Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (1st review)

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s recent Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony presented me with a new entry for my lifetime musical record list: It was the third performance of the Ninth I’ve heard in 17 months. More important, it was the third item in a series that covered three different types of performance.

In May 2012, Valentin Radu’s Vox Amadeus presented the Ninth with an ultra-light chamber orchestra—so small that the cello section seated exactly two musicians. Last spring, Ignat Solzhenitsyn led a moderate-size Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia in the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” concert scheduled by the Philadelphia International Festival for the Arts.

For the Philadelphia Orchestra edition, Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the kind of large-scale performance we customarily expect from major orchestras, with ten cellos leading the great introduction to the “Ode to Joy” theme, and the other strings in proportion.

Size does matter. Each of the three performances highlighted different values in Beethoven’s score.

Solzhenitsyn’s compromise

Radu and Solzhenitsyn reduced their orchestras by decreasing the number of strings— a move that approximates the actual practice in Beethoven’s time and elevates the importance of the winds.

In Radu’s performance, for example, the piccolo solo in the last movement became a major event, with the piccolo dominating the stage like a piper leading a street festival. Solzhenitsyn’s middle-of-the-road compromise increased the prominence of the winds while it retained effects like the sound of the massed cellos. Yannick gave the Orchestra audience an experience that satisfied all the expectations for drama and grandeur evoked by a major orchestra performance of the Ninth.

Yannick’s first and second movements sounded tentative in places, as if he was still working out his approach, but that kind of questioning probing can be interesting in itself. His work with the mammoth third movement adagio created a long sojourn in a beautifully serene world, as it should.

Ultimate test

In the grand finale, the chorus sounded exceptionally clear, despite its size, and Yannick maintained a strong dramatic tension between chorus and orchestra.

The guest soloists were superb examples of the kind of talent Yannick attracts to Philadelphia: soprano Twyla Robinson, mezzo Mihoko Fujimura, tenor Christian Eisner, and bass-baritone Shenyang. Their pure, unstrained voices made a good match for the youthful singers of the massed choirs of Westminster Choir College.

All three of these performances met the most important test of the Ninth: They made you feel you had attended an important event and touched something grand and fundamental. If the Ninth doesn’t produce goose bumps, it’s a failure, whatever the quality of the musicians and the chorus. If it does, any evaluation of the details, however interesting, is basically irrelevant.

Unique choral benefit

Verizon Hall’s choral seating arrangement is one of the Kimmel Center’s underrated virtues. In most halls, including the Academy of Music, the chorus sits on bleachers behind the orchestra, where their voices have to fight their way through the musicians.

In Verizon Hall, by contrast, they’re seated above the orchestra, in the balcony behind the stage. Their voices travel over the orchestra, so that they always sound like an equal partner.

A novel Mass

The Orchestra accompanied the Ninth with an attractive piece of new music: the premiere of a fully orchestrated version of Bright Mass with Canons by the young American composer Nico Muhly.

The mass of the title is a true liturgical piece, a setting of the traditional Latin text originally composed for the organ and chorus of St. Thomas Church in New York City. Muhly has enhanced it with an orchestral accompaniment crowded with novel effects that are continuously striking and always tasteful and appropriate. He has retained the organ part, but he wisely treated the organ as one more instrument in the orchestra and didn’t let it dominate its partners.

The Mass’s only weakness is easily correctible. It would be more audience-friendly if it included clearer pauses between the sections.

Muhly has created the kind of setting that mixes up the words, which is no big problem when you’re listening to the most familiar text in Western art music. We’re all familiar with the general drift of each section. Still, it’s nice to know when you’re listening to the Gloria and when you’re listening to the Sanctus; unmistakable breaks would help those of us who are easily confused.♦