July 10, 2009: Beethoven favorites

The title for last night's installment of the Summer & the Symphony series at Davies Symphony Hall was "my classic Beethoven" (capitalization as in the program), probably as a move to attract a large enthusiastic audience.  Both audience and enthusiasm were present for the occasion, as was conductor James Gaffigan, leading the San Francisco Symphony and pianist Jeremy Denk in a program of favorite works by Ludwig van Beethoven that were not, in the technical sense of the word, "classical" but provided a full evening of stimulating listening opportunities.  What struck me the most about the program itself was how narrow a period of time it covered.  Having emerged from the historical scope of the full cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas, it was interesting to encounter a program that narrowed in on a single decade, covering, specifically, the years 1801, 1807, and 1809 (which is where the technicality comes in, since by this time Beethoven had put most of the "classic" traditions behind him).

1801 was represented by Beethoven's fifth symphony, Opus 67 in C minor, probably the most venerable of the warhorses in the Beethoven stable.  It is hard to imagine anyone in the audience who was not familiar with this music, so the challenge to performing it was very much a matter of appealing to that familiarity while making the case that there was more to the concert experience than listening to a recording yet another time.  Gaffigan rose to this challenge by eschewing any outré approaches and instead going for the jugular with the edge-of-your-seat tension of forward-moving drive.  Since this was the only work following the intermission, he had plenty of time to take all repeats and, where the final movement was concerned, kicked the tempo up a bit for the second iteration.  Even for those who know this music in their sleep, this reading was well worth the listen.

1807 was the year in which Beethoven prepared a concert overture for a performance of the play Coriolan by Heinrich Joseph von Collin.  In his notes for the program book, Michael Steinberg quoted Alexander Wheelock Thayer, whose biography of Beethoven is almost always by my side when I have to write about his music.  Thayer observed that "the admirable adaptation of the overture to the play is duly appreciated by those only who have read Collin's almost forgotten work."  Since I have not seen any of Collin's texts, I am in a poor position to judge this remark;  but on other occasions I have observed that Beethoven's sense of drama seldom seems to be matched by an equally acute sense of text.  Thus, one can treat this as a "dramatic" overture without hanging it on any specific "drama" (as also seems to be the case with the "Tragic Overture" of Johannes Brahms).  In this spirit Gaffigan could apply the same strategy of finding the tension in the music and engaging that tension as his motivating force, thus obviating the need for any familiarity with a work that is probably even less known today than it was in Thayer's time.

The latest work on the program was the fifth piano concerto, Opus 73 in E-flat major ("Emperor").  The soloist was preceded by some enthusiastic advance work on the San Francisco Symphony Social Network, emphasizing his recent decision to couple Charles Ives' second piano sonata ("Concord, Mass., 1840-1860") with Beethoven's Opus 106 ("Hammerklavier") on a single program.  Neither of these works can be performed effectively without an acute sense of listening, and it was satisfying to see that Denk brought that same sense of listening to this more accessible concerto.  This listening was applied to not only the shaping of his solo work but also the ongoing alignment with Gaffigan's shaping of the orchestra.  As was the case with the C minor symphony, familiar as the music may have been, this was a performance in which every note signified for the entire ensemble;  and, again, the result was ear-opening, regardless of familiarity.  This may not have been a particularly "classic" Beethoven;  but it was a delightful reminder that we should always make time to listen to Beethoven!