I can’t help but smile at the fact that less than 24 hours after finishing my concert with the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales, I was rehearsing Beethoven 5 and the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Surrey Mozart Players.

Preparing the ultimate “warhorse” piece at the same time as a preparing four very little known and “difficult” pieces of modern music can’t help but underline the qualities that music of our time and music of the past share, sometimes in spite of the wishes of the composers!

Anyway, this is my second Beethoven 5 since Christmas, and I thought the hard core conducting fanatics might be interested to know how the two projects stack up. First, we compare the two orchestras and look at assumptions about the “right” orchestra for Beethoven….

The Band-

Both groups are chamber orchestras, using almost identical sized string sections (about 8 first violins in both cases, although the LCO performance had smaller cello and bass sections). Beethoven’s music works magnificently with small string sections, but it is a complete fallacy that Beethoven would have necessarily expected or even preferred a string section of this size to that of a modern symphony orchestra. In fact, the performance of the 7^th and 8^th symphonies used 36 violins, 14 violas, 12 cellos, 7 basses and doubled winds. Given that the instrumentation of the 7^th and 8^th is smaller than that of the 5^th, 6^th or 9^th, it is very possible that the use of smaller orchestras for the premieres of those pieces was more an economic matter than an artistic preference on Beethoven’s part. Beethoven was careful to make his orchestral works adaptable to groups of different sizes. After all, he understood the perils of orchestral economics all-too-well, and wanted his music to be successful in all kinds of performing situations.

In fact, when using a large orchestra such as for the premiere of the 7^th and 8^th, Beethoven used to mark not only when the winds should and shouldn’t “double,” but also divided the string section into a reduced and full section. Contrary to what you may have read, Beethoven was not against doubling, and actually put thought into how to use doubling of winds in performances during his lifetime. The fact is, we can never know for certain whether Beethoven preferred or wanted a huge or a moderate sized orchestra– the evidence is inconclusive, but we can be quite sure that he understood the practical issues in working with different sized bands. Yes, a smaller orchestra makes for more transparent textures and ease of precision, but a bigger one (especially when deployed using a mixture of tutti and reduced sections) has a much bigger possible dynamic range (bigger string sections can play both louder and softer than smaller ones), and we know Beethoven was obsessed with getting the biggest possible range of dynamics out of the orchestra. Think of the description of Beethoven’s own conducting from Ludwig Spohr-

“whenever there was a sforzando he vehemently opened his arms which had previously been folded on his chest. To the piano he would bend forward – the lower, the softer he wanted it played. Then, when there was a crescendo, he gradually straightened himself up and when the forte arrived leaped into the air; sometimes even, he would shout in order to reinforce the forte….”

John Elliott Gardiner says on the discussion disc that accompanies his excellent recording that Beethoven felt that larger orchestras in his day were incapable of playing his music at his tempos, but, even if that were true then, it is certainly no longer true. While just slower than Norrington and Gardiner, both Karajan and Kleiber recorded the first movement of the 5^th just a few metronome points short of Beethoven’s tempo using huge orchestras, and Solti’s own score (which you can find here) shows that he did the piece in the 90’s at the metronome mark, which is just as fast as the fastest performances with small orchestras. Also, even today, conductors not only continue to tend to take some movements slower than Beethoven marks, but to take others too fast. In just the last couple of years, two of my favorite conductors Haitink and Harnoncourt (whose performances were both said to be to various degrees historically aware and informed by the metronome markings) start the last movement of B5 faster than the Scherzo, in complete contradiction of Beethoven’s instruction to downshift from 96 to 84. In the end, tempo has nothing to do with the size of the band, and everything to do with how fast the conductor conducts.

In Lancashire, we sat the strings in the “normal” modern seating, with the violins together on my left, then violas then cellos on my right. In Surrey, we are seating the violins antiphonally with the cellos next to the firsts and the violas remaining in their usual position. Although I generally prefer this seating for a variety of reasons, there are many factors that go into deciding what will be the best setup for any orchestra. Leonard Slatkin has recently written an excellent post on this topic for Classical Source. Being dogmatic in the face of practical needs can cause way more harm than good.

For the LCO performance, we used hand horns, rotary trumpets and a trombone trio of alto, tenor and bass trombones. With SMP, we’re using modern horns, which cause balance problems in the first movement where they often have to balance with the woodwinds (bars 110-117 are almost impossible to balance using modern horns an un-doubled woodwinds), but solve problems in the last movement where they need all the power they can get (especially the second horn) in places like letter A. I haven’t heard yet about the trumpets, but even if we were using natural trumpets, which I would love to try, I would want to avoid the screaming-screetchy, completely out of balance kind of playing one tends to hear in many original instrument recordings. More likely, we’ll have rotaries again (the trumpets don’t come till later in the rehearsal sequence).

Both of these bands use modern timps, which isn’t ideal (although the timpanist in LCO was fantastic at working around the limitations of the drums). I love the sound of period timps in passages where Beethoven wants to really use them as drums or you want to differentiate between different kinds of strokes. For instance, at letter G in the Finale, Beethoven switches the timpani from a ff roll to sixteenth notes, something that is almost impossible to hear with modern drums, but works brilliantly on period ones. However,  where they have a more harmonic function, like in the transition from the 3^rd to the 4^th movements, they don’t really give you a lot of pitch (especially in soft playing- the softer you play a period timp the less pitch you get). Modern timps on the other hand can be way too muddy, and when you use hard sticks to make up for that, the plastic heads can sound, well, plastic. Viennese timpani seem like a perfect compromise to me- the leather heads (you can use leather on any timp, but they’re a pain in the but to work with) give you more articulation and clarity, don’t give you that nasty, plasticky smacking sound when you use wooden sticks, and yet they can ring and sustain when you want them to.

One thing I was very happy about at the LCO was the wonderfully furry contrabassoon playing- Gunther Schuller points out in his essay on B5 that one can rarely hear the trombones in the recordings of the last movement, and that you almost never hear the contra, which is a great noise.

Both of my groups use modern woodwinds exclusively. I’ve never done a performance with period winds, and would love to, however, their impact (especially in an extrovert piece like B5) tends to be less than that of the using period versus modern brass. In most ensemble playing, the differences in timbre get a bit lost, so it is only in solo writing that you hear a huge difference. Sometimes, this is fascinating, but modern wind instruments do project a bit easier, and sometimes the solo wind playing on period recordings can sound a bit frail (although there are plenty of astounding virtuosos out there nowdays). On the other hand, I always prefer wooden flutes in classical repertoire, as they seem to blend better, tune better and look cooler.

One instrument I don’t have much choice about is the most important one- LCO play in an intimate and very live room that really lets the orchestra’s sound develop and ring. SMP will be playing in the Electric Theatre, which is a very comfortable venue with excellent facilities, but lousy acoustics. Our first SMP concert this year was at Holy Trinity Church in Guildford, which has magnificent acoustics, but we lost a lot of our audience. Apparently, many of our regular listeners prefer the bathrooms and the bar at the Electric to the acoustic splendor of Holy Trinity. Just goes to show you that one should not think that correcting a dot to a dash is going to save society….