It’s a question of trust between baton and orchestra. This, I thought, is how all music should be. Listening to my own copy, I can hear Tennstedt driving the players into corridors of uncertainty where they have no clue where on earth he will lead them next. The performance is unfortunately unavailable on Idagio. Between movements, I remember wondering if I should ever want to hear another orchestra or conductor again. My own goosebump concert was with Klaus Tennstedt and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, some time in the late 1980s at the Royal Festival Hall, a level of intensity I had never encountered in my life. Memories like this remind us to check the privilege of personal experience against the possible existence of a recording. The energy of its fourth movement still gives me goosebumps.’ It was Jurowski’s debut with that symphony, and with that orchestra: extraordinarily vital, youthful, well-focused, though profound, and the quality of the sound was really amazing: a rich and thick “idiomatic-German” sound. The performance of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony I heard there is possibly not the best performance ever, of course, though it is by far the most vividly one recorded in my memory. ‘After a snack of boiled little lake shrimps with Sekt, the Sunday afternoon concert took place in what was once the wood-and-bricks barn of the castle, still a bit “délabré”: it was absolutely choc-a-bloc, packed with enthusiasts. It was a very hot and humid summer of 1997, the manager of the orchestra, Dieter Rexroth, kindly drove me a couple of hours north of Berlin to a very old castle in the ex-DDR Vorpommern region, amid little lakes and wetlands, named Ulrichshusen, and belonging to a wealthy family: the “Freiheer” told us that the castle had been given back to its original owners shortly after the reunification of Germany. Valerio Tura in Bologna writes: ‘Vladimir Jurowski, in his mid-twenties, was invited to conduct a Summer festival concert with the ex-West Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. This account reveals the finest qualities of his complete Beethoven cycle. Harnoncourt stood out among period conductors in never letting the theory overwhelm the music. This particular concert, with musicians the age of his grandchildren, is particularly engrossing for its supple speeds and unexpected turns. While many associate Harnoncourt with period practice, his most memorable performances are often with small orchestras on modern instruments. And, in the orchestra, Shmuel Ashkenazi, Pina Carmirelli, Felix Galimir, Ronald Leonard, Julius Levine, Larry Crombs, Milan Turkovic… I’m sorry, but definitely: Casals.’ For the Allegretto alone, this is a must-listen.Ĭoncertmaster Eoin Andersen in Berlin recalls indelible performances with Manfred Honeck (not recorded) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in 1991.
Some minor imperfections but pure vitality, pure joy with a conductor who was then 92 years old. Luis Sunen writes from La Coruna, Spain: ‘The one that I prefer is that of Pablo Casals in Marlboro in 1969. The Allegretto is made an Adagio, in phrasing if not tempo, but it is mesmerizing. His English accent is a bit like Antonio Pappano’s.Īrthur says: ‘Every bar alive in the first movement. At the end, there is a spoken commentary by the conductor. This recording is not yet on Idagio, but some discreet hand has uploaded it onto Youtube, where it has received a mere handful of clicks and just one response.
We’ll come to these disputations in a few paragraphs’ time, but meanwhile there are more than 100 others to consider and some will open your ears to a different and unexpected approach to Beethoven’s truth.Īrthur Kapitainis in Montreal, for instance, swears by Leopold Stokowski’s fabulous Philadelphians in 1927. All seem to agree that one performance is indispensable and two others are so anthithetical that they can’t both be right. Our expert panel in a dozen different countries has come up with remarkable unanimity in their choice of the three quintessential recordings of this symphony. Seventh symphony, opus 92 (part 3 – previous 2 parts here and here)
Welcome to the 80th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition
0 kommentar(er)
