Gardiner and Jurowski: Two period pieces (2nd review)

I have always wondered what it would have been like to sit in the audience on April 7, 1805 for the first public performance of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. To imagine it, one would first have to zone out Berlioz and Bruckner, Stravinsky and Stockhausen, and return to a world in which the last symphonies of Mozart and Haydn and the first two of Beethoven himself represented the summit of the form.

Of course these works are unsurpassable— perfect achievements within their historical moment, because art never progresses but only changes. What the Eroica did, as no work has done before or since, was to change the sense of the moment's possibilities, the horizon of what might now be said. It did this so violently and radically that music would never be the same again— nor, in a sense, would history itself, because art, pace Auden, can change the world more powerfully than anything else.

Beethoven may have sensed this himself when he dedicated his new symphony to Napoleon, the only man capable of changing the world on the scale the Eroica would. Beethoven withdrew the dedication, of course, allegedly because Napoleon had proved a tyrant.

I wonder, though, whether he did not conclude that the emperor simply didn't measure up to the symphony. This would not have been presumptuous on Beethoven's part. He had brought something into the world never conceived before, whereas Napoleon was no more than an Alexander the Great or a Julius Caesar.

The sound of 200 years ago

My thought experiment is of course impossible, not only because I cannot— even in fantasy— suppress the knowledge of what came after Beethoven, but because my notion of him, of the Eroica itself, was formed by the big Romantic orchestras that played it in my youth and still generally do.

But Sir John Eliot Gardiner has dedicated a lifetime to stripping 19th-Century excrescences off Beethoven and others of the classical era in the hope of restoring the sound of 200 years ago— the sound Beethoven's contemporaries would have heard on that April 1805 day. Last week he came to Philadelphia to display the results with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the group he founded in 1989, with an all-Beethoven program consisting of the Egmont Overture and the Third and Fifth symphonies.

Sir John's orchestra consists of about 60 musicians who play specially constructed period instruments. The musicians are highly skilled, and their instruments represent the acme of the craftsman's art.

Beethoven might have dreamed of such a sound, but the orchestras of his time would hardly have produced it. So we hear not what Beethoven's audiences would have heard but an idealized and hypothetical version of it (we lack, of course, any record of performance style).

Stravinsky achieved it too

Nor, more importantly, do we hear how they would have heard it, since we cannot suppress our knowledge of the music that came after it, including Beethoven's own. What we have, then, is an alternative style of modern performance.

This is true of all period instrument performance. In some technical respects (for example, the use of valveless trumpets), it's no doubt closer to what Beethoven might have heard, but how close it will never be possible to say. What the period instrument movement boils down to, the tonal variation of reconstructed instruments aside, is a preference for leaner, tauter sound and greater clarity of textures.

This is a perfectly valid goal, but Stravinsky achieved it many years ago simply by writing a different, sparer kind of music. He made no claim to reviving the classical style but composed in a modern idiom that reinterpreted the elements of it that appealed to him.

This happens all the time in the arts, though few possess Stravinsky's genius. Period instrument performance should be regarded similarly: as a modern style of interpreting the past.

Beethoven the envelope pusher

How, then, did Gardiner's Beethoven sound? Certainly, it was leaner and tauter than what the modern large orchestra has accustomed us to, the sound edgier, the armature more exposed. Beethoven was pushing the envelope in terms of what an orchestra of his time could give him, and even Gardiner's orchestra couldn't wholly avoid sour notes, particularly in the brass.

With fewer overtones to be had, the music had to proceed more briskly, although Gardiner at times hurried the notes so rapidly that they all but tripped over one another, especially in the opening movement of the Eroica. But he could stop to shape a phrase or highlight a detail, and the lower strings particularly produced a surprisingly robust sound.

In Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the famous four-note motto was played at near-equal value, with no ritard or portentous downbeat on the last note. It quite altered the dynamic of the entire movement.

The overall result was mostly refreshing— not everyone's Beethoven, nor necessarily a Beethoven for every day, but certainly a point of view worth hearing. Just, please, don't call it "authentic." There ain't no such thing.

When dowagers sang the Internationale

Two days later, I caught Vladimir Jurowski taking the Philadelphia Orchestra through Shostakovich's epic Seventh Symphony. The Seventh, begun in Nazi-besieged Leningrad, became the symbol of the new Grand Alliance against Hitler (it was completed 20 days after Pearl Harbor). There was an unseemly struggle for first American performance rights, and when Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia premiere in 1942, Main Line dowagers were asked to join in singing the Internationale— a sight and sound that would have certainly been worth preserving.

But the work fell out of favor with the Cold War, and Ormandy never played it again down to the end of his tenure in 1980, although he championed other Shostakovich works and maintained a close relationship with the composer. Yuri Temirkanov was the next to play the Seventh, in 1977 and 2000, so that Jurowski's concerts were only the fourth Philadelphia hearing of the work.

The Seventh was dedicated to the city of Leningrad. When it was first performed there, a full complement of musicians couldn't be found, and those available needed special food rations to enable them to meet its exacting sonic demands.

A quarter-century later, the surviving members of that wartime orchestra reunited to play the Seventh again in what amounted to a chamber version, with Shostakovich himself, tears streaming down his face, in attendance.

Against Hitler, or Stalin?

The Seventh was clearly a response to the war, and the middle section of the opening Allegretto, with its robotic-sounding theme repeated, Bolero-fashion, through a dozen variations to a brazen climax, has been taken as a tone picture of the Nazi invasion. Shostakovich neither confirmed nor denied this interpretation, and the picture has been complicated by his purported remarks in Solomon Volkov's volume, Testimony, to the effect that the Seventh was as much about the city's destruction by Stalin as about the devastation of Hitler.

None of this background is of any special use in hearing the Seventh some 70 years on, any more than the Eroica's original dedication to Napoleon is relevant to our present hearing of that work.

Structurally, the Seventh contains many affinities to Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, its predecessor by four years, and many of its most effective moments are to be found in its more reflective passages and its orchestral solos and duets. If it's a more sprawling and less tightly integrated canvas than the Fifth, it can rise to Mahlerian grandeur in the right hands, and the great theme of the Adagio, rising from its plangent introductory chorale, is perhaps the most heartfelt cry in all of Shostakovich.

I still find Leonard Bernstein's the most persuasive reading of the score, but Jurowski took it firmly in hand, and the Orchestra gave him its very best— a burnished sound that recalled its glory days, with wonderful sectional and unison work, and superb solos, particularly in the winds.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes….

I call this a period performance too, if only for the poignant reminder of how great the Philadelphia Orchestra has been and still can be. To make up a full complement, some recently retired musicians returned, and a few chairs were discreetly filled by others. But just how long a million-dollar orchestra can survive on a $100,000 salary base remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, ugliness still lurks behind the scenes. As the Inquirer's Peter Dobrin recently reported, the Orchestra Association has characterized a bankruptcy court motion by the American Federation of Musicians and the Employers Pension Fund for disclosure of the restrictions that allegedly bind the Orchestra's endowment fund as a "vexatious" attempt to "embarrass and harass" the Association and its donors.

I find it hard to understand how seeking factual clarity about assets in a bankruptcy hearing can be construed as harassment, or why donors should be embarrassed by the terms of their bequests— we are not, presumably, talking about restrictive covenants here. But such is the level of rhetoric between management and musicians right now, and I have heard some of it in private too. That the musicians can put this contentiousness behind them onstage, and play as splendidly as they did for Jurowski, is everlastingly to their credit as artists and professionals.♦


To read another review of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire by Peter Burwasser, click here.
To read a response, click here.