Album of the Week: Don’t mess with Beethoven
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Composers have learned not to mess with Beethoven. Fewer variations have been written on themes by Beethoven than on any other master’s work. Reformers, like Mahler, who sought to update his instrumentation came away with a bloody nose. A recent computerised ‘completion’ of an alleged tenth symphony by Beethoven was a seriously bad AI joke.
It must have taken guts on the part of the Australian Brett Dean…
Read on here.
And here.
Biss is such a nonentity as a pianist. His playing is just as dull as he looks. And I’ve never heard a Swedish or for that matter any Scandinavian orchestra do justice to Beethoven. They tend to be ice-cold, hardly the approach called for in Beethoven.
As for Beethoven resisting adaptation, I have always noted how little he is “appropriated” compared to Mozart and, especially, Bach. I think the latter two are far more frequently adapted because many of their themes have a neutral affect, whereas Beethoven may be many things but he is rarely ever neutral. He was already such a master of variation on his own and others’ themes, always on his own, Beethovenian terms, that anyone else trying to play in the same sandbox sounds pitifully absurd and outclassed by comparison. He may be the most instantly recognizable and distinctive composer of all, but also consequently the most inimitable without resorting to parody (i.e. Dudley Moore).
Found it entirely unlistenable, after already 2 minutes. Mere effects without a cause, mumbling and fumbling around randomly. I predict the piece will have no future at all, after one hearing nobody will be seriously longing to hear it again and Norman’s heroic 3 times listening is really very generous.
I think Dean’s ‘Farewell to philosophy’ on material from Haydn’s symphonies is better. Why such parasitical attempts? Why not try to write a real piece, and if you would like to be able to write as beautifully as Haydn and Beethoven, why not trying to use something of that language and make your own version, and write something of yourself? Dean’s treament is from a modernist perspective: fidgeting with existing material, and that is a quite outdated one, belonging to the last century.
Mahler’s ‘updating’ is very good and his touching-up of the scores makes the music ideal for the modern, regular symphony orchestra. I’m sure Beethoven would have scored in that way if he had the resources Mahler had. And Mahler’s changes are very few and only to make things clearer, not fatter. For an chamber orchestra size, the original scores are best, then the balance can be experienced much better.
Any attempts to finish the unfinished symphonies of Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, Elgar, Bruckner, Glinka, Wagner, Schumann, Bizet, etc, etc, etc! and Bach’s unfinished “Art of Fugue” can never seriously be realized with true integrity because what they produce more often than not merely take composer’s notes and result in a unwinnable guessing game for posterity and will never achieve the special aura of completion had the composers lived or attempted to finish them on their own.
It’s a fruitless, fairy-tale, romantic wish to etch in each composer’s pen when the will always relegated to the Miscellaneous Entertainment folder in the catalog. Gee whiz, isn’t it tantamount to hubris to even initiate such task?
Musicologists will argue as to their merits or failings ad infinitum.
Meh both in the underlying idea and the realization of it. The various attempted completions of the early Beethoven Violin Concerto fragment at least serve a genuine purpose ….. and let the record reflect that Saint-Saëns’s Variations on a Theme by Beethoven is a very good piece and actually captures something of the Beethoven spirit and manner.