Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Friday 19th September 2014
Do we take serious music too seriously? That's a question I've been ruminating on since this
Beethoven Festival 2 concert by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra at the Adelaide Town Hall. In Beethoven's day entertainment was live. You either did it yourself or went and watched someone else do it. If you heard a Beethoven symphony once, you might never hear it again. And that first performance might not have been up to the composer's satisfaction. We know this is true. The excitement that came with that circumstance is missing from much contemporary concert going. If you've got eleven recordings of the
Piano Concerto No. 1, why go and hear Robert Levin play it with your home town orchestra. If you weren't there, you missed more than a treat. This concert was a highlight of the year. Levin, and conductor, Nicholas McGegan, brought such immediacy and energy to the music the audience was swept up and carried along. While the first of the Beethoven Fest concerts had a delayed action effect on me, this one was, dare I say, in your face and in your ear.
Levin is a showman/show-off. A scholar of immense erudition and fine technique, certainly, but then there are others who can be so described. He brings such theatricality to his performance that makes you think that Beethoven's own performances must have had that panache. He writes his own cadenzas, often improvising them on the spot. This was the tradition in Beethoven's day. There's always a place near the end of the movement when the pianist can make it up for a few minutes, embellishing and exploring themes from the music he's just played. Rock guitarists do it. Jazz musicians can't be prevented from doing it. Classical pianists rarely dare. At the end of his thunderous 1st movement cadenza, as the orchestra played the last few bars, he turned to the audience and raised his hands in athletic triumphant. Show-off indeed. That energy continued through to the end.
His party trick is to solicit from the audience little musical themes or motifs in the style of Beethoven, which he then improvises upon. The themes he was given were all recognizably Beethoven which gave his impassioned improvisation as stamp of authenticity.
The additional theatricality of the evening was found in the two other works on the program. The
Leonore Overture No. 2, like the first one last week, draws on themes from the opera, but in this case quoting the trumpet call from off-stage that signifies the arrival of the cavalry, and we heard it from off-stage, and we heard it coming closer to the auditorium. A simple device but wonderfully apposite.
The
Symphony No. 7, is the apotheosis of the dance and, in the second movement, one of those life saving, mood altering things that music can do better than drugs, and faster. On the other hand, the
Symphony No. 9, is an uncomfortable yoking of a classical symphony to a choral ode, the main theme of which is instantly memorable because of its banality, clumping up and down the keys.
In the middle, the
Symphony No. 9, is bright, polished, amiable, affable, welcoming, and genuinely pleased that you are there to enjoy its company. This is a symphony that offers you a plate of sachertorte, and suggests that you have another piece to take home. McGegan obviously loves it. Beethoven had fun writing it. It's all in major keys for a start. He may also have been jokingly paying tribute the invention of the metronome by his friend, Maalzel.
McGegan's characteristic hand gestures and podium postures (no dear it's not 'twerking' if a middle aged and portly gentleman does it in front of an orchestra) kept the energy flowing and, interestingly, he signalled the last beat of each movement with a little throw away gesture, a little wrap up signal. For the final bars of the last movement it was the big hands, and the arms outstretched. Bravo maestro, bravo soloist, bravo orchestra. Such excitement, such a memorable night.
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