Am immensely glad to be 81 years old. All my recordings are older performances, thank goodness, and very individual and special. Dave Hurwitz, I feel as indignant as you sound. I would be wearing a tie if I were a man, but I am an old lady in her pyjamas, agreeing with every word you say. Thank you for caring as much as you do about the wonders of great music.
Well said Dave ! I'm 51 and when I was growing up a performance of the Ninth was a special event, be it live or on the radio (BBC Radio 3 here in the UK). Even putting on a record or CD, or in my case an audio cassette (either Klemperer / Philharmonia, or Schmidt-Isserstedt / VPO recorded from my Dad's LP) was a big deal requiring a free Saturday afternoon, headphones, and a big black and yellow 'do not disturb' sign on my bedroom door. The Proms is a case in point. The penultimate night was always 'Beethoven Friday' with a much anticipated Ninth performance usually broadcast live on BBC 2 (TV). Not so now. Nowadays it's performed on a random Tuesday night sandwiched between a 'Harry Potter' Prom and a DJ led celebration of 'Street Dirt and Funk-Garage-Grime' or whatever. This year was particularly beige and uninteresting and the only redeeming quality was it was over in about 59 minutes. I swear André Rieu could've done it better, at least it would've been an original take . . . and scene.
Next May is the 200th anniversary of its premiere and I really want this to be an occasion where we reassess the work and its significance, including how it’s performed. I’m an early music guy but bristle at the notion that “authentic” means “small”. The most authentic way to perform Beethoven’s 7th, 8th and 9th symphonies is with doubled winds and 40-60 strings. The metronome markings should be studied since they provide some valuable clues as to the interpretation but certainly should not be followed slavishly. Talking about the ninth is also an excellent opportunity to talk about the Enlightenment values it represents. At a time when the classical music world is working hard to diversify we should recognize the 9th as part of that rebellious movement, not something to be rebelled against. I grew up with the Bruno Walter and Toscanini recordings. I love Karl Bohm’s first movement, an almost mystical exploration of the abyss. I do think the historically informed crowd have done a good job restoring the Scherzo its proper dimensions and character and making the Adagio something other than a nice nap between the second and fourth movements. And the last movement only works if the conductor believes in its ability to transcend borders as much as Beethoven did; if you’re just going to hide behind a clinical approach to metrical relationships please stay home. We need to keep Beethoven in the conversation and on concert programs, but we can’t engage with him if we keep him on a pedestal. He was weird, he was problematic, but can still be inspirational, as a composer and even as a person: the fact that someone so damaged could create what is perhaps the greatest love letter to the human spirit is something to be celebrated. I hope enough of us still want to celebrate it.
In 2019, I was visiting family in the U.S. and was preparing for a road trip to see the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and a stop to attend the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game, when I discovered that the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra was performing the ninth on the evening I'd planned for a stopover on the way. Fortunately, my trip had begun in New York City where I'd attended a performance of The Ring cycle, so I had a suit (as well as a tux) with me. I packed the suit for the road trip. Having spent most of my adult life living in the Middle East and India, where I don't get to see many classical music performances, this was indeed a special occasion. I think the majority of the audience felt the same way as many were dressed well. By the end, I really felt as if it had been a once in a lifetime performance for me. Very special.
It doesn't matter if people think afterwards that I'm being too complimentary in this instance, but I have to say once again that it's not only a pleasure but also a real pleasure to listen to your analyses and perspectives. And I'll sound even more complimentary if I say that I agree with most of your analyses. So, here, I ABSOLUTELY MUST say this astonishing narrowing of the very apprehension of the Ninth. And all is said here, so many thanks once again. A hypothesis, personal, but one in which I fundamentally believe. The "gigantic" works of music and, even more broadly, of culture and cultural heritage, are sometimes hard to hear in our time, which is characterized precisely by the narrowing of everything. How can we imagine that this age can support monumental or "cosmic" works? The general tendency is to shrink everything, just to the degree of Liliputian pettiness. It's important to know this in terms of this era's relationship to the legacy of a giant like Beethoven and his work. No, really, what a pleasure and a relief to hear that. "A journey to what? To a dinner?" Well, yes: that's the current path. Making everything conform to the law of maketing, advertising, slogans and stupidity. Instead of behaving like true heirs capable of rising to the level of such a heritage. The very notion of a "box" is of this order: selling a "cycle of Beethoven symphonies" like you'd sell a packet of washing powder, and with a stupid slogan to boot. That says it all. Think about it: this way of shrinking works reminds me of what Nietzsche already predicted in Also sprach Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil: the man of modernity, he said, will be the one who winks at the past, convinced that he, the man of the new society, is superior to the whole of the past. Why admire, when "everything is in the box"? And you have rightly felt and named this lowering. We should all reread Adorno (even if it's sometimes boring) to fully grasp this destiny of culture in consumer society. This is "the joke", this is "the tragedy", and we're aiming for it, we're all looking at it. That's why I don't take your intention to wear a tie when talking about the Ninth, just as a joke. George Steiner didn't say otherwise, claiming to have painted a Chardin table depicting a man who has dressed up to read a masterpiece (I could point you to the reference, if you like). "It deserves special attention" you say; "The Music rewards that"; "It asks for, it begs for". I have nothing more to add: you exclaim here about the inability of our age to live up to WHAT a heritage REQUIRES. And it's nothing to do with snobbery to observe this, which is truly a tragedy.
Some years back, I attended a Buddhist seminar on Tenerife Island with people from around the world, and during a lunch break in the plaza, I overheard an elderly woman suddenly beginning to sing to her friend the Schiller chorus---I couldn't resist and immediately joined in the singing. She paused and looked at me and asked, "do you speak German?" To which I answered, " No, but I know Beethoven," and she smiled. Turns out she was from the former East Germany, and survived freedom-suppressing conditions there for decades. Beethoven's Ninth was an internal light they could carry to help them spiritually carry on. Yes, the Ninth is a special work, and I am always totally drained and yet fulfilled each time I listen to it. The sound blesses the space in which it is played.
Hear, hear. If anything, I’d rather see this gigantic work giganticized with added forces (as Mahler’s re-orchestration proposed by doubling horns and adding tuba), rather than amputated down into nothingness. Beethoven’s 9th is worth a full-blooded orchestra, much as Paris is worth a mass. If economics dictate a real 9th cannot be staged, programmers need to organize performances of something else.
Osmo Vanska and Minnesota is my favourite modern ninth. The whole cycle is very strong. The ninth is wonderfully cosmic. Every ambitious, dramatically-inclined symphonist has been influenced by it but not one has surpassed it. So thank you for emphasising that it should should never sound small!
You'll be pleased to know I put on a tie to reply. I couldn't agree more. The BBC Proms in 🇬🇧 is a perfect example of a) the dumbing down of classical programming and b) the diminishment of the 9th. The reverence and quality of performance have descended into mediocrity. It no longer holds a special place amongst conductors who seem obsessed with churning out Mahler who has also been reduced to ordinariness. There's nothing ordinary about the music both Beethoven and Mahler produced. The 9th was always the penultimate concert of the proms and was performed by greats such as Solti, Jessye Norman, et al. Now it's given any old Tuesday by bands you've never heard of.
100% agree ! That Solti performance was immense, 1986 I think. As soon as the BBC tried to 'popularise' the Proms and try and woo a younger Radio 2 audience I was out. Will the powers that be add a performance of Die Shopfung to the 2024 Latitude line-up to even things out ? No, of course not.
Another wonderful post Dave, and like so many more you put out it trandcends the specific subject you have and covers the wider topic of a mad and often bogus rush to attain 'authenticity' over making the performance the best it can possibly be. I have two go-tos, Solti's 70's recording for it's majesterial handling and Leinsdorf for the sheer excitement with a much brisker version - without feeling hurried. I think it highlights the fact it is good to have different interpretations to draw on which can help highlight different aspects of the work. Solti is around 75 minutes and Leinsdorf around 10 minutes shorter, but both very powerful performances
Well said!...could not agree with you more!!! You hit on it...."special." We may have a new topic for a series. Music that was and should be a special event, and not treated that way anymore. Beethoven 9, Mahler 2, etc.
One of the most memorable performances of the 9th that I attended was in Golden Gate Park about one or two weeks after the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake. The San Francisco Symphony and Blomstedt decided to perform for free -- the price of admission was at least one can of food for the homeless. . It was a great concert -- Herbie being Herbie, the concert started with a rousing edition of the Star Spangled Banner. I made the front page of the San Francisco Examiner that day -- the arts reporter asked me what I thought of the concert and my comment was "Beethoven's 9th Symphony means Rebirth!" The title of the article was "City's Rebirth in Music, with a smiling picture of me giving the quote". This was my Andy Warhol 15 minutes claim to fame.
Your view on boxed sets of the 'cycle' of symphonies is spot on. My respect for Beethoven grows and grows and in the 9th symphony he looks ahead to Mahler. The thing is, for Beethoven there was no Mahler. People talk about the disunity of the four movements but it's all one big story. It's our world: primordial chaos, life and then the resultant brotherhood of man. Unity, not disunity. Composers after Beethoven have struggled to match his work but I would say, in general, they really struggle to match the depth of his humanity. Thank you for your appreciation of that great man.
Listening to the Ninth, I always felt a particular impression. Each of its 4 movements is a gigantic masterpiece in itself. But the unity of the work remains for me a deep enigma : maybe, that mystery contributes to the specificity of that work and to the difficulties to interpret it properly. I wonder if I am the only one to feel that.
I don't think you are alone. After many years of hearing it, the "meaning" (if that is actually the right word) has evolved as I've grown older. It makes more sense to me now in my 70's than it did when I was younger, though I would be hard put to explain just why. In any case, I favor the more emotionally expressive interpretations.
"...unity of the work remains for me a deep enigma". You're not the only one, Philip. If I had written that, my use of "enigma" would've been as a euphemism. With great regret, I characterize the LvB 9th as a seriously flawed masterpiece. For me, the disunity revolves around the presence of the 4th movement [an aside: it's interesting that David appears to feel that way about Eroica, i.e., not unified - two movements out of character with the other two]. I don't hate the finale, and I respect the fact that he attempted to compose a "choral symphony", but just not with this finale. I feel that he could've made a separate, more coherent piece with that same "Ode to Joy" material. I have to admit that, as a sinful pleasure, I sometimes carve out a bleeding chunk of the 9th finale to be enraptured by that wonderful little fugue of an orchestral interlude and the brief, full tutti contrapuntal outburst that follows it.
Thanks, Dave. Can you imagine if we treated great theater this way? Someone puts on a production of King Lear not to draw out the universal of themes power, family, age, and so on; rather, they stage Lear with the express purpose of trying to mimic the performance as it might have been done in the early 17th century... Might be an interesting one-off novelty, but the work deserves more respect than that.
Could not agree more! I always look back to older recordings, because they’re always more rich, musically talking. But I have to say, I can appreciate a “historically informed” performance, when it is made with taste, and sensibility, without compromising the concept of the work. Great video by the way! Best regards from Santiago, Chile
You are soooo right about all this... I am looking forward to conducting the 9th next season with a full-size Residentie Orchestra and Chorus in The Hague
You might have posted a warning, Dave. Luckily I wasn't eating... Agreed 100% on everything you said though. Being such a monumental piece of music, bigger in all respects is generally better, at least when it comes to THE NINTH!
BRAVO! The ninth is the NINTH! It is the work that loomed over Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner. It should be cosmic, powerful, cataclysmic . Wand, klemperer, Bohm, szell, toscanini etc knew this. Paul
Attending the Pittsburgh Symphony for many years, a good number under Steinberg, the Beethoven Ninth was always reserved as a season finale. Steinberg treated it with the reverence it was due.
Bravo, Dave, for that blast of trumpet against the tendency to trivialise Beethoven's 9th (and a lot of other music as well - only Mahler seems relatively exempt). It is as if modern performers, especially those "historically informed", are afraid of grandeur and magnificence. Unfortunately their influence seems to affect many less bigoted performers to a certain extent. The 9th is indeed special and represents the pinnacle of these qualities. I got to know the work through Toscanini's NBC recording which certainly displays these qualities albeit diminished by rather dry and thin sound on HMV's 1953 pressings (I still have these LPs). However, Furtwängler's 1954 Lucerne performance was a revelation to me. I think it has an extra dimension in cosmic grandeur and specialness, no doubt helped by the very good mono sound.
I always thought that the Furtwangler 54 performance at Lucerne was his best. The other performance I find stupendous is Blomstedt's 1985 performance with Dresden at the reopening of the Semperoper after its closing for 40 years --- it had to be rebuilt after the bombing of Dresden.
Since today is the 200th anniversary of The 9th, I would just like to add that one of the earliest concerts I attended, at the age of 13, was with the Minnesota Orchestra led by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, on June 30, 1974. A wonderful, stirring performance for this 13-year old, although I did think that the 3rd movement was interminable. I didn't really know the name Skrowaczewski back then, except that he wasn't Ormandy or Bernstein! However, I have noticed in the last few years that a number of recordings of Skrowaczewski have been released. Happy 9th to everyone. Wesley
Well said Dave, it is an unfortunate fact that cultural touchstones become part of the wallpaper of consumerism. As a related topic, it occurred to me that there are a number of pieces that we consider part of the general repertoire that only became widely known or appreciated much later In the same way you mention Late Beethoven as being for the cognoscenti for many years. Certainly that was the case with some of Schubert, all of Mahler, and I guess you could even add Bach to the list! And another interesting topic is what the public considers a piece used for celebratory occasions. I know Furtwangler viewed the 9th in that way, but when I was in Los Angeles a few years ago, Salonen used the Mahler 2nd to open the new Disney Concert Hall... Come to think of it Solti used the Mahler 8th to open the concert season when I lived in Chicago.
I think it's happening across all Classical music. It infested Opera first. Instead of changing the venues and the decorum of going to the Opera to appeal to the average person, they thought "Let's change the Opera instead" to appeal to no one, but people that wear their glasses too far down their nose. It's like your video ranting about cycles, and how it cheapens works and you often get lesser performances crammed into a box set. I have to admit to being a cycles and box set guy, but I fully understand what you mean. There might be a couple of works that drew me to the set, but then there'll be a lot of filler. The 9th should never be filler. It should never be the after dinner mint.
My first hearing of the 9th was at Tanglewood in 1960, conducted by Pierre Monteux, with the soprano part sung by Eleanor Steber. I was sitting 7th row center, age (almost) 16. I have largely avoided hearing the work since, wanting to retain the memory of that totally amazing performance. Hearing the work too frequently is another way to make it feel ordinary (one reason folks listen to period performances: they sound different). Last year (62 years later) I heard Michael Tilson Thomas conduct it at Tanglewood. One reason I went is that it was preceded by Ives's Psalm 90; in a review I wrote about the question of what you pair it with to make a program. Monteux started with Schubert's "Unfinished" (written almost at the same time). Recently it has been a practice to pair it with Schoenberg's "Survivor from Warsaw" providing a post-modern, existential frame for its idealistic message. While that can work as an antidote to its political mis-use by Nazis or to celebrate the tearing down of the Berlin wall, I felt that using Ives's most transcendent work offered a more appropriate prelude to the universal aspect of the symphony. MTT managed to make the piece sound fresh by maintaining balance and transparency, utilizing classical articulation (taking the phrase markings etc seriously) and finding a just tempo (neither rushed nor dragging) for the slow movement. Most powerfully he made the trio of the scherzo sound not only gorgeous but meaningful, like an idealized community singing session, one that anticipates the communal song of the last movement. It was an original, appropriate interpretation, made more poignant for me by the fact that MTT was fighting (and overcoming) very serious health challenges. I am skipping the Tanglewood performance today, not because I have doubts about Susanna Malkki or the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, but because I don't want to use the work the way Tanglewood does, as a ritual which loses specificity through repetition and over-familiarity. Each hearing should feel like the first one! That is another way to respect its monumentality. (Sorry, I did not put on a tie to write this).
Completely agree. Of all symphonies, a performance of Beethoven's 9th should be an "event" a "special occasion" that leaves one in total awe after it has finished (and, what a stupendously thrilling, overwhelming, ending it has!). Unfortunately we are living in a age when the most sublime and most life-changing music is instantly available at the leisurely flick of a switch (if one chooses to treat the profoundest utterances of the human soul as just another piece of music then does anything have any real meaning in one's life?)
Muti scheduled to do his first Missa Solemnis EVER a couple of years ago in Chicago. He said he hadn't felt ready yet. Because of covid, his premier ended up being somewhere else. But you could tell at his Chicago performances this spring how special the piece is
The best Beethoven 9th on TH-cam, IMO, is the one by Ormandy and the Chicago Symphony, a live performance. The playing is close to perfection and the tempos, on the fast side, are perfect. This performance is totally different from the studio recording by Solti with its incredibly slow third movement. There is another great one by the Budapest Philharmonic, only available as a download. It is similar to the aforementioned Ormandy with slightly slower tempos. It is hard to find but worth the effort.
B9 is so great that I hardly ever listen to it! Same goes for certain other works (Mozart MofF; Bach Bm; Wagner T&I; Schubert quintet etc). Fortunately I am ignorant enough to be able to spend the majority of my listening time getting to know new repertoire. This year it’s mainly Handel operas. An infinity of choice.
i was delighted to see my first performance of the work this past weekend. The stage was absolutely filled with a double choir, musicians and 4 soloists. (BPO Buffalo NY}. It was wonderful. Im trying to make comparisons to your discussion but Im having a tough time getting the crux of it. Is the point that modern orchestras should follow the spirit of the work but discard tempo and dynamics at other points bc the composer could not hear himself? Can the argument be boiled down for this layperson?
I'm glad you enjoyed the concert, but I'm unsure about your question. I discuss the modern habit of performing large works with ever smaller forces, but I think the bottom line is that some works are "big" in vision and scale and minimizing them for (mostly) financial reasons, even when dressed up under the rubric of "authenticity," does not serve them well.
@@DavesClassicalGuide thank you, I did hear that in your talk and agree. I guess there were other points that came up along the way that distracted my attention 😄
Besides being a musician, I am also a Classicist, and the period instrument movement always reminds me of the tendency in Latin to insist on certain "reconstructed" pronunciations, when in fact, we have no idea how Caesar actually sounded when he spoke. The bottom line is, it's impossible to reconstruct a sound when you don't have a recording, and sometimes the best policy, is just to make it sound as good as you can--I kind of thought that was the point of this music we all love so much.
Totally agree. Late Beethoven belongs to a later era in history of music. And it should be played like that. The Ninth on period instruments is a bit like the Sonata op. 111 or the Hammerklavier played on a harpsichord. You can do it, of course, but what would it convey?
In your original repertoire video on The Ninth you only mentioned three recordings. Have you ever considered revisiting it as a Repertoire video with a few more?
🙂 Somehow someone will also mention Brexit and such. Oh well. Moving onwards. Perhaps a simular example of how one is experiencing the reducement of great oeuvres is Händel's Messiah. I remember Richard Whittall's ariticle in The Guardian already a decade ago. He wrote then about how a certain passage is as beautiful as it is haunting when one hears "He was dispised". Sadly there's indeed yawning, perhaps even an eye roll or two then in the ranks of singers. When someone involved in music does that, well, it's cursing and not good at all. Not at all elitish to demand more and better
Absolutely. The Late Period is still sounds modern and revolutionary…. Crazy music. Concerning “TheNinth”, as an event, I really like the 1977 live video with Karajan and Berlin. It was a real “Event”…performed on New Year’s Eve, broadcast worldwide. I remember seeing it on PBS at some point later… the video, directed by Humphrey Burton, doesn’t suffer from Karajan’s static, fake, conductor-centric, musicianless movie directing, but is a wonderful live document, much like Burton did with the Bernstein/Vienna Mahler video cycle.
Excellent chat Dave. I don't get too much into new cycles because my approach to collecting is different - I want just the high quality, well done recordings of a given work and I generally don't want more than three of ANY given work. (Of course that's partly informed by the fact that I will have, one day, to go through my dad's enormous collection - no need for me to buy anything I may inherit 20fold later on). But back when I was young my first Beethoven cycle wasn't Karajan or some other celebrated one everyone's supposed to have, it was Hogwood and the AAM. I bring it up mostly because as a period instrument cycle done by one of that movement's more important groups and leaders, I think it does everything right and diminishes nothing. I still prefer that 9th to many better known and more lauded interpretations. But perhaps Hogwood and the AAM are the exception to the period instrument rule. I believe they were cognizant of the world premier's forces and replicated them, as I recall counting the named musicians and I think the number was around 120, to say nothing of the chorus (who I think remained anonymous and uncounted) who do sound very full. It seems to me that you can't claim authenticity if you're going to scale back the forces when we know they were big at that premier. One other thing to mention about Hogwood's cycle, is that they did originally come out one disc or LP at a time. It's long been available only as a complete set but I have the individual originals and though I haven't really thought about it before, it makes sense that you do regard the individual symphonies on their own merits more when presented to you that way. I guess it's one of the drawbacks of living in the age of recorded, play it whenever you want to hear it, age of music, because I don't think it was as possible to regard something like a symphony cycle, to say nothing of his piano sonatas, as a gigantic whole back when you could only hear the music when someone was playing it. You were never going to hear all 9 symphonies in an evening for example - something my local classical radio station has done every New Years' Eve for as long as I've been alive, probably longer.
One of my favorite 9th's is this AAM/Hogwood. His tempi are lively enough such that the monumental 1st movement's energy and tension (the movement that my judgement of 9ths always hinges on) never let up and the sense of forward momentum strikes me viscerally here, as it does also, say, in the NBC/Toscanini. Notwithstanding that, I couldn't actually pick a fave in this work, over which I have distressing ambivalence due to Beethoven's compositional decisions (ever since childhood I've had difficulty with 4th movement).
Recently the Oregon Symphony played the 9th, I figured it might be one of the few opportunities to take my teenage sons for a live performance, They were skeptical, but I explained that the piece was special and that people needed to hear it at least once live before they died. Our Symphony here in Portland did a terrific job with it, and the kids were just flabbergasted, said they had just never heard anything like it. One underrated quality of the ninth is that it can draw in listeners with relatively less experience, in spite of (because of?) its extraordinary complexity. It connects people not just of different cultural backgrounds but different historical periods as well, and will do so for centuries.
Richard Taruskin made a similar point about the kind of arrogance it takes to do this kind of "correction" - it reminds me of Tia de Nora's book on Beethoven and the construction of genius that spends a lot of energy to "deconstruct" the "myth of genius" but when you listen to his contemporaries and I think the word "genius" in the sentence "compared to his contemporaries Beethoven's genius is self-evident" sells Beethoven short
One performance of the 9th that really makes it sound special is Solti's first analog Chicago recording. Not a great symphony cycle overall, but an exceptional 9th, IMO, which hardly gets mentioned these days.
The Solti one(first Chicago recording) has probably the best, most clearest sounding choruses of all the 9th recordings. Most recordings have the chorus sounding like mush, but this Solti one is crystal clear. It's my go to for the 9th.
Indeed! Most of the cycle is a snoozefest, which is kinda surprising when you think it’s Solti, and that he already has recorded way more exciting versions in Vienna. But that Ninth is exceptional!
In Berlin, the 9th has become ubiquitous. 21st October - Ticciati: DSO (with new spoken texts in-between movements …) 30th December - Canellakis: RSB 31st December - Canellakis: RSB 31st December - van Zweden: Staatskapelle (you can make it to both) 1st January - van Zweden: Staatskapelle 1st January - Dodds: SOB (simultaneously) 7th January - Andreas: Sinfonia Leipzig 11th February - Peschik: Czech Symphony It‘s feels as overplayed as Vivaldi‘s Four Seasons … 😐
It appears to be something of a holiday favorite, Berlin's version of Vienna's waltzes. If you account for all the ones happening at the New Year, and count Canellakis and van Zweden as one each (since most orchestras that schedules it would play it three or four times over the weekend), it's not so excessive.
Agree wholeheartedly Dave. There is some music that should never be routine, like B9 (& late sonatas & quartets). I rarely listen to it, perhaps only once every 3 or 4 years. It's too monumental. Requires a special mood or occasion. Depending on my preoccupations at the time, one of the Furt. performances, Klemps or Fricsay, or for the character of the orchestra, probably Kletzki or Schuricht in Paris. For similar reasons I avoid public performances. I was privileged decades ago to have seen Kubelik do it with BRSO in Munich. It made such a huge & lasting impression that I've not wanted to see another live performance...
Hi Dave. Your comments on late Beethoven and his forward looking quality, and your recent vid on black composers reminded me of a video from 2 yrs ago entitled Music theory and white supremacy. In case you have seen it, what do you think? Thabks
Personally, I think the "period instrument" revolution went too far, all I can see it has dumbed down performances generally. Instead of giving artistic flexibility from the conductor, you get a thin, weedy sound with all the repeats included. Good job Bruckner and Mahler didn't do many repeats lol. But never been of a fan of it. Great talk though David...
Agreed. One of the most awful recordings of the 9th that I ever purchased was Roger Norrington with the London Classical Players. What a tinny sounding snooze!
Furtwangler/Lucerne; Szell/CO; Reiner/CSO; Schmidt-Isserstdt;Blomstedt/Dresden for starters. IMHO, the ultimate example of how NOT to do it is Norrington, with the "correct" metronome markings (yecccchhhhh).
Well, and I’ve listened to it many times, but I hope it’s not offensive to say that I don’t really like it. So much cultural overload and the whole thing is rather humourless. Much happier listening to the Schubert one Happy to try again, but there are so many other things to listen to Really don’t like the cult of this particular work
I wouldn't think anyone is offended. I'm sure there is no work of art, no matter how exalted, that is beloved by each and every single person. We may feel very, very sad for you, and pray for your wicked and corrupted soul, but we're not offended. In all seriousness, the 9th was not an automatic object of infatuation for me, probably because I was still new to classical music and I needed to stretch my knowledge and tastes further before I could reckon with such a mammoth work. (The 9th is probably among the first works most people hear when they decide to take on classical music.) I love it now, and I"ve loved it for years. But initially I found it inpenetrable.
Perfectly valid opinion to have of the symphony but it's somewhat outside the scope of this chat. Even if you aren't so into the piece, it's still dumbed down too often.
Fair point. As you may gather, I’d really like to like it, but a limitation in me seems to mean I find it difficult to engage with. I’m the same way with the Missa Solemnis @@chickenringNYC
You don't need to apologize for not liking a piece of music. BTW I agree with you about Schubert 9th --- but it needs to be conducted by someone like Furtwangler or Blomstedt) as a monumental symphonic work, not like a series of Disney-esque central European folk tunes.
Am immensely glad to be 81 years old. All my recordings are older performances, thank goodness, and very individual and special. Dave Hurwitz, I feel as indignant as you sound. I would be wearing a tie if I were a man, but I am an old lady in her pyjamas, agreeing with every word you say. Thank you for caring as much as you do about the wonders of great music.
Yes, but I'll bet they're NICE pyjamas!
Well said Dave ! I'm 51 and when I was growing up a performance of the Ninth was a special event, be it live or on the radio (BBC Radio 3 here in the UK). Even putting on a record or CD, or in my case an audio cassette (either Klemperer / Philharmonia, or Schmidt-Isserstedt / VPO recorded from my Dad's LP) was a big deal requiring a free Saturday afternoon, headphones, and a big black and yellow 'do not disturb' sign on my bedroom door. The Proms is a case in point. The penultimate night was always 'Beethoven Friday' with a much anticipated Ninth performance usually broadcast live on BBC 2 (TV). Not so now. Nowadays it's performed on a random Tuesday night sandwiched between a 'Harry Potter' Prom and a DJ led celebration of 'Street Dirt and Funk-Garage-Grime' or whatever. This year was particularly beige and uninteresting and the only redeeming quality was it was over in about 59 minutes. I swear André Rieu could've done it better, at least it would've been an original take . . . and scene.
So true. Part of a wholesale sidelining of classical music in philistine little England. At least we still have R3, parts of which remain excellent.
Next May is the 200th anniversary of its premiere and I really want this to be an occasion where we reassess the work and its significance, including how it’s performed. I’m an early music guy but bristle at the notion that “authentic” means “small”. The most authentic way to perform Beethoven’s 7th, 8th and 9th symphonies is with doubled winds and 40-60 strings. The metronome markings should be studied since they provide some valuable clues as to the interpretation but certainly should not be followed slavishly.
Talking about the ninth is also an excellent opportunity to talk about the Enlightenment values it represents. At a time when the classical music world is working hard to diversify we should recognize the 9th as part of that rebellious movement, not something to be rebelled against.
I grew up with the Bruno Walter and Toscanini recordings. I love Karl Bohm’s first movement, an almost mystical exploration of the abyss. I do think the historically informed crowd have done a good job restoring the Scherzo its proper dimensions and character and making the Adagio something other than a nice nap between the second and fourth movements. And the last movement only works if the conductor believes in its ability to transcend borders as much as Beethoven did; if you’re just going to hide behind a clinical approach to metrical relationships please stay home.
We need to keep Beethoven in the conversation and on concert programs, but we can’t engage with him if we keep him on a pedestal. He was weird, he was problematic, but can still be inspirational, as a composer and even as a person: the fact that someone so damaged could create what is perhaps the greatest love letter to the human spirit is something to be celebrated. I hope enough of us still want to celebrate it.
In 2019, I was visiting family in the U.S. and was preparing for a road trip to see the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and a stop to attend the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game, when I discovered that the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra was performing the ninth on the evening I'd planned for a stopover on the way. Fortunately, my trip had begun in New York City where I'd attended a performance of The Ring cycle, so I had a suit (as well as a tux) with me. I packed the suit for the road trip. Having spent most of my adult life living in the Middle East and India, where I don't get to see many classical music performances, this was indeed a special occasion. I think the majority of the audience felt the same way as many were dressed well. By the end, I really felt as if it had been a once in a lifetime performance for me. Very special.
It doesn't matter if people think afterwards that I'm being too complimentary in this instance, but I have to say once again that it's not only a pleasure but also a real pleasure to listen to your analyses and perspectives. And I'll sound even more complimentary if I say that I agree with most of your analyses. So, here, I ABSOLUTELY MUST say this astonishing narrowing of the very apprehension of the Ninth. And all is said here, so many thanks once again.
A hypothesis, personal, but one in which I fundamentally believe. The "gigantic" works of music and, even more broadly, of culture and cultural heritage, are sometimes hard to hear in our time, which is characterized precisely by the narrowing of everything. How can we imagine that this age can support monumental or "cosmic" works? The general tendency is to shrink everything, just to the degree of Liliputian pettiness. It's important to know this in terms of this era's relationship to the legacy of a giant like Beethoven and his work.
No, really, what a pleasure and a relief to hear that. "A journey to what? To a dinner?" Well, yes: that's the current path. Making everything conform to the law of maketing, advertising, slogans and stupidity. Instead of behaving like true heirs capable of rising to the level of such a heritage. The very notion of a "box" is of this order: selling a "cycle of Beethoven symphonies" like you'd sell a packet of washing powder, and with a stupid slogan to boot. That says it all.
Think about it: this way of shrinking works reminds me of what Nietzsche already predicted in Also sprach Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil: the man of modernity, he said, will be the one who winks at the past, convinced that he, the man of the new society, is superior to the whole of the past. Why admire, when "everything is in the box"? And you have rightly felt and named this lowering. We should all reread Adorno (even if it's sometimes boring) to fully grasp this destiny of culture in consumer society. This is "the joke", this is "the tragedy", and we're aiming for it, we're all looking at it.
That's why I don't take your intention to wear a tie when talking about the Ninth, just as a joke. George Steiner didn't say otherwise, claiming to have painted a Chardin table depicting a man who has dressed up to read a masterpiece (I could point you to the reference, if you like). "It deserves special attention" you say; "The Music rewards that"; "It asks for, it begs for". I have nothing more to add: you exclaim here about the inability of our age to live up to WHAT a heritage REQUIRES. And it's nothing to do with snobbery to observe this, which is truly a tragedy.
Some years back, I attended a Buddhist seminar on Tenerife Island with people from around the world, and during a lunch break in the plaza, I overheard an elderly woman suddenly beginning to sing to her friend the Schiller chorus---I couldn't resist and immediately joined in the singing. She paused and looked at me and asked, "do you speak German?" To which I answered, " No, but I know Beethoven," and she smiled. Turns out she was from the former East Germany, and survived freedom-suppressing conditions there for decades. Beethoven's Ninth was an internal light they could carry to help them spiritually carry on. Yes, the Ninth is a special work, and I am always totally drained and yet fulfilled each time I listen to it. The sound blesses the space in which it is played.
Hear, hear. If anything, I’d rather see this gigantic work giganticized with added forces (as Mahler’s re-orchestration proposed by doubling horns and adding tuba), rather than amputated down into nothingness. Beethoven’s 9th is worth a full-blooded orchestra, much as Paris is worth a mass. If economics dictate a real 9th cannot be staged, programmers need to organize performances of something else.
I couldn't agree more. Please accept my personal standing ovation for this chat..
Osmo Vanska and Minnesota is my favourite modern ninth. The whole cycle is very strong.
The ninth is wonderfully cosmic. Every ambitious, dramatically-inclined symphonist has been influenced by it but not one has surpassed it. So thank you for emphasising that it should should never sound small!
One of your best videos yet - absolutely spot on! Love the ending too.
You'll be pleased to know I put on a tie to reply. I couldn't agree more. The BBC Proms in 🇬🇧 is a perfect example of a) the dumbing down of classical programming and b) the diminishment of the 9th. The reverence and quality of performance have descended into mediocrity. It no longer holds a special place amongst conductors who seem obsessed with churning out Mahler who has also been reduced to ordinariness. There's nothing ordinary about the music both Beethoven and Mahler produced. The 9th was always the penultimate concert of the proms and was performed by greats such as Solti, Jessye Norman, et al. Now it's given any old Tuesday by bands you've never heard of.
100% agree ! That Solti performance was immense, 1986 I think. As soon as the BBC tried to 'popularise' the Proms and try and woo a younger Radio 2 audience I was out. Will the powers that be add a performance of Die Shopfung to the 2024 Latitude line-up to even things out ? No, of course not.
Another wonderful post Dave, and like so many more you put out it trandcends the specific subject you have and covers the wider topic of a mad and often bogus rush to attain 'authenticity' over making the performance the best it can possibly be. I have two go-tos, Solti's 70's recording for it's majesterial handling and Leinsdorf for the sheer excitement with a much brisker version - without feeling hurried. I think it highlights the fact it is good to have different interpretations to draw on which can help highlight different aspects of the work. Solti is around 75 minutes and Leinsdorf around 10 minutes shorter, but both very powerful performances
Well said!...could not agree with you more!!!
You hit on it...."special."
We may have a new topic for a series.
Music that was and should be a special event, and not treated that way anymore.
Beethoven 9, Mahler 2, etc.
In 1823, the public thought Beethoven had 8 symphonies. He's done. BAMM!! The ninth was Beethoven's comeback!! Respect.
One of the most memorable performances of the 9th that I attended was in Golden Gate Park about one or two weeks after the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake. The San Francisco Symphony and Blomstedt decided to perform for free -- the price of admission was at least one can of food for the homeless. . It was a great concert -- Herbie being Herbie, the concert started with a rousing edition of the Star Spangled Banner. I made the front page of the San Francisco Examiner that day -- the arts reporter asked me what I thought of the concert and my comment was "Beethoven's 9th Symphony means Rebirth!" The title of the article was "City's Rebirth in Music, with a smiling picture of me giving the quote". This was my Andy Warhol 15 minutes claim to fame.
Mazel Tov!
Your view on boxed sets of the 'cycle' of symphonies is spot on. My respect for Beethoven grows and grows and in the 9th symphony he looks ahead to Mahler. The thing is, for Beethoven there was no Mahler. People talk about the disunity of the four movements but it's all one big story. It's our world: primordial chaos, life and then the resultant brotherhood of man. Unity, not disunity. Composers after Beethoven have struggled to match his work but I would say, in general, they really struggle to match the depth of his humanity. Thank you for your appreciation of that great man.
"Late Beethoven is from another world" well said!
Listening to the Ninth, I always felt a particular impression. Each of its 4 movements is a gigantic masterpiece in itself. But the unity of the work remains for me a deep enigma : maybe, that mystery contributes to the specificity of that work and to the difficulties to interpret it properly. I wonder if I am the only one to feel that.
I don't think you are alone. After many years of hearing it, the "meaning" (if that is actually the right word) has evolved as I've grown older. It makes more sense to me now in my 70's than it did when I was younger, though I would be hard put to explain just why. In any case, I favor the more emotionally expressive interpretations.
"...unity of the work remains for me a deep enigma". You're not the only one, Philip. If I had written that, my use of "enigma" would've been as a euphemism. With great regret, I characterize the LvB 9th as a seriously flawed masterpiece. For me, the disunity revolves around the presence of the 4th movement [an aside: it's interesting that David appears to feel that way about Eroica, i.e., not unified - two movements out of character with the other two]. I don't hate the finale, and I respect the fact that he attempted to compose a "choral symphony", but just not with this finale. I feel that he could've made a separate, more coherent piece with that same "Ode to Joy" material.
I have to admit that, as a sinful pleasure, I sometimes carve out a bleeding chunk of the 9th finale to be enraptured by that wonderful little fugue of an orchestral interlude and the brief, full tutti contrapuntal outburst that follows it.
Thanks, Dave. Can you imagine if we treated great theater this way? Someone puts on a production of King Lear not to draw out the universal of themes power, family, age, and so on; rather, they stage Lear with the express purpose of trying to mimic the performance as it might have been done in the early 17th century... Might be an interesting one-off novelty, but the work deserves more respect than that.
Could not agree more! I always look back to older recordings, because they’re always more rich, musically talking. But I have to say, I can appreciate a “historically informed” performance, when it is made with taste, and sensibility, without compromising the concept of the work. Great video by the way! Best regards from Santiago, Chile
You are soooo right about all this... I am looking forward to conducting the 9th next season with a full-size Residentie Orchestra and Chorus in The Hague
Go for it!
You might have posted a warning, Dave. Luckily I wasn't eating...
Agreed 100% on everything you said though. Being such a monumental piece of music, bigger in all respects is generally better, at least when it comes to THE NINTH!
This is such a wonderful video with such a heartbreakingly true argument!!
BRAVO! The ninth is the NINTH! It is the work that loomed over Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner. It should be cosmic, powerful, cataclysmic . Wand, klemperer, Bohm, szell, toscanini etc knew this.
Paul
Attending the Pittsburgh Symphony for many years, a good number under Steinberg, the Beethoven Ninth was always reserved as a season finale. Steinberg treated it with the reverence it was due.
Bravo, Dave, for that blast of trumpet against the tendency to trivialise Beethoven's 9th (and a lot of other music as well - only Mahler seems relatively exempt). It is as if modern performers, especially those "historically informed", are afraid of grandeur and magnificence. Unfortunately their influence seems to affect many less bigoted performers to a certain extent. The 9th is indeed special and represents the pinnacle of these qualities. I got to know the work through Toscanini's NBC recording which certainly displays these qualities albeit diminished by rather dry and thin sound on HMV's 1953 pressings (I still have these LPs). However, Furtwängler's 1954 Lucerne performance was a revelation to me. I think it has an extra dimension in cosmic grandeur and specialness, no doubt helped by the very good mono sound.
Couldn't agree more.
I always thought that the Furtwangler 54 performance at Lucerne was his best. The other performance I find stupendous is Blomstedt's 1985 performance with
Dresden at the reopening of the Semperoper after its closing for 40 years --- it had to be rebuilt after the bombing of Dresden.
Since today is the 200th anniversary of The 9th, I would just like to add that one of the earliest concerts I attended, at the age of 13, was with the Minnesota Orchestra led by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, on June 30, 1974. A wonderful, stirring performance for this 13-year old, although I did think that the 3rd movement was interminable. I didn't really know the name Skrowaczewski back then, except that he wasn't Ormandy or Bernstein! However, I have noticed in the last few years that a number of recordings of Skrowaczewski have been released. Happy 9th to everyone. Wesley
Well said Dave, it is an unfortunate fact that cultural touchstones become part of the wallpaper of consumerism. As a related topic, it occurred to me that there are a number of pieces that we consider part of the general repertoire that only became widely known or appreciated much later In the same way you mention Late Beethoven as being for the cognoscenti for many years. Certainly that was the case with some of Schubert, all of Mahler, and I guess you could even add Bach to the list! And another interesting topic is what the public considers a piece used for celebratory occasions. I know Furtwangler viewed the 9th in that way, but when I was in Los Angeles a few years ago, Salonen used the Mahler 2nd to open the new Disney Concert Hall... Come to think of it Solti used the Mahler 8th to open the concert season when I lived in Chicago.
I think it's happening across all Classical music. It infested Opera first. Instead of changing the venues and the decorum of going to the Opera to appeal to the average person, they thought "Let's change the Opera instead" to appeal to no one, but people that wear their glasses too far down their nose. It's like your video ranting about cycles, and how it cheapens works and you often get lesser performances crammed into a box set. I have to admit to being a cycles and box set guy, but I fully understand what you mean. There might be a couple of works that drew me to the set, but then there'll be a lot of filler. The 9th should never be filler. It should never be the after dinner mint.
My first hearing of the 9th was at Tanglewood in 1960, conducted by Pierre Monteux, with the soprano part sung by Eleanor Steber. I was sitting 7th row center, age (almost) 16. I have largely avoided hearing the work since, wanting to retain the memory of that totally amazing performance. Hearing the work too frequently is another way to make it feel ordinary (one reason folks listen to period performances: they sound different). Last year (62 years later) I heard Michael Tilson Thomas conduct it at Tanglewood. One reason I went is that it was preceded by Ives's Psalm 90; in a review I wrote about the question of what you pair it with to make a program. Monteux started with Schubert's "Unfinished" (written almost at the same time). Recently it has been a practice to pair it with Schoenberg's "Survivor from Warsaw" providing a post-modern, existential frame for its idealistic message. While that can work as an antidote to its political mis-use by Nazis or to celebrate the tearing down of the Berlin wall, I felt that using Ives's most transcendent work offered a more appropriate prelude to the universal aspect of the symphony. MTT managed to make the piece sound fresh by maintaining balance and transparency, utilizing classical articulation (taking the phrase markings etc seriously) and finding a just tempo (neither rushed nor dragging) for the slow movement. Most powerfully he made the trio of the scherzo sound not only gorgeous but meaningful, like an idealized community singing session, one that anticipates the communal song of the last movement. It was an original, appropriate interpretation, made more poignant for me by the fact that MTT was fighting (and overcoming) very serious health challenges. I am skipping the Tanglewood performance today, not because I have doubts about Susanna Malkki or the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, but because I don't want to use the work the way Tanglewood does, as a ritual which loses specificity through repetition and over-familiarity. Each hearing should feel like the first one! That is another way to respect its monumentality. (Sorry, I did not put on a tie to write this).
Love your passion, for The 9th, Dave!
Shall we practice our grimaces now for scaled-down Missa Solemnises?
...Next up: a conductorless, vibratoless, one-instrument-per-part TRISTAN.
Completely agree. Of all symphonies, a performance of Beethoven's 9th should be an "event" a "special occasion" that leaves one in total awe after it has finished (and, what a stupendously thrilling, overwhelming, ending it has!). Unfortunately we are living in a age when the most sublime and most life-changing music is instantly available at the leisurely flick of a switch (if one chooses to treat the profoundest utterances of the human soul as just another piece of music then does anything have any real meaning in one's life?)
Muti scheduled to do his first Missa Solemnis EVER a couple of years ago in Chicago. He said he hadn't felt ready yet. Because of covid, his premier ended up being somewhere else. But you could tell at his Chicago performances this spring how special the piece is
The best Beethoven 9th on TH-cam, IMO, is the one by Ormandy and the Chicago Symphony, a live performance. The playing is close to perfection and the tempos, on the fast side, are perfect. This performance is totally different from the studio recording by Solti with its incredibly slow third movement. There is another great one by the Budapest Philharmonic, only available as a download. It is similar to the aforementioned Ormandy with slightly slower tempos. It is hard to find but worth the effort.
Preach! Couldn’t agree more. 😎🎹
B9 is so great that I hardly ever listen to it! Same goes for certain other works (Mozart MofF; Bach Bm; Wagner T&I; Schubert quintet etc). Fortunately I am ignorant enough to be able to spend the majority of my listening time getting to know new repertoire. This year it’s mainly Handel operas. An infinity of choice.
Reminds me of that song about the blandness of the suburbs.
Boxes ticky tacky boxes and they all look just the same😊
Don't get me wrong I love spacious homes in family neighbourhoods😊
Not sure why I made that analogy more pertaining to the musical talk above.
i was delighted to see my first performance of the work this past weekend. The stage was absolutely filled with a double choir, musicians and 4 soloists. (BPO Buffalo NY}. It was wonderful. Im trying to make comparisons to your discussion but Im having a tough time getting the crux of it. Is the point that modern orchestras should follow the spirit of the work but discard tempo and dynamics at other points bc the composer could not hear himself? Can the argument be boiled down for this layperson?
I'm glad you enjoyed the concert, but I'm unsure about your question. I discuss the modern habit of performing large works with ever smaller forces, but I think the bottom line is that some works are "big" in vision and scale and minimizing them for (mostly) financial reasons, even when dressed up under the rubric of "authenticity," does not serve them well.
@@DavesClassicalGuide thank you, I did hear that in your talk and agree. I guess there were other points that came up along the way that distracted my attention 😄
Besides being a musician, I am also a Classicist, and the period instrument movement always reminds me of the tendency in Latin to insist on certain "reconstructed" pronunciations, when in fact, we have no idea how Caesar actually sounded when he spoke. The bottom line is, it's impossible to reconstruct a sound when you don't have a recording, and sometimes the best policy, is just to make it sound as good as you can--I kind of thought that was the point of this music we all love so much.
Now I need to listen to a good recording of :puts on tie: the ninth.
Maybe Fricsay...
The Fricsay is my first choice for the 9th followed by the Furtwangler/Lucerne and the Schmidt-Isserstedt Vienna.
Excellent talk... even if my Freude dipped slightly when "den Brüsten der Natur" made their fleeting cameo appearance :)
My favorite recordings are Fricsay from 1958 and Toscanini from 1952. What’s your favorite Dave?
Watch the video.
Let us hope the people that perform such madness stop and that people not listen or buy such thrash. I like the tie !
Totally agree. Late Beethoven belongs to a later era in history of music. And it should be played like that. The Ninth on period instruments is a bit like the Sonata op. 111 or the Hammerklavier played on a harpsichord. You can do it, of course, but what would it convey?
In your original repertoire video on The Ninth you only mentioned three recordings. Have you ever considered revisiting it as a Repertoire video with a few more?
I'd love to see that, too.
🙂 Somehow someone will also mention Brexit and such. Oh well. Moving onwards. Perhaps a simular example of how one is experiencing the reducement of great oeuvres is Händel's Messiah. I remember Richard Whittall's ariticle in The Guardian already a decade ago. He wrote then about how a certain passage is as beautiful as it is haunting when one hears "He was dispised". Sadly there's indeed yawning, perhaps even an eye roll or two then in the ranks of singers. When someone involved in music does that, well, it's cursing and not good at all. Not at all elitish to demand more and better
Absolutely. The Late Period is still sounds modern and revolutionary…. Crazy music. Concerning “TheNinth”, as an event, I really like the 1977 live video with Karajan and Berlin. It was a real “Event”…performed on New Year’s Eve, broadcast worldwide. I remember seeing it on PBS at some point later… the video, directed by Humphrey Burton, doesn’t suffer from Karajan’s static, fake, conductor-centric, musicianless movie directing, but is a wonderful live document, much like Burton did with the Bernstein/Vienna Mahler video cycle.
Excellent chat Dave. I don't get too much into new cycles because my approach to collecting is different - I want just the high quality, well done recordings of a given work and I generally don't want more than three of ANY given work. (Of course that's partly informed by the fact that I will have, one day, to go through my dad's enormous collection - no need for me to buy anything I may inherit 20fold later on). But back when I was young my first Beethoven cycle wasn't Karajan or some other celebrated one everyone's supposed to have, it was Hogwood and the AAM. I bring it up mostly because as a period instrument cycle done by one of that movement's more important groups and leaders, I think it does everything right and diminishes nothing. I still prefer that 9th to many better known and more lauded interpretations. But perhaps Hogwood and the AAM are the exception to the period instrument rule. I believe they were cognizant of the world premier's forces and replicated them, as I recall counting the named musicians and I think the number was around 120, to say nothing of the chorus (who I think remained anonymous and uncounted) who do sound very full. It seems to me that you can't claim authenticity if you're going to scale back the forces when we know they were big at that premier.
One other thing to mention about Hogwood's cycle, is that they did originally come out one disc or LP at a time. It's long been available only as a complete set but I have the individual originals and though I haven't really thought about it before, it makes sense that you do regard the individual symphonies on their own merits more when presented to you that way. I guess it's one of the drawbacks of living in the age of recorded, play it whenever you want to hear it, age of music, because I don't think it was as possible to regard something like a symphony cycle, to say nothing of his piano sonatas, as a gigantic whole back when you could only hear the music when someone was playing it. You were never going to hear all 9 symphonies in an evening for example - something my local classical radio station has done every New Years' Eve for as long as I've been alive, probably longer.
Hogwood recorded the symphonies in the late 1980s; so perhaps the period instruments fetish had not yet become so pervasive.
One of my favorite 9th's is this AAM/Hogwood. His tempi are lively enough such that the monumental 1st movement's energy and tension (the movement that my judgement of 9ths always hinges on) never let up and the sense of forward momentum strikes me viscerally here, as it does also, say, in the NBC/Toscanini. Notwithstanding that, I couldn't actually pick a fave in this work, over which I have distressing ambivalence due to Beethoven's compositional decisions (ever since childhood I've had difficulty with 4th movement).
Recently the Oregon Symphony played the 9th, I figured it might be one of the few opportunities to take my teenage sons for a live performance, They were skeptical, but I explained that the piece was special and that people needed to hear it at least once live before they died. Our Symphony here in Portland did a terrific job with it, and the kids were just flabbergasted, said they had just never heard anything like it. One underrated quality of the ninth is that it can draw in listeners with relatively less experience, in spite of (because of?) its extraordinary complexity. It connects people not just of different cultural backgrounds but different historical periods as well, and will do so for centuries.
Glad to hear your teens were favorably impressed. It gives an old geezer like me some hope for the future.
Richard Taruskin made a similar point about the kind of arrogance it takes to do this kind of "correction" - it reminds me of Tia de Nora's book on Beethoven and the construction of genius that spends a lot of energy to "deconstruct" the "myth of genius" but when you listen to his contemporaries and I think the word "genius" in the sentence "compared to his contemporaries Beethoven's genius is self-evident" sells Beethoven short
I started with the Karl Boehm last edition so to me, the 🙏Ninth 🙏 has always been his homage to Wagner...
One performance of the 9th that really makes it sound special is Solti's first analog Chicago recording. Not a great symphony cycle overall, but an exceptional 9th, IMO, which hardly gets mentioned these days.
The Solti one(first Chicago recording) has probably the best, most clearest sounding choruses of all the 9th recordings. Most recordings have the chorus sounding like mush, but this Solti one is crystal clear. It's my go to for the 9th.
Indeed! Most of the cycle is a snoozefest, which is kinda surprising when you think it’s Solti, and that he already has recorded way more exciting versions in Vienna. But that Ninth is exceptional!
completely agree------and recording quality was excellent-----my favorite recorded version
What do you think of Rahbari's 4th movement?
People have a tendency to cut things down to size, unfortunately-it makes them uncomfortable
In Berlin, the 9th has become ubiquitous.
21st October - Ticciati: DSO (with new spoken texts in-between movements …)
30th December - Canellakis: RSB
31st December - Canellakis: RSB
31st December - van Zweden: Staatskapelle (you can make it to both)
1st January - van Zweden: Staatskapelle
1st January - Dodds: SOB (simultaneously)
7th January - Andreas: Sinfonia Leipzig
11th February - Peschik: Czech Symphony
It‘s feels as overplayed as Vivaldi‘s Four Seasons … 😐
It appears to be something of a holiday favorite, Berlin's version of Vienna's waltzes. If you account for all the ones happening at the New Year, and count Canellakis and van Zweden as one each (since most orchestras that schedules it would play it three or four times over the weekend), it's not so excessive.
Agree wholeheartedly Dave. There is some music that should never be routine, like B9 (& late sonatas & quartets). I rarely listen to it, perhaps only once every 3 or 4 years. It's too monumental. Requires a special mood or occasion. Depending on my preoccupations at the time, one of the Furt. performances, Klemps or Fricsay, or for the character of the orchestra, probably Kletzki or Schuricht in Paris. For similar reasons I avoid public performances. I was privileged decades ago to have seen Kubelik do it with BRSO in Munich. It made such a huge & lasting impression that I've not wanted to see another live performance...
Hi Dave. Your comments on late Beethoven and his forward looking quality, and your recent vid on black composers reminded me of a video from 2 yrs ago entitled Music theory and white supremacy. In case you have seen it, what do you think? Thabks
be right back, I gotta get my tie before watching!
A tie! Nice looking.
Nice tie ;)
Personally, I think the "period instrument" revolution went too far, all I can see it has dumbed down performances generally. Instead of giving artistic flexibility from the conductor, you get a thin, weedy sound with all the repeats included. Good job Bruckner and Mahler didn't do many repeats lol. But never been of a fan of it. Great talk though David...
Agreed. One of the most awful recordings of the 9th that I ever purchased was Roger Norrington with the London Classical Players. What a tinny sounding snooze!
Why do you have a black tie on, Dave?
Note his opening statement, specifically the words "suitably attired." He also alludes to it several other times later.
"Oh, it's only the Ninth."
Whose? "Just Beethoven."
Duh... That's a crime!
Seeing Dave's moobs is also a crime!
Exactly.
[Warning: the following is sarcasm] I'm holding out for an authentic chamber-ensemble recording of Brian's Gothic Symphony.
Norrington will be doing it at next year's proms.
Ha!
Furtwangler/Lucerne; Szell/CO; Reiner/CSO; Schmidt-Isserstdt;Blomstedt/Dresden for starters.
IMHO, the ultimate example of how NOT to do it is Norrington, with the "correct" metronome markings
(yecccchhhhh).
Beethoven at the premiere performance used double woodwind; I even read somewhere that he paid for part of the extra expense out of his own pocket.
Shirts off might be more appropriate for Saint Saens Carnival of the Animals.
Preach 🙌
Amen!
YES
Well, and I’ve listened to it many times, but I hope it’s not offensive to say that I don’t really like it. So much cultural overload and the whole thing is rather humourless. Much happier listening to the Schubert one
Happy to try again, but there are so many other things to listen to
Really don’t like the cult of this particular work
Schubert 9 has a spirituality to it as well. But Beethoven 9 is the ultimate.
I wouldn't think anyone is offended. I'm sure there is no work of art, no matter how exalted, that is beloved by each and every single person.
We may feel very, very sad for you, and pray for your wicked and corrupted soul, but we're not offended.
In all seriousness, the 9th was not an automatic object of infatuation for me, probably because I was still new to classical music and I needed to stretch my knowledge and tastes further before I could reckon with such a mammoth work. (The 9th is probably among the first works most people hear when they decide to take on classical music.) I love it now, and I"ve loved it for years. But initially I found it inpenetrable.
Perfectly valid opinion to have of the symphony but it's somewhat outside the scope of this chat. Even if you aren't so into the piece, it's still dumbed down too often.
Fair point. As you may gather, I’d really like to like it, but a limitation in me seems to mean I find it difficult to engage with. I’m the same way with the Missa Solemnis
@@chickenringNYC
You don't need to apologize for not liking a piece of music. BTW I agree with you about Schubert 9th --- but it needs to be conducted by someone like Furtwangler or Blomstedt) as a monumental symphonic work, not like a series of Disney-esque central European folk tunes.