Reading a Score, and Beethoven's Mind By ALLAN KOZINN
Reading a Score, and Beethoven's Mind
By ALLAN KOZINN :
"It has been 20 years since Roger Norrington began researching the way Beethoven's symphonies were performed in the composer's time and how that style might be revived.
Sir Roger was not the first to raise those questions, but the startling set of Beethoven symphonies he recorded in the 1980's with his period instrument band, the London Classical Players, lighted a fire in the world of Beethoven interpretation.
At the time most of the early-music world was focused on Baroque and Classical music, and as far as the big modern orchestras were concerned, these groups had gone far
enough. It was one thing to surrender Bach and Vivaldi, but when Christopher Hogwood and his Academy of Ancient Music took on the Mozart symphonies, red flags went up. A move on Beethoven could be trouble. But Sir Roger forged ahead; he earned his knighthood partly for wresting the grail of Beethoven performance tradition away from Germanic
orchestras and making it a British trophy.
As it turned out, modern-instrument orchestras survived this assault: they have continued playing Beethoven, and they may have benefited from Sir Roger's experiments in performance style and the research behind it. That is certainly how Sir Roger sees it, as he explained on Sunday and Monday in "Beethoven Experience" a pair of Mostly
Mozart Festival lecture-concerts at Alice Tully Hall.
To the extent that other conductors have reconsidered issues like balance, articulation, tempos and the use of
string and wind vibrato, he has a point. He is taking the view that these interpretive issues are far more crucial than the use of old or new instruments, and he is proving
it by spending much of his time with modern orchestras, including the Camerata Salzburg, which he brought to Lincoln Center for these concerts.
Each program balanced an infrequently heard dramatic work against an even more dramatic symphony. On Monday it was the ballet score "The Creatures of Prometheus" on Sunday, the incidental music for "Egmont" with the Fifth Symphony.
There was, in Sir Roger's quasi-improvised and often humorous commentaries, a sense of revisiting the sites of battles fought and won long ago. Some weren't as momentous
as he made out.
Insisting, for example, that an orchestra's size and layout are paramount, he said the Camerata's roster of 49 players was about what Beethoven could have expected, and that its seating plan, with the first and second violinists on either side of the conductor (instead of next to each other, as they are in many modern orchestras) is essential.
But none of this would have seemed radical to a Mostly Mozart audience.
The festival's own orchestra is about the same size and has been since the late 1960's; its violins have been seated
antiphonally since Gerard Schwarz took over the orchestra in the early 1980's. Louis Langrée, the festival's new director, has maintained that arrangement, which is
increasingly common.
There were more contentious issues. Sir Roger devoted much of his talk on Sunday to Beethoven's tempos, arguing that his metronome markings are as much a part of the score as the notes, and that they should be adhered to religiously. This has been much debated. Opponents note that Beethoven
was deaf when he affixed those indications and may have miscalculated.
Some of these tempos are quite speedy, as Sir Roger showed when he finally got around to performing. The opening movement of the Fifth Symphony, which he conducted on
Monday, was so fast as to seem almost reckless at times; it clearly pushed the players to their limits. This was truly
exciting music making: the Fifth as a visceral experience rather than a weighty, philosophical one. The opening movement of the "Eroica," on Sunday's program, cruised
along similarly, underscoring the music's evocation of battle.
Sir Roger addressed two issues on Monday. One was vibrato, to which he has an almost maniacal allergy. There is some merit in his insistence that an unvibrated string and wind
sound yields a certain clarity of texture in which inner voices were heard as distinctly as the top lines. But that clarity also came from the balance of winds and strings in
such a small orchestra and from the winds' being on risers.
On the other hand the loss of the constant adjustment that vibrato makes possible took a toll on the group's intonation. By the end of "The Creatures of Prometheus," notes were going sour at an alarming rate, and there was
some of that in the "Eroica" as well. The Monday performances fared generally better. Sir Roger's other topic on Monday was the importance of extra-musical imagery
in Beethoven. Here his historical presentation was arguable. The concept of abstract music - music without programs or other associations - did not arise until the
1920's, he said. But surely this was a major point of contention as far back as the 1870's, between the supporters of Wagner, for whom extra-musical meaning was crucial, and Brahms, for whom it was not.
That Beethoven sometimes had a program in mind is clear enough; "Pastoral" and "Eroica"
Symphonies are unarguably driven by them. But Beethoven's comments, even about these works, betrayed an ambivalence about programmatic music. In works like the Fifth there is no way to say what he had in mind.
Sir Roger made a fanciful proposal of his own: the Fifth could be about the return of Ulysses. The first movement might represent his struggle to cross the sea; the second
could show Penelope's suitors trying unsuccessfully to string Ulysses' bow and the disguised Ulysses succeeding.
The third might depict him killing the suitors, and the finale would be the reunion of Ulysses and Penelope. In the dramatic performance this inventively pasted-on scenario seemed plausible, at least in the first and last movements.
But for all the chatter - and there was one listener who, after 20 minutes of talk on Monday, called out, "Music, please!" - some of the most striking aspects of the
performance had little to do with the topics Sir Roger addressed. His approach to dynamics was one example. The chord blasts that run through the opening movement of the
"Eroica" were given dramatic shape by way of a steady crescendo. And in the opening movement of the Fifth, he applied a similarly dramatic crescendo to the single note entries of the French horns, an enlivening touch more typically left uninflected.
The one troubling current of Sir Roger's presentation was the sense of monolithic rightness he projected. The outcome
of the period instrument wars of the 1980's was not the establishment of a new dogma but a sense that music - Beethoven's as much as anyone else's - yields many truths.
Just as conductors of modern orchestras learned that there was much to gain by adopting some of Sir Roger's ideas,
many listeners who had sworn by period-instrument performances came to see that there was also great beauty, passion and drama in the grandly scaled, slow-paced
performances of Wilhelm Furtwängler, surely Sir Roger's polar opposite."
------------------
'Man know thyself'
By ALLAN KOZINN :
"It has been 20 years since Roger Norrington began researching the way Beethoven's symphonies were performed in the composer's time and how that style might be revived.
Sir Roger was not the first to raise those questions, but the startling set of Beethoven symphonies he recorded in the 1980's with his period instrument band, the London Classical Players, lighted a fire in the world of Beethoven interpretation.
At the time most of the early-music world was focused on Baroque and Classical music, and as far as the big modern orchestras were concerned, these groups had gone far
enough. It was one thing to surrender Bach and Vivaldi, but when Christopher Hogwood and his Academy of Ancient Music took on the Mozart symphonies, red flags went up. A move on Beethoven could be trouble. But Sir Roger forged ahead; he earned his knighthood partly for wresting the grail of Beethoven performance tradition away from Germanic
orchestras and making it a British trophy.
As it turned out, modern-instrument orchestras survived this assault: they have continued playing Beethoven, and they may have benefited from Sir Roger's experiments in performance style and the research behind it. That is certainly how Sir Roger sees it, as he explained on Sunday and Monday in "Beethoven Experience" a pair of Mostly
Mozart Festival lecture-concerts at Alice Tully Hall.
To the extent that other conductors have reconsidered issues like balance, articulation, tempos and the use of
string and wind vibrato, he has a point. He is taking the view that these interpretive issues are far more crucial than the use of old or new instruments, and he is proving
it by spending much of his time with modern orchestras, including the Camerata Salzburg, which he brought to Lincoln Center for these concerts.
Each program balanced an infrequently heard dramatic work against an even more dramatic symphony. On Monday it was the ballet score "The Creatures of Prometheus" on Sunday, the incidental music for "Egmont" with the Fifth Symphony.
There was, in Sir Roger's quasi-improvised and often humorous commentaries, a sense of revisiting the sites of battles fought and won long ago. Some weren't as momentous
as he made out.
Insisting, for example, that an orchestra's size and layout are paramount, he said the Camerata's roster of 49 players was about what Beethoven could have expected, and that its seating plan, with the first and second violinists on either side of the conductor (instead of next to each other, as they are in many modern orchestras) is essential.
But none of this would have seemed radical to a Mostly Mozart audience.
The festival's own orchestra is about the same size and has been since the late 1960's; its violins have been seated
antiphonally since Gerard Schwarz took over the orchestra in the early 1980's. Louis Langrée, the festival's new director, has maintained that arrangement, which is
increasingly common.
There were more contentious issues. Sir Roger devoted much of his talk on Sunday to Beethoven's tempos, arguing that his metronome markings are as much a part of the score as the notes, and that they should be adhered to religiously. This has been much debated. Opponents note that Beethoven
was deaf when he affixed those indications and may have miscalculated.
Some of these tempos are quite speedy, as Sir Roger showed when he finally got around to performing. The opening movement of the Fifth Symphony, which he conducted on
Monday, was so fast as to seem almost reckless at times; it clearly pushed the players to their limits. This was truly
exciting music making: the Fifth as a visceral experience rather than a weighty, philosophical one. The opening movement of the "Eroica," on Sunday's program, cruised
along similarly, underscoring the music's evocation of battle.
Sir Roger addressed two issues on Monday. One was vibrato, to which he has an almost maniacal allergy. There is some merit in his insistence that an unvibrated string and wind
sound yields a certain clarity of texture in which inner voices were heard as distinctly as the top lines. But that clarity also came from the balance of winds and strings in
such a small orchestra and from the winds' being on risers.
On the other hand the loss of the constant adjustment that vibrato makes possible took a toll on the group's intonation. By the end of "The Creatures of Prometheus," notes were going sour at an alarming rate, and there was
some of that in the "Eroica" as well. The Monday performances fared generally better. Sir Roger's other topic on Monday was the importance of extra-musical imagery
in Beethoven. Here his historical presentation was arguable. The concept of abstract music - music without programs or other associations - did not arise until the
1920's, he said. But surely this was a major point of contention as far back as the 1870's, between the supporters of Wagner, for whom extra-musical meaning was crucial, and Brahms, for whom it was not.
That Beethoven sometimes had a program in mind is clear enough; "Pastoral" and "Eroica"
Symphonies are unarguably driven by them. But Beethoven's comments, even about these works, betrayed an ambivalence about programmatic music. In works like the Fifth there is no way to say what he had in mind.
Sir Roger made a fanciful proposal of his own: the Fifth could be about the return of Ulysses. The first movement might represent his struggle to cross the sea; the second
could show Penelope's suitors trying unsuccessfully to string Ulysses' bow and the disguised Ulysses succeeding.
The third might depict him killing the suitors, and the finale would be the reunion of Ulysses and Penelope. In the dramatic performance this inventively pasted-on scenario seemed plausible, at least in the first and last movements.
But for all the chatter - and there was one listener who, after 20 minutes of talk on Monday, called out, "Music, please!" - some of the most striking aspects of the
performance had little to do with the topics Sir Roger addressed. His approach to dynamics was one example. The chord blasts that run through the opening movement of the
"Eroica" were given dramatic shape by way of a steady crescendo. And in the opening movement of the Fifth, he applied a similarly dramatic crescendo to the single note entries of the French horns, an enlivening touch more typically left uninflected.
The one troubling current of Sir Roger's presentation was the sense of monolithic rightness he projected. The outcome
of the period instrument wars of the 1980's was not the establishment of a new dogma but a sense that music - Beethoven's as much as anyone else's - yields many truths.
Just as conductors of modern orchestras learned that there was much to gain by adopting some of Sir Roger's ideas,
many listeners who had sworn by period-instrument performances came to see that there was also great beauty, passion and drama in the grandly scaled, slow-paced
performances of Wilhelm Furtwängler, surely Sir Roger's polar opposite."
------------------
'Man know thyself'
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