Of Beethoven, not booze. Haven’t had a drop in a year, and what better way to celebrate than with this monument to triumph? If you buy into the finale as revolutionary triumphalism (I partially do), then who better to perform it than musicians from the city that stormed the Bastille? Markevitch must have understood that, because he got the sometimes lazy Lamoureaux orchestra to catch fire like few versions I’ve heard. It also helps that some members of the Lamoureaux also played with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire of Paris, who had the longest unbroken tradition of Beethoven performance in history (they were formed in 1828 specifically to perform Beethoven) until the French government in its infinite wisdom broke them up sometime in the 60’s. You hear the traditional French orchestral sound in all its unblended glory–thank God they and others were recorded for posterity in the 60’s and earlier. Their characteristic sound has disappeared. French orchestras now sound like everyone else.
George Szell, who turned the Cleveland Orchestra into a world-class ensemble (they were Stravinsky’s favorite orchestra and one of the “big five” who dominated classical music in the US from the 50’s-80’s–the others were Boston, Phildelphia, Chicago, and New York) made three “official” (i.e. commercial releases recorded under controlled circumstances) recordings of the fifth, all great. But this live one with the Vienna Philharmonic (another group with a long tradition in this music) absolutely smokes.
If you Google top recordings of Beethoven’s fifth, you’ll find that everyone recommends Carlos Kleiber/Vienna Philharmonic as “the best. ” It’s excellent, but I find these to have more mojo. Anyway, the idea of there being a “best” in a work capable of infinite interpretations is just silly.
Other of my faves are any of the recordings by Otto Klemperer, whose son played Col. Klink on Hogan’s Heroes. If you don’t mind inferior 40’s to mid ‘50’s sound quality, there are also stunning 5ths by Erich Kleiber (father of Carlos), Bruno Walter, and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
If not for you, I never would have noticed the subtle differences in classical music performances. Thanks!
I broke the headphones out, sat in the dark, and listened to the Cleveland version first and thought “this was maybe not written by a sane person.” It was fucking awesome.
Then I listened to the Markevitch performance. Also great, but perhaps less unhinged. I noticed with the Szell recording you can hear the pages of the score rustle around from some of the musicians – is this just randomly how they’re mic’ed, or is there some preferred style of recording an orchestra?
The first movement of the Fifth seems like a final movement to me: it’s like whoa strap in this is going down RIGHT NOW.
Would Beethoven or a contemporary have had orchestras this skilled or this good? His biography by Edmund Morris mentions all these performances where they “barely had time to rehearse” but simultaneously says that most of his friends and patrons were skilled musicians themselves. Just curious.
Also now that I have you here I need your opinions on Stop Mutilating Classical Music to Sell It To Kids and the Greatest Symphonies of All Time list:
20. Bruckner No. 7
19. Beethoven No. 6
18. Brahms No. 2
17. Shostakovich No. 5
16. Beethoven No. 7
15. Mozart No. 40
14. Sibellus No. 7
13. Bruckner No. 8
12. Brahms No. 3
11. Beethoven No. 5
10. Mahler No. 3
9. Tchaikovsky No. 6
8. Brahms No. 1
7. Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique
6. Brahms No. 4
5. Mahler No. 2
4. Mahler No. 9
3. Mozart No. 41
2. Beethoven No. 9
1. Beethoven No. 3
I know these lists are stupid and just designed to piss people off, but I would love to hear in what particular way this list pisses you off.
The Szell I posted is actually with the Vienna Philharmonic, not his usual Clevelanders. I blame my rambling paragraph for the confusion. He did two recordings of it in Cleveland, both outstanding, the latter one in better sound. He did another commercial release with the Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam). That one is even better than the Cleveland ones, and would be in my top two favorites if not for this live Vienna one. I dunno what Szell and the Viennese had for breakfast that day, but I want some.
You hear a lot of extraneous noises like page turning because it’s a live recording (Salzburg Festival). It was likely recorded as an air check for a live broadcast and never intended for commercial release. Nowadays live performances can be made into a more controlled environment for recording, and I’m sure there are techniques to edit out noises, but live recordings from the 70’s and earlier usually have such noises. I’m guessing the Szell recording, like most live ones, favored capturing orchestral detail over Austrians coughing in the audience, so was miked closely.
As for orchestras in Beethoven’s time, Beethoven could not expect anything remotely like the orchestral prowess we take for granted nowadays. As you said, rehearsal time was limited. Standards were sloppy, if they existed at all. As you mentioned, Beethoven had skilled musicians as friends, but there weren’t many of them. That’s why Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, et al., saved their brainiest music for solo piano, string quartets, and other small chamber groups: you could find one great player per instrument, but a large group of string players to handle something like the Grosse Fugue? Forget it. Nowadays you can (Bernstein, Klemperer and others recorded it with a large string section). When an orchestra in Schubert’s time (he was young when Beethoven was still around) tried to play his 9th symphony, the violinists couldn’t play their difficult string parts in the finale, and burst out laughing. They couldn’t believe what they were being asked to do. Today a volunteer community orchestra could pull it off, although maybe sloppily. Any professional orchestra can now play it almost perfectly, the best perfectly.
Although Beethoven would marvel at today’s orchestral precision, which is beyond his wildest dreams, he, Mozart, and any other musician of the time with absolute pitch would find it very jarring. Since the 18th century, standard pitch has migrated from around A=425 Hz to A=440 Hz. Youch.
Modern virtuoso orchestras slowly emerged in the late 19th century, as conductors like Mahler, who constantly complained about lazy orchestras, began whipping them into shape. The trend really took off in the early and mid 20th century when you had perfectionists like Arturo Toscanini (New York, among others) George Szell, and Fritz Reiner (Chicago) achieving unprecedented precision. These were not nice men. They ruled with iron fists, and could be very cruel. I don’t know how accurate this is, but I read somewhere that a pretty large percentage of the Cleveland orchestra required psychotherapy during Szell’s tenure. But his presence still dominates the Clevelanders, who have kept up standards very well. One subsequent conductor there bemoaned, “we give a great performance, and Szell gets a good review.”
I don’t have a strong opinion on Stop Mutilating Classical Music to Sell It To Kids. I grew up hearing full works on record and going to full-length concerts, but I had kids’ records of excerpts as well. Sometimes I’d mutilate longer works on my own. For example, like many people, as a youngster I loved the catchy second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, much more so than the rest of it. (That’s not unusual, when it was premiered the audience demanded it be repeated three times–concerts in Beethoven’s time were not the stuffy affairs that they are now). When playing my dad’s record of the 7th, I’d usually just play that movement and nothing else. Sometime in high school I started playing the whole thing. So mutilating it didn’t ruin my capacity for long works. My sons were exposed to mutilations via baby DVD’s and kiddie music classes. They also went to concerts with me starting in maybe 4th grade. They were/are both ADD as hell, as am I, and they had no problem sitting through a concert. They had also heard me playing longer works at home, but they were usually in and out of the room. So it’s hard for me to generalize on this topic.
One thing I can’t stand is the “play your kids (or yourself) classical music for brain development” trend, which makes it like forced broccoli or asparagus. All music is entertainment and should be presented as such. If you pre-define some music as “good for you,” you’re implying that you wouldn’t listen to it for enjoyment. I guess catchy snippets could be a gateway drug, although kids should sometimes hear more if you want them to learn the language. Some will take to it, some won’t.
I’ll answer the greatest symphony list part later.
As for the Greatest Symphonies list, nothing pisses me off, because I don’t take it seriously enough to get pissed off. Brahms 2nd is the 18th best symphony ever? What does that even mean?
Most are solid choices for a top 20, but the Berlioz and Tchiakovsky don’t play by the same rules as the others, so don’t belong in the same list. More helpful for newbs would be a list that separates between the classical and romantic periods.
The dumbest thing on the list is the recommendation of Roger Norrington in Beethoven’s 6th (Pastoral). Dull, monotonous, one-dimensional. Beethoven described the first movement as “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside.” If your idea of that is riding around the countryside way too fast in a noisy ATV driven by an idiot hauling around styrofoam coolers of Bud Lite, Norrington’s your man. Probably recommended because he was British, and British writers are heavily biased toward their own. My favorite 6th is by Bruno Walter with the Columbia SO, not an uncommon choice. He did an earlier mono one that’s also great. I also really like Szell, Otto Klemperer, and Karl Bohm in the 6th.
I think naming Beethoven’s 3rd as the best symphony of all time is weird, but typical of a certain mindset (one that elevates novelty over musicality). The 3rd is not Beethoven’s best symphony, much less the best of all time. It is a very important work, the first symphony in history that tried to encompass a huge expressive range. So it’s a great leap forward in music history. But Beethoven was not yet skilled in harnessing such a huge range. The writer of the list says, “the whole thing is wrought from the brilliantly simple notion of a not quite finished tune…that continually strives for completion and each time goes off in some fascinating new direction.” That’s mostly true of just the first movement, not the “whole thing.” It doesn’t have a unified goal, as does the 5th Symphony. The movements are separate chunks rather than a logical chain. Beethoven later figured out how to do this kind of thing–using a huge range of expression–in the 5th, where every detail works ahead to the finale. That’s why the 5th is kind of idiot-proof: even a mediocre performance sounds pretty good. But the 3rd needs a great performance to sound good. In the wrong hands it gets boring, especially in the long slow movement (when premiered it was the longest symphony yet written, which annoyed audiences). Don’t get me wrong, I love the 3rd when played well. Which gets me to the list’s recommended recording by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Nope. It’s not bad, just not one of the best. The best of all time has to be Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra. Tense and exciting from beginning to end, with jaw-dropping horn playing that sends the heroic ending over the top. I’ve never heard another horn section handle it as well. Otto Klemperer was also great in the 3rd. He did it twice, once in the 50’s in mono, then a bit later in stereo. The mono one sounds fine, and I prefer it because it’s faster. Other ones I like are from Erich Kleiber and Wilhelm Furtwangler, but they are rather scratchy old recordings.
As for Mahler, the 9th belongs in that list, but there are better choices than the 2nd and 3rd. The 2nd and 3rd are very popular, and they make a big impact. But Mahler was a better composer beginning with his 5th. He began closely studying Bach after the 4th, and it shows. The 2nd and 3rd partially employ choruses, but the fully choral 8th is much better written and far more interesting than either. I like both the 2nd and 3rd, but they contain padding and aren’t always structurally sound. I haven’t heard the recordings he recommends. I like Bernstein, Otto Klemperer, and Bruno Walter in the 2nd, and Bernstein, Raphael Kubelik, and Bernard Haitink in the 3rd.
I listened to the list’s recommended recording of the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique. It’s ok, but ok ain’t good enough. This work is crazy, and crazy works best. Nothing even begins to approach the two unhinged recordings from Charles Munch and the Boston SO. Second best is Leonard Bernstein with the New York Phil. The CD release contained his lecture comparing the work to an LSD trip. He conducts it as such, and it works. There are outstanding sane recordings by Igor Markevitch, Jean Martinon, and Michael Tilson Thomas (San Francisco SO).
The Brahms recommendations are solid, but Chailly in the 3rd is iffy. Walter and Klemperer are better.
The recommendation of Herbert Von Karajan for the Mahler 9th is a very common recommendation, but not my thing. In general he’s too soft-edged and string-heavy for my taste. My faves are probably Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Chailly.
The list recommends Karajan again for Beethoven’s 9th. Again, a common recommendation. Karajan does his thing very well, it’s just not my thing. You may love it, and that’s fine. I’ll admit it’s very powerful. I prefer Gunter Wand if you want great modern sound. Ferenc Fricsay might be my fave. It’s an early 60’s recording but sounds fine. Wilhelm Furtwangler’s Lucerne recording with the Philharmonia is great, but in early 50’s sound which is a little scratchy.
Bruckner can be hard to get into and requires patience. It takes a few listens to get Bruckner. Some people with fine taste just can’t get into him, which is fine. As for Bruckner 7th, Eugen Jochum’s Dresden recording is best imo. For the 8th, Pierre Boulez is excellent. Can recommend more upon request if you ever pursue Bruckner. The list recommendations there are pretty good.
Thanks!
Enjoying Szell’s Beethoven No 3 at the moment. It rocks.
I can’t remember what classical LP’s we had at home – there were a few, but they weren’t on heavy rotation. I think it’s taken me fifty plus years to develop an apparatus capable of appreciating any of it.
I had one piano teacher who let me play Joplin, but he moved across town. The next one hammered the classics, and at some point my interest in another damn Schubert sonatina flagged so low that it wasn’t worth the struggle or practice.
I memorized every piece I ever played and just absolutely sucked at sight reading. My relegation to the soccer field was probably appropriate.
Don’t get me started on Schubert. Last three string quartets and last three piano sonatas and the string quintet in their way equal Beethoven’s best.
Another problem with that list: no Haydn. That’s because the list is biased towards blood-sweating romanticism. Only exception is Mozart, but he’s probably there because he’s been romanticized as a tragic figure (also, no one would take that list seriously without the inclusion of 40 & 41). Haydn is every bit as important as Beethoven and Mozart in the development of the symphony. He more than anyone defined symphonic form. Beethoven sought him out as a teacher. Haydn was older than Mozart, and Mozart was heavily influenced by him. Each regarded the other as the greatest living composer. Beethoven’s vastly underrated 8th Symphony is an homage to Haydn. Any close and unbiased listening to Haydn’s vast output reveals that his work is equal to anyone’s. I think there’s a bias against him because he was sane, stable, good-natured, and professional. But I get it, the writer of the list mostly wants the Beethoven and post Beethoven trend of a huge emotional range in a single work. But it’s silly to ignore the guy who got the ball rolling. He was called “Pappa Haydn” for generations for a good reason.
I think the problem is that the people who compile such lists talk and write about music more than they listen, and so rely on received opinion and groupthink. As such it seems a lazy list. One exception is the inclusion of the Sibelius 7th over his more popular 2nd. I wouldn’t include either in my personal top 20, but at least that’s an unexpected and thought-provoking choice.
I will now shut up about all this. I will now shut up about all this.