Cleveland’s poignant fadeout
mainThe Cleveland Orchestra gave its last performance before shutdown to a Friday-morning audience of about 20 people for the purpose of feeding its new online own-label, launched this week.
The orchestra has also released on Spotify what may be the only recording of Beethoven op.132 with a full strings section.
You can sample it here.
==what may be the only recording of Beethoven op.132 with a full strings section.
Interesting. Lenny of course did 131 (C#min) many times and op 135 (F maj) a few times. But 132 sounds quite rare. Thanks for the tip
My opinion is the op. 132 does not lend itself well to string orchestra. To the trained ear, the lines and counterpoint are too intimate for the big lush sound. Besides, if Beethoven were to choose the big sound for such a work, he would have surely done some editing, not to mention adding the color of winds to fully round out the creation. It’s a musicologists onanistic fantasy.
I doubt that musicologists had much to do with it. I would guess that Franz and the string section decided they wanted to try it. (They have played other string quartets before.)
U
Lipstick
1. Full strings? That’d be a bigger string contingent than what Beethoven wrote for his symphonies.
2. Whatever the musicological merits, I don’t think the recording shows off the Cleveland strings in any particularly favorable light. It rather stretches them a bit, IMHO.
Was there a conductor?