Beethoven: Symphony no. 9 - 4th movement - Tenor aria (Benjamin Zander - Interpretation Class)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 มิ.ย. 2020
- For more classes like this one, please visit the Benjamin Zander Center - www.benjaminzander.org/
David Rivera Bozón, tenor
Pierre-Nicolas Colombat, piano
Benjamin Zander's Interpretation of Music, Lessons for Life
Dave Jamrog Audio/Video
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I just love how he manages to bring out the beauty and joy of music not only in the musicians but in the audience and anyone watching these videos. I'm sitting here with a big grin on my face. Mr. Zander is truly a gift to humanity as his passions and teachings and work with musicians truly brings out everyone's best.
That tenor has an amazing smile to match that voice!
This is wonderful. In a few minutes the soloist is transformed from apparently nervous and slightly inaccurate to confident and spot on; this is thanks to the change of speed and to Mr Zander's warmth and positivity. Well done to the pianist too, for coping with the much faster tempo.
Extraordinary. I bought the Zander version on iTunes yesterday afternoon. What a coincidence that this video comes out the following day. I'm one of Ben's people that like classical music but just don't know it yet.
Thank you very much for great
performance.
The most beautiful part of the 4th
this video makes my day
Danke Maestro!!!
I can’t quite describe how much I love this tiny little morsel from the tour de force that is the Ninth. That the maestro is able to wrest this sort of power from the singer is remarkable.
Same here my friend. I'm obsessed and in love with this tiny little gem in the awesome ninth. I could watch this video all day
fantastic!
Beautiful interpretation
I like the slow tempo better. Alla marcha. Can you March to that fast tempo? Ruins. A middle growing would be ideal
He looks like Furio from The Sopranos (no pun intended), just waiting for him to exclaim "STOOPIDA FAKKIN GAME" 😂😂😂😂😂
That sounds so difficult at that tempo.
My online class starts in 5 minutes
Had a little trouble on the second "froh".
How much God kissis his live, he has love in his ❤️
When his metronome stopped working , it broke my heart. . .
Muito bom
No matter how trivial my thoughts are, against this master; I disagree on the tempo. The full Italian tempo mark contains "Alla Marcia" which suggests that it should be in the tempo of a march. I do not know what is the evidence that the nephew was mistaken but the dotted tempo doesn't feel very wrong to me. It is also so hard for tenor and tha bassoon to perform the riff where tenor says (soo - on - nee - en - fliii - e - geee - en) with (F - F - A - C - F - F - G - A).
Be careful when disagreeing with him :) he's probably right
@@H.hipster appeal to authority?
@@felixfourcolor appeal to lack of authority from the op 😂😂😂
Almost like the old master was present
His produced vibrato might be an indication of some vocal issues.
Tooooo short !!!! I feel cheated ! 😁
I believe Maestro Zander will demand more softer voice and build the climax and more and more powerful at almost the end of the phrase.
I am not sure why we are able to just disregard what Beethoven marked down as the original dotted 1/4 = 84. Surely, if Beethoven had believed his nephew was in error with this marking, it would have been changed, no?
It's troubling to think that we can just "update" a tempo that clearly was intended by the composer simply because its labelled "allegro assai vivace." Do we have a hard and fast definition of what "very fast" is? If so, I am not sure I know it.
"Allegro assai vivace" literally "enough lively cheerful". I would not say this translates to "very fast" because that could have been "presto" or "prestissimo". But that is a matter of literal translation. It should be considerably faster, though, than andante (going, as in a good walking pace).
There are tribes of musicologists that debate how to explain metronome tempi in sheet music that got introduced after about 1815. See AuthenticSound TH-cam channel.
I would say that dances give a reasonably stable tempo because the relation between music and human motion is defined. A waltz has to allow you a certain sort-of-slow speed.
Many times, Van Beethoven's music sounds as if based on a march tempo. While in modernity everything seems to go faster all the time, and this makes us think that "way back" everything was slow, we have to imagine a day's marching distance of a Roman army, 2,000 years ago. The slow day march was about 20 miles and the fast one about 30 - with very heavy load on the shoulders. Yes, miles, not kilometers: 30 miles is 48.3 kilometers, so more than a marathon. That said, tempo is difficult. An extremely long note today, "brevis" was called that ("short") in times when religious music had to be performed as slowly s possible.
As to the note-taking "error" - this is very likely in the case of Van Beethoven (1770-1827 - composed the 9th symphony 1822-1824, premiered on 7 May 1824, first printed 1826) - as he was almost completely deaf in 1814 already and needed help of assistants to get many things done. A complication today is that his metronome still works properly and accurately, but the weight is missing and the mass of that weight would determine how fast it goes.
Wagner and Mahler have tried to improve this symphony in their practice, I feel Zander understands the Zeitgeist and Van Beethoven's spirit.
Reports say that the first performance with deaf Van Beethoven conducting (next to another conductor) lasted about 70 minutes. Eyewitnesses say Ludwig gesticulated with so much drive that it seemed he wanted to play all the instruments himself - I would translate this as making sure the tempo was high enough. IIRC the 70 mminutes are about what can be put on a single music CD. Zander just released his 9th in a 3-CD box: one with the symphony and the other two with his discussion of why it is performed the way he does.
Von Karajan is under 70 minutes, Bernstein in the ballpark, Furtwängler a couple minutes slower. Brahms would say that performance is not his business as a composer. Ravel walked out when a conductor disregarded an important instruction (Furtwängler, Bolero, IIRC). Rachmaninoff played piano pieces of other composers like a composer, not like a performer.
It's art and taste, and in the end boils down to PLU or OKOP.
PLU - People Like Us
OKOP - Our Kind Of People
think this is art, beautiful and that is not.
@@jpdj2715 I agree that that is not an accurate translation, I was simply applying the language used by Zander in the video. But the deeper question is what exactly does that mean? You say it's "considerably faster, though than andante" - but what exactly does that translate into tempo-wise. There are MULTIPLE examples of Beethoven using italian tempii markings and having wildly different corresponding mm's for them (i.e. Sym 1, mvmnts 3 + 4 are marked 'Allegro molto e vivace' with mm's dotted 1/2 = 108 and half note = 88 respectively. How does one account for this, if not to say that the mm's are an actual indication of a real tempo and not just a 'feeling' based on the italian tempii markings).
Sure, we can try and blame the error on something like deafness, a broken metronome, etc. but the fact remains that these are the numbers we have. Of course in late life Beethoven needed assistance, but I cannot imagine him standing for an incorrect notation from his assistants. Imagine him walking over to his nephew who was recording the numbers for him (as described in the video), and seeing an incorrect number, he would have corrected it.
"""Reports say that the first performance with deaf Van Beethoven conducting (next to another conductor) lasted about 70 minutes. Eyewitnesses say Ludwig gesticulated with so much drive that it seemed he wanted to play all the instruments himself - I would translate this as making sure the tempo was high enough. IIRC the 70 minutes are about what can be put on a single music CD. Zander just released his 9th in a 3-CD box: one with the symphony and the other two with his discussion of why it is performed the way he does.
Von Karajan is under 70 minutes, Bernstein in the ballpark, Furtwängler a couple minutes slower. Brahms would say that performance is not his business as a composer. Ravel walked out when a conductor disregarded an important instruction (Furtwängler, Bolero, IIRC). Rachmaninoff played piano pieces of other composers like a composer, not like a performer.
It's art and taste, and in the end boils down to PLU or OKOP."""
- I am not sure what you are trying to say here. This is not a matter of "art and taste," it's a matter of accuracy. You're right to point out a spectrum of duration when it comes to performances of the 9th, but as of late, there are more and more "historically informed practices" that jettison the original tempo markings and are wildly fast compared to the ones you cited. I can think off hand of three that barely crest over the hour mark: Gardiner, Hogwood, Goodman, (not to mention Zander, who seems to have an aversion to having the symphony go longer than an hour - speaking from personal experience having both listened to the CD and heard his performance live with the Akron Symphony a few years back).
So, already there is a gap. There are those who play it slower and those who play it faster. It is intellectually dishonest to throw up one's hands and say "well it's just a matter of taste." At least Zander takes the mm's seriously and says "no these are the numbers, play the piece faster." I would politely disagree with him and would be happy to chat further about it, but then again, I am no expert, I just believe there are deeper questions to be asked than simply devolving to "feelings" and "sentiment" when discussing tempo markings.
Nicholas Bartulovic Wait if a dotted 1/2=108 then 1/4=324 thats very fast and 1/2=88 then you would have 1/4= 160 and thats in a piece of 2/4 so where 1/4 would be the same as 1/2 in 2/2
These don't seem like very legit questions...
This IS what Beethoven intended, otherwise he would have written "moderato" or "andante" (if it were half the time).
He just wrote 6/8, 84.
That, along with the italian marking, is enough information. Don't overthink it.
"Tempo is character."
Beethoven
That is the key.
You have to think tempo as an expressive and musical information, not as some kind of close mathematical formula that makes you forget everything else in a blind search for a false objectivity.
Beethoven didn't make music according to these terms. He assumed we would be intelligent enough to put together the simple information he gave in the most appropriate manner.
The dotted notes are his nephew's, not his. Remember that. Don't presume he would bother double-checking everything. He was too busy writing this amazing music.
Otherwise, he would not have asked for help in the first place.
Cheers!
@
"This IS what Beethoven intended, otherwise he would have written "moderato" or "andante" (if it were half the time)."
-Is this true? Again, even a basic examination of Beethoven's corpus shows wildly different metronome indications and even Italian descriptors for "Moderato" and "Andante." On top of this, I am wondering what we are to make of tempo indications like the first mvmnt of Op. 59, no. 2 - which Beethoven marks "Allegro" - 6/8 - Dotted quarter = 84. So now the only distinction between the two is "Allegro" v. "Allegro assai vivace." How do we account for this?
"Don't presume he would bother double-checking everything. He was too busy writing this amazing music."
-Is there any biographical evidence to support this? I am legitimately not sure.
"Beethoven didn't make music according to these terms. He assumed we would be intelligent enough to put together the simple information he gave in the most appropriate manner."
-Then why was he so meticulous about his metronome markings? And again, if he assumed we would be intelligent enough to put this together ourselves, why is there so much controversy surrounding the tempii of Beethoven and to a lesser extent, other early romantic composers? Additionally, if it was so intuitive as to how fast/slow one ought to play a piece, why is there such a disparity in the vast number of recordings out there, all with varying tempii?
"You have to think tempo as an expressive and musical information, not as some kind of close mathematical formula that makes you forget everything else in a blind search for a false objectivity."
-This is not a search for false objectivity, but rather, being faithful to the composers intentions. Even Zander, though I disagree with him, takes the metronome markings seriously in an attempt to bring about what Beethoven meant things to sound like.
Entirely disagree with the tempo. It is a comfortable March it is not a running bandit escaping from police 👮♀️
Primer comentario xd
Way, way, way too fast.