The Best Beethoven I Have Ever Heard

Those who follow this blog know that I normally comment on current events and the Cubs/baseball.  Today, let me post what may be my first cultural review: on the Beethoven Festival that concluded at the Harris Theater last night.

With 2020 being the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth, there have been Beethoven festivals all over.  The Chicago Symphony is playing all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, plus more, during its 2019-20 season.  The Lincoln (Nebraska) Symphony Orchestra has done the same over the last two seasons.  But one of the best may have been the Beethoven Festival at the Harris Theater.  I am not exactly sure how the Harris Theater did it, but it was just one of three locations that Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique are performing all nine symphonies in one week.  (The other are Carnegie Hall in New York City {just before Chicago} and London {in May}.)

I read about the cycle last fall and put it on our calendar for February.  Last Thursday night, we went to see Gardiner and the ORR play Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies.  I often try to listen, ahead of time, to what I will be hearing at a concert, so I listened to the Eighth Symphony several times before we went.  (It didn’t seem necessary to listen to the Ninth.)

Gardiner and the ORR play on “period instruments;” i.e., instruments from the time when the music was composed.  As Gardiner said in his program notes, the ORR’s period instruments are like the ones Beethoven knew when he was a young musician in Bonn.  They have a different sound than today’s instruments.  Less plush, might be one word for the difference.  They have the sound that Beethoven heard, either actually or in his mind, when he was composing his symphonies.

Because of this, the Eighth Symphony really did sound different than the recordings I listened to before we went.  It was a little lighter and, following Beethoven’s metronome markings, faster.

But it was in the Ninth where you really noticed the difference.  You could tell, from the first notes, that this was going to be a different Ninth.  It drew you in, and I just sat there, mesmerized, for the entire piece.  In reviewing the performance at Carnegie Hall in The New York Times, Joshua Barone wrote: “Throughout the cycle I had kept detailed notes during each performance.  But when the Ninth, a piece I would normally shrug off as overplayed, came to a galvanizing end, I looked down at a blank sheet of paper and realized I had spent the entire finale with my eyes on the state.”  I know how he felt.  When the Ninth was over, I didn’t jump to my feet and start applauding.  I was so stunned with the performance, I initially just sat there, in awe of what I had heard.  As I tweeted Saturday morning, it was the best Ninth I had ever heard, and I have heard Chicago and Berlin (including Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic the night before the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall).   

The concert was so good that I went home and looked to see if there was another performance I could go to.  I decided on Monday, to hear the Fourth and Fifth.  The Fourth has been a particular favorite of mine since we heard the Berlin Philharmonic (with a young Daniel Barenboim conducting) play it in 1982 (in a concert so long it had two intermissions).  Gardiner’s Fourth was excellent, but it was the Fifth that was incredible.  Once again, the lightness and the tempo made it stand out as so different and so much better than other performances (and recordings) of the Fifth I have heard.

Given that the cycle ended last night, what can you do, assuming you can’t go to London in May?¹  You might turn to recordings, though if you do so, make sure you get John Eliot Gardiner recordings with the Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique.  While I have not heard them myself (they are on order), I would expect/hope them to be as good as what we heard this past week.
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¹ Though London in June would be good, too.