theatre on 3 October 1822 and today. It's very rare that we come across a treasure in its very "find-spot", the term archaeologists use to refer to the place where an object is dug up. But the Josefstadt Theatre is still there, and still available as a concert and recording venue. To return to the world of museums, Philippe de Montebello re-states this problem:

On the matter of moving an altarpiece back into a church, this is no more than just a spacial re-integration, for the temporal element has been lost forever. We are not 15th- or 16th century Italians and cannot ever imagine what it was like to live in northern Italy in that period. *

But that, I believe, is overstating the case. Of course we can imagine what it was like to be those Italians, or those 19th century Viennese. That's why we call it imagination. If we're serious about wanting to hear music the way Beethoven's audiences heard it, every little bit helps. We're all museum-goers in the world, and we're dead in the water if we can't imagine the world of 1822, or the world of last Wednesday. When we listen to Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees, can we ever imagine what it was like to dance to this music in Studio 54 in 1977?  Crank up your stereo, light up your disco ball, give it a twirl, and dance! There you go.

Back to this disc. It would be only an interesting, esoteric, minor experiment if it were not for the superb playing by the Orchester Wiener Akademie under Matin Haselbock. John Malkovich provides an amazing theatrical experience in the Egmont narration and melodramas. Here we're on more solid ground, for aren't we used to imagining the original character an actor plays even if it's centuries from its creation? I'm excited to think that I'm listening to something close to what the audience heard in the Josefstadt Theatre back then, even if Beethoven heard nothing. The impressive music production by Stephan Reh and sound engineering by Martin Rust provides a musical experience so different from what we usually hear when we listen to Beethoven. Sure it's a kind of museum experience, but we're in the hands of superb curators here.

* In Rendezvous With Art, with Martin Gayford, 2014, p. 50.