Monday 28 September 2015

The Beethoven Marathon

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra launched their 70th anniversary season this weekend with a unique Beethoven marathon.  Three concerts (Friday evening, Saturday afternoon and evening) presented the complete cycle of Beethoven piano concertos plus several other works.  The piano soloist was the young Canadian virtuoso, Stewart Goodyear.

It was a remarkable weekend of music, not least for pulling up a few real rarities of Beethoven's that are almost never performed live.

So I'm going to start with some comments about those other works before getting to the main events, the concerto performances.

Friday night's concert opened with the Grand Philharmonic Choir joining the orchestra for Beethoven's brief cantata, Meeresstille und gluckliche Fahrt (most accurately translated into English as "Becalmed sea and prosperous voyage").  This work sets a pair of short poems by Goethe, the first describing the edge of terror besetting sailors who are stuck at sea with no wind to fill the sails, and the second describing the rise of the wind and the resumption of the voyage, up to the point where land is sighted.  The choir and orchestra alike performed the slow, quiet opening portion with incredible precision -- essential when combining staccato sung notes with pizzicati from the strings. The rush of the rising wind was played with beautiful realism, and the choir swung energetically into the joyful allegro of the prosperous voyage.  Fine performance of a true rarity.

Since the Saturday afternoon concert involved only one concerto, this was the performance which really showcased the orchestra.  The concert opened with a work which is probably better known, but not much more often played: the overture to Coriolan.  It's an intense, stormy piece, accurately depicting the vehemence of mood of the title character, and with a quiet ending which almost perfectly pictures his death.  This work has many sudden silences built into it, and many sharp attacks by the full orchestra so precision is essential.  Music director Edwin Outwater led a fiery, edgy account that emphasized these dramatic contrasts.

This concert also included the so-called "little" Eighth Symphony.  It may be the shortest of the famous nine, but that certainly doesn't make it an also-ran for either structural or emotional interest.  I'd bet that when Beethoven described this creation as little, he was being heavily ironic to someone who couldn't tell that legs were being pulled!

Outwater and the orchestra made the most of the sudden loud-soft contrasts and silent pauses which pepper this score as much as Coriolan.  The use of the so-called European seating plan with first and second violins on opposite sides of the conductor paid stereophonic dividends in some of the antiphonal passages.  Throughout the symphony, tempi were brisk and the music always went with a lift and a swing.  It wouldn't be far wrong to describe this as a playful reading, even if some of the jokes are on a practically gigantic scale.  Only in the finale did the music become perhaps a shade too hectic.  The gimmick is that the rich resonance of the Centre In The Square can make mush out of rapid passagework which might sound clear in another venue.

The Saturday night concert opened with another rarity, the overture to King Stephen.  This incidental music was composed late in Beethoven's life for a play presented as a companion piece to The Ruins of Athens.  I think it's best described as "quirky", at least in terms of the odd chord progression and the little organ-grinder-type tune which opens it and interrupts the flow from time to time.  The main theme, allegro, is more conventional but good and lively all the same.

And then, of course, there was the centrepiece of the entire weekend: the five Piano Concertos, spread out with # 1 and # 4 on Friday night, # 3 on Saturday afternoon, and # 2 and # 5 on Saturday night.  All of these performances were noteworthy for the close communication between conductor and soloist and for the consequent tightly-integrated performances.  No less noteworthy or fascinating for the audience was the giant overhead video screen giving a live camera feed focused on the piano keyboard -- for once you didn't have to be sitting on the left side of the hall to see what the pianist was doing!

Although the big, dramatic passages may be more remembered by many, this series of concerts has reminded me forcibly of how important the quieter pages are in Beethoven -- not just in the slow movements, but also in many passages of the outer movements.  In the first two concertos we are still in the world of Mozart, and the music we encounter is scaled appropriately.  By the time we reach the last two we are completely into the world of Beethoven, the Olympian world of musical drama that we have come to know by his name.  Even there, though, the piano spends a surprising amount of time playing quite quietly.  Many of the most important structural features of these works also occur in quiet passages.  Think of the three quiet rising scales played by the piano at three key points in the opening movement of # 5, the so-called Emperor Concerto.

Already in Concerto # 1, Goodyear's quiet playing indicated something special.  As always, I couldn't help getting annoyed at the cadenza which goes on and on and on, and is far out of scale with the rest of the first movement!  The slow movement was captivating in its lyrical inwardness, and the finale brimmed with life and vigour. 

In # 4 (my personal favourite of the cycle), Goodyear's performance of the first movement was imbued with distinction, and an air of fantasy that suits this more lyrical music very well indeed.  Not that his playing of the louder passages was lacking anything, far from it, but he showed on that first night that he knew what could be done in the quieter music (other than just marking time until the next big showpiece moment arrived).  The dialogue of the slow movement between orchestra and soloist, a truly unique conversation in music, was nicely balanced although perhaps lacking the last degree of intensity.  The opening of the finale was almost too quiet, but still filled with energy, and the volume came soon enough -- yet without abandoning the essentially lively, joyful tone of the music.

In the more dramatic and fiery # 3, Goodyear worked on the widest scale of tone and treated us to a remarkable cadenza at the end of the first movement.  He then gave a lovely, inward account of the hymn-like opening of the slow movement.  The finale sparkled joyfully at the opening and gradually grew in power until the final pages flashed fire through to the rousing ending.

The best was kept for last.  Saturday evening's concert contrasted the second concerto (which was actually the first in order of composition) with the fifth and last.  And what a contrast it was!  The finale of # 2 is one of the lightest, brightest, most playful rondos Beethoven ever wrote.  But # 5 is of a totally different order, the prototype for the later concertos of Brahms -- more on the scale of a symphony with a piano part embedded in it.  Nothing symbolizes this change quite so much as the fact that Beethoven wrote out the cadenzas in full -- no improvising allowed here! -- and kept them terse to the point that one almost doesn't notice them in passing.  More to the point, Beethoven actually opens the work with its biggest solo cadenza, an innovation which was duly noted and stretched right to the limits by almost every composer of a piano concerto for the next hundred years.

And here was also where we got the biggest range of playing style and scale of tone, from both soloist and orchestra.  In keeping with its lighter character, Concerto # 2 was played with wit, flair, and a strong sense of fun -- especially in the central episode of that rondo finale.  Piano and orchestra alike took on a totally different sound, richer, weightier, and altogether larger in # 5.  Indeed, Goodyear's piano sound was so full that in the infamous fortissimo scale passages in the first movement the accompanying bassoon figure had trouble making itself felt.  Despite that, there was no doubt in my mind that the performance of # 5 as a whole was the most strongly integrated, the most fully realized, of the entire cycle.  The intensity generated in the huge opening movement was sustained through the quiet slow movement and the quick transition into the finale. 

Right at the end of that third concert, when both orchestra and soloist could reasonably be expected to start flagging a bit, the finale of the "Emperor" was treated to a fire-eating performance that sacrificed nothing of clarity or musicality while still achieving a hair-raising intensity.  The standing ovation with four calls by the soloist and conductor and volleys of cheering from all over the auditorium was richly earned and deserved.

I think I was most surprised by how tired I was after it ended.  I'm used to attending multiple concerts a day at the Festival of the Sound, but this was an experience of a wholly different kind -- intensely musical and fascinating insights into well-known and well-loved music, but also very demanding on the listener.  I'm sure that the sizable number of music lovers who took in all three concerts all felt themselves amply rewarded for their time, as I did.

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