Orchestra plays Beethoven and Stravinsky (2nd review)

My favorite live performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are the Philadelphia Orchestra past readings led by Wolfgang Sawallisch and Rossen Milanov. Sawallisch conducted the Ninth with an intensity reflecting his understanding that the joy in the final movement was a hard won emotion. Beethoven's deafness may be one of the clichés of program notes, but for Beethoven himself it was a real event— a personal catastrophe that could have turned him into an embittered might-have-been.

Milanov led the last movement with a recognition that it's become one of the modern world's most meaningful rituals. The Ninth exerts such a fundamental universal appeal that it has even become a New Year's tradition in Japan, where every symphony orchestra presents it several times in December, and amateur choruses and orchestras stage performances throughout that country. The text may celebrate a Eurocentric religious view, but clearly Beethoven's music communicates something much more profound.

Charles Dutoit's Ninth didn't quite make it into the circle inhabited by Sawallisch and Milanov. But it came close, and it delivered the kind of major experience the Ninth should bestow on its audiences.

The second movement scherzo can sometimes seem nervous and jittery, but in Dutoit's hands it felt genuinely gay. His third movement floated through a beautiful, soft landscape and merged, almost without pause, with a fourth movement that delivered the kind of powerful finale we all came to hear.

The soloists were the major weakness at this performance. All had their moments, but overall they failed to evoke the punch and zest that the script demands.

In Handel's league

Fortunately, the real vocal star of Beethoven's greatest finale is the chorus. Beethoven is noted for his symphonies and chamber works, but in pieces like the Ninth and the Missa Solemnis he proved himself a choral composer who belongs in the same league as Bach and Handel.

The Ode to Joy theme is such a catchy, well known melody that it's easy to forget that most of the choral writing in the Ninth consists of big masses of sound interacting in the classic manner developed by Beethoven's great predecessors. One of the major peaks even echoes the climactic ascent of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.

How many American cities can field a chorus like the Philadelphia Singers, with its core of professional singers augmented by first-class volunteers? The professionals sing like pros. The amateurs sing like people who appreciate the chance to sing with a major orchestra under the leadership of a world-famous conductor.

The evening's opener, Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, is a work for chorus and orchestra, with no soloists, that ends with one of the Bible's most exalted praise texts, Psalm 150. Dutoit's sensitive, exuberant reading turned it into a perfect companion for the Ninth and a showcase for the orchestra and chorus.

About that financial crisis....

I heard the Ninth for the first time when I was in my mid-20s, in a Philadelphia Orchestra performance probably conducted by Eugene Ormandy. The native Philadelphians I knew liked to sneer at Ormandy, assuring me that his Ninth was a minor league effort compared to the Ninths of Stokowski or Furtwängler. To someone like me, who had come to Philadelphia at 18 from environments that lacked such wonders, such complaints seemed frivolously irrelevant.

In the midst of the debate over the Philadelphia Orchestra's financial troubles, we shouldn't forget a basic fact: The Philadelphia Orchestra is the only institution in Philadelphia that can regularly perform Beethoven's final symphony and all the other works— including modern creations such as the John Adams Harmoniliehre— that require a large professional orchestra. A city that doesn't hear Beethoven's Ninth every year or two has surrendered one of the major reasons many of us chose to live here in the first place. And a piece of its soul, too.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.