American Symphony Orchestra's "Classics Declassified" takes on Beethoven's 4th Symphony

For this year and next, the American Symphony Orchestra has dedicated its "Classics Declassified" series to a retrospective of the Beethoven Symphonies (including Wellington's Victory), meted out one symphony per concert.  This afternoon we had the 4th, with the 5th coming up on Tuesday, then skip to next fall for the 6th and spring 2011 for the remainder of the cycle.  (How they are going to get the orchestra, chorus and soloists all on the stage at Symphony Space for the 9th on April 12, 2011, is beyond my imagination.) 

Leon Botstein, ASO Music Director, begins each of these programs with a lecture-demonstration, then a complete performance of the piece follows an intermission, with some time for audience Q&A after the performance.  I thought Botstein had not much to say about this Symphony, although he said it at considerable length.  One of his main ideas was that the piece is actually an hommage to Josef Haydn, with whom Beethoven had briefly studied as a young man and who was, at that time (1806), the looming musical presence in Vienna, although no longer active as a composer.  Botstein points out that the 4th Symphony was composed at the Oppersdorff estate during the summer, Beethoven as guest of the nobleman who had commissioned the piece, and that Beethoven probably had access to Haydn symphony scores in the royal library.  Botstein posits parallels between the Beethoven symphony and Haydn's Symphony No. 102 in the same key, and he reinforced the point with performances of selected passages from both works.  It is an interesting thesis, although I'm not sure the parallels were particularly convincing.  While I do hear plenty of Haydn in this and all the earlier Beethoven symphonies, even the revolutionary 3rd, I also hear plenty of prefiguring.  There are bits and traces of the 5th, which was being written in tandem with this one, and foreshadowings of later symphonies as well.  I hear parallels between the second movement here and the third movement of the 9th, for example. 

At any rate, whatever one thought of the talk, the performance was yet another thing.  This is an orchestra of freelancers who just don't get to play together as much as the major orchestras, since many of them are off playing other gigs when not assembled to work up ASO programs, and despite the large core group, it is, overall, a rotating cast.  That said, they played well together this afternoon, and occasional imprecisions did not detract from the effective performance.  As Botstein pointed out in the Q&A afterwards, it is a bigger thrill for this group to play a Beethoven symphony for an audience than it might be for a major full-time orchestra, which gets to play standard repertory frequently.  Botstein's programming policy for the orchestra's main series --- works by neglected composers and neglected works by great composers -- means they rarely have a chance to play the great masterworks of the standard repertory as a group.  Given the chance, they make the most of it.  There was real fervor and excitement throughout the performance.

Tempi were on the fleet side.  These days, Beethoven's metronome markings are taken seriously, and Botstein indicated as much when questioned about tempo.  For generations, the common wisdom was that the early model metronome with which the composer was gifted by the inventor was probably not particularly reliable -- and Beethoven had a reputation for abusing mechanical things -- and, of course, the composer was almost completely deaf when he wrote the piece, even more so when he was retrospectively assigning metronome markings to this piece a decade after it was written, so for a long time performers considered the metronome markings unreliable and in any event much too fast. So the custom in playing Beethoven was for much slower tempi throughout the 19th and into the early 20th century.  Then Toscanini broke out of this convention -- it was one of the many differences dividing the Toscanini and Furtwangler camps -- and adopted tempi closer to the metronome marks, and some of his "followers" - most prominently Ormandy and Mitropoulos during the 1950s -- took things to even faster extremes. (Mitropoulos, in particular, could be impossibly fast in classical and early romantic repertory, as the recent releases of radio broadcasts illustrate.)  Then the "authentic instrument" crowd got their hands on Beethoven symphonies beginning in the 1970s and now just about everybody plays them fast.  Sometimes, I think, even a bit too fast.  The second movement of the 4th in Botstein's hands was, in my view, just a shade too fast, leaving the symphony without a real slow movement, although I could actually have stood a slightly faster finale!  But these are questions of individual taste, as his tempi were well within the current mainstream, and the orchestra proved capable of keeping up with them.

On to the 5th on Tuesday night....

Comments

[Art Leonard]

The 5th on Tuesday night was played in the same fleet tradition as the 4th was on Sunday. Although most of it struck me as very effective, I did find the second movement a bit too fast and unbending. We have now settled into a "new" performing tradition of Beethoven that seems dedicated to avoiding even a whiff of the romantic - but his middle period symphonies were composed at a time when romantic stirrings were in the air. So I think the pendulum can swing too far in the direction of momentum vs. relaxation.