Beethoven and the Boston Massacre

While James Levine is recovering from surgery, the Boston Symphony has lined up a bunch of guest conductors to take over his concert dates.  Last night at Carnegie Hall, Lorin Maazel led the orchestra through readings of two Beethoven Symphonies, Nos. 6 (Pastoral) and 7.

This is about the most unimaginative concert programming possible.  Two Beethoven symphonies.  Nothing else.  Perhaps Levine expected to produce an extraordinary effect with probing, insightful readings, but we didn't get Levine. We got Maazel.  My verdict on him, after his years at the NY Philharmonic, is that every year he seemed more bored with the standard repertory works he was recycling (under Maazel, the NYP spent most of its time playing music it had recently played, over and over and over again....), and boredom can lead a super-technician like Maazel to do crazy things.  I think Beethoven is the greatest composer for orchestra who ever lived, as I wrote on Saturday about the NYP's performance (led by Alan Gilbert) of the Egmont Overture and 3rd Piano Concerto with Emanuel Ax.  And I guess each Beethoven Symphony is its own creative world, so you can make a good concert out of two of them.  But still, this is programming that lacks imagination, and to make it worth while you have to do a really good job of it.

Last night, an inert Pastoral Symphony was followed by a 7th that seemed to present all the wrong interpretive choices, strange tempo fluctuations, wierd balances (Maazel defied Richard Strauss's dictum not to look at the trumpets because it only encourages them; he visibly cued them to blare out their high notes and distort the balances), an allegretto that sacrificed all the drama and mystery of its opening with too loud, too thick sound from the low strings, and, in the finale, a mad dash through to the end that got the audience hysterically excited but slaughtered poor Beethoven.  It was as if Maazel had heard the recent recording by Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and decided, anything he can do I can do faster.  Dudamel's 7th finale is about as fast as it can be played while still articulating the notes.  Maazel took it faster than the notes can be articulated, a real mad dash that bludgeoned the music and removed all the drama, transforming it into a carnival of speed.  No, Maazel, you are not "the Dude"....

I came away from the performance of the 7th quite disgusted, but the 6th merely bored me.