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First Metropolitan United Church
February 15, 2019
There are certain pieces of music that are, as they say, "performance proof" or that "play themselves".
By which musicians and music-lovers generally mean that, as long as the notes are more-or-less all present and in more-or-less the right order, the music will make its intended effect felt.
Beethoven's Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano, the "Triple Concerto", Op.56, is emphatically not one of these works.
One of the reasons for this is probably length: having vastly expanded the symphony in the "Eroica" (which immediately preceded the concerto) Beethoven was clearly in an expansive frame of mind and would soon go on to push the boundaries of both the piano concerto (Op.58) and the violin concerto (Op.61), both of whose opening movements were the longest ever written at the time.
This was also the time when composers had begun to write music that needed to be listened to, not simply heard as background music (think of all those serenades and divertimentos), in order to appreciate it fully.
A mediocre performance, then, even of a masterful work, can easily lead to tedium, as a dismally depressing performance of Beethoven's violin concerto I witnessed a couple of decades ago amply demonstrated.
Happily, Friday's performance of the Triple Concerto had everything going for it: a trio of superb soloists, a fine orchestra and a conductor who understands pacing and structure.
The opening movement began almost surreptitiously in the cellos and basses, before a most impressive tutti crescendo, pregnant with promise.
Beethoven gives the opening statement of virtually every theme to the weakest (sonically-speaking, I hasten to add) instrument, the cello; and Pamela Highbaugh Aloni's entry was elegance personified. Indeed, elegance was the watchword for all three soloists, whether playing together or separately. Balances were as good as they are ever likely to get in this music (Beethoven did his best, but he really was trying to square the circle in this regard).
Yariv Aloni shaped the movement superbly, adding to its coherence, and the soloists were scintillating in the snappy coda.
The slow movement featured rich string tones in the accompaniment, some exquisite clarinets — courtesy of Don Mayer and Marcus Durrent — accompanying Lorraine Min's rippling piano, and Terence Tam's singing violin. It was easy to concur with Roger Fiske's view of this movement as "perfect".
The finale combined the aforementioned elegance with a real sense of playfulness and excellently-observed dynamics in the orchestra. The entire movement was full of life and rhythmic verve, even the half-tempo coda, which Fiske suggests was "too casually written", speculating that Beethoven had by this time lost interest in the concerto, having become engrossed in writing Fidelio, and completing it only at the insistence of his patron and student (and probable pianist in the premiere) Archduke Rudolph.
There can be no denying that the concerto is not an unproblematic work, but this performance came as close to overcoming its shortcomings as any I have heard.
As if his deafness and the problems with his nephew weren't enough, poor Beethoven often had to face audiences whose enthusiasms did not always coincide with his own.
At the premiere of his Symphony No.8, on 27 February 1814, the work was clearly less popular than its companion on the programme, the Symphony No.7. (And when the seventh was premiered the previous year, the audience was far more receptive to its companion piece, Wellingtons Sieg, commonly known as the "Battle" Symphony and considered by most to be one of the very worst pieces Beethoven ever composed.)
After the premiere of the eighth, Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny asked the composer why he though the seventh was more popular than its successor.
"Because the Eighth is so much better", Beethoven growled. (For what it's worth, George Bernard Shaw agreed with him.)
And, two centuries later, the eighth is still less popular than the seventh and still, I would venture to suggest, seriously under-rated. It has many experimental aspects: Robert Simpson has suggested that it foreshadows some of the formal innovations of the late quartets and he also believes that what is usually considered an extended coda in the finale is, in fact, a second development section.
This has long been one of my favourite Beethoven symphonies and I was looking forward to hearing Aloni and the Victoria Chamber Orchestra take it on.
Nor was I in any way disappointed.
The opening movement featured crisp, precise playing from all sections and an unstoppable momentum n the development, with nicely rasping brass accents, leading to a glorious climax. The almost throwaway ending was delectable.
The Allegretto scherzando was taken at a decidedly nippy pace and was playfully energetic (not to mention energetically playful) but did not lack in subtlety.
The third movement is a minuet, but a far cry from those in a symphony by Haydn or Mozart.
Again, it was taken at a brisk pace; I thoroughly enjoyed the slightly pompous air with which it was, very aptly, imbued. In the trio (in which, according to Igor Stravinsky, Beethoven displayed "incomparable instrumental thought") the horns were very fine, although — and this was almost certainly because of where I was sitting in the balcony — the wonderful arpeggiated triplets from the cellos were all but inaudible.
The finale was once again quick, in fact after the opening bars it was very quick indeed. One orchestra member described it to me afterwards as a "wild ride"; it certainly was, but to their great credit, the orchestra at no time seemed in any danger of actually falling off.
A superb performance of a superb symphony.
The evening opened with the overture to the incidental music to Goethe's Egmont.
The first bars revealed the full, rich sound which characterised the orchestra's playing throughout the evening, with the strings really digging in and marvellously characterful winds.
The sense of urgency conveyed in the main body of the overture was, if anything, only enhanced by the sound of sirens from the street and the exciting coda was given that extra fillip by the piccolo of Mary Jill McCullough (you could almost hear Beethoven thinking "well, it worked at the end of the fifth symphony, so why change a winning formula?")
An uplifting evening all around.
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