UPCOMING CONCERT-<\/p>\n
Lancashire Chamber Orchestra<\/p>\n
Sunday, January 20, 2009<\/p>\n
7:30 PM<\/p>\n
Altrincham Grammar School for Girls<\/p>\n
Mozart- Overture to \u201cDie Zauberflote\u201d<\/p>\n
Beethoven- Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major<\/p>\n
Ivan Hovorum, piano<\/p>\n
Beethoven- Symphony no 5 in C minor<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thoughts from Ken-<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It seems that whenever a critic wants to solve the economic problems of the classical music industry, or whenever a poor composer is at the end of their wits trying to get their music performed, the culprit is always the same- Beethoven 5. To listen to many, you would think that Beethoven 5 was like the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events- a piece so ubiquitous that it now appeared on every single concert by every single orchestra\u00a0 in the world.<\/p>\n
Of course, it is a very famous piece with a high degree of familiarity for almost every listener, but I think musicians and program planners realized about 25 years ago that it was a special occasion piece, and not one to be worn out by over-frequent performances. It was the last Beethoven symphony I played in its entirety as a cellist, and the one I\u2019ve played and conducted the least since then. I spoke with my wife this morning, and she can only remember having played it once since joining the BBC seven years ago, and that was a truly ghastly affair with some deranged half-wit instrumentalist at the helm (funny how a 12 inch stick of wood can turn a genius instrumentalist into a derranged half-wit….\u00a0makes me\u00a0glad I was never a genius instrumentalist!) who had never been taught to give an upbeat. As a point of comparison, she\u2019s played Vaughan Williams 5 about 5 times in that same period.<\/p>\n
Still, how does one respond to a composer or critic friend who says \u201cI never want to hear that piece again- it\u2019s become so boring to me.\u201d Well, I guess I can only smile and offer my condolences. Do playwrights and theatre snobs feel the same about Shakespeare?<\/p>\n
I certainly don\u2019t program the piece to sell seats- I\u2019ve learned from hard experience that ticket sales are much more a reflection of what else is going on that night,\u00a0how effective your marketing is and\u00a0how nice the bathrooms are in the concert hall, than what you play or how well you play it.<\/p>\n
So why do it? I feel like it is a piece I\u2019m drawn to because of its difficulty- for all its familiarity, I think it is as challenging as any piece I\u2019ve ever come across.<\/p>\n
On a purely practical level, it is more merciless in its demands for rhythmic perfection than any other piece I know (including Stravinsky) except for the Coriolan Overture. There are thousands of challenges of balance and tuning, and there is no place in the piece where the conductor or players can lose focus for even a second without unfortunate consequences. I\u2019ve probably heard 60+ recordings of the piece, and, even with the marvels of digital editing, I have yet to hear a technically perfect CD- I\u2019m not speaking of interpretive disagreements, I\u2019m saying I have yet to hear a performance that is perfectly together and in tune<\/em><\/strong> from beginning to end.<\/p>\n Ah, but there are interpretive disagreements! I would say Beethoven 5 is possibly the work most likely to cause a CD to be thrown across the room in disgust (Shost 5 is another)! It is easy to sneer at some conductors who have felt the need to release their recordings of the piece with long polemics arguing why their way is better than all that came before, but I know where they come from. One becomes so passionate about the piece that simply playing it is not enough, you want to shout to the world about what you’ve discovered in your study and research. Even today, with all the accumulated scholarship on the piece, I still feel like there are relationships to be found that no performance known to be has discovered, and I\u2019ve certainly never heard a performance that seems really true to everything I see on the page.<\/p>\n I have no illusions mine will be that performance either- even in a very good rehearsal you never seem to be able to capture all you\u2019ve worked toward in a single run through. The piece defeats you, again and again.\u00a0Also- because it is so difficult (particularly the first movement), it is all too easy to lose any sense of sophistication in the drama. The mood in the recap before the oboe cadenza should be completely different, with an entirely different color and atmosphere, but this rarely happens because people are mostly focusing on playing together. Then there are the performance questions- some as simple as do you come onstage and launch straight into it like a sudden shock\u00a0or try to create a silence and a stillness first, into which the music explodes?<\/p>\n I\u00a0\u00a0tend to have long drives back from many of my rehearsals, and I\u2019ll often just listen to a bit of jazz, or maybe moan a bit about some organizational thing that didn\u2019t go right. I rarely continue to think long about the rehearsal itself. Not so with Beethoven 5- each drive back from Lancashire has found me obsessing all the way home about\u00a0an articulation or how I might better have shown a color I was after, or even just ranting about how appallingly most people play the last movement these days (there\u2019s a subject of another blog post- people really don\u2019t read music when it comes to Beethoven!). I can get home quite wound up\u2026.<\/p>\n Anyway, come Sunday, we\u2019ll play as John Daly played golf- grip it and rip and see what happens.<\/p>\n For the curious- we\u2019re using natural horns, rotary trumpets and a smallish trio of trombones (first tb on an alto for sure). We\u2019re using modern timps, and trying to find an articulation that works in this music (Beethoven uses timpani primary for rhythmic emphasis, where as later composers like Strauss tend to use them for harmonic emphasis) while also integrating into the sound of the band. I\u2019ve done the piece once before with C clarinets, which I thought was a cool sound, but not this time\u2026.<\/p>\n Also- the concerto and symphony were premiered on the same night, but were only about 1\/3 of that program\u2026. \u00a0<\/p>\n