5 + 6 = '10'

Beethoven and other benefits from Emmanuel Church

by Lloyd Schwartz

Craig Smith said he wanted to "stretch" the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, so for the group's fall opener he programmed a concert featuring two of the most famous and popular symphonies ever written: Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth (the Pastorale). Smith and his all-star orchestra are far better known for their Bach, Handel, Mozart, and even John Harbison than for Beethoven, though they've given memorable performances of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy and Fourth Piano Concerto with Russell Sherman and the Violin Concerto with Rose Mary Harbison.

It's no accident that even when Emmanuel has done Beethoven, it's chosen works that spotlight a singular performer. In this Beethoven evening, Smith let each symphony become a kind of concerto for orchestra in which practically every player got a turn to shine. This was some of the most ravishing Beethoven playing I've ever heard, from sweetly trilling piccolo and flute to full-hearted -- and touching (never merely brassy) -- horns, trumpets, and trombones.

It was also, not surprisingly, very Mozartian Beethoven playing. This was partly the result of a relatively light contingent of strings (only four cellos, for example -- the Emmanuel Church "stage" can't fit more), so that the solo winds (those piercing oboes! those consoling clarinets! those buoyant bassoons!) and brasses leapt out like lightning, without getting blanketed in the thick cotton wool of the more usual massings of Beethoven strings.

But this Beethoven also sounded like Mozart because Smith -- who's conducted so many Mozart concertos, symphonies, and operas (in those famous productions staged by Peter Sellars as well as in concert) -- really knows his Mozart. And knows that Beethoven knew Mozart. You could hear the ancestry of the Pastorale's second movement, the gently unfurling, flowing (practically floating) Scene at the Brook, in Mozart's sublime wind serenades and the literally seductive serenading of the criss-crossed lovers in Cosí fan tutte. The fourth movement Storm echoed the supernatural terrors of Don Giovanni.

Virgil Thomson said about a 1940 Koussevitzky performance of the Beethoven Fifth: "At the back of every conductor's mind is a desire to make his orchestra produce a larger noise than anyone else's orchestra can produce, a really majestic noise, a Niagara Falls of sound. Sometimes in the course of every concert this desire overpowers him. You can tell when it is coming by the way he goes into a brief convulsion at that point. . . . You will usually find that the sound provoked out of a group of exacerbated musicians by any gesture of the convulsive type is less accurate in pitch and less sonorous in decibels than a more objectively conducted fortissimo."

Since there's no pressing need right now to make the Fifth Symphony patriotic and martial, Smith goes into no such convulsions. His Fifth was compelling, generous, with rousing climaxes, but also intimate, loving, and full of song -- an entrancing, shapely, inevitable unfolding, moving from the charming (those pizzicatos) to the ominous (those hushed timpani taps) even within a few bars, and to the ultimate celebration. The familiar opening theme -- da-da-da-daaah (the first three notes here quick and quite brisk, the fourth long-held) -- sounded as if Smith and the orchestra were hearing and feeling them for the first time. Even more revealing was the way that theme re-echoed in the final triumphant four notes of the last movement -- not a parodyable superclimax but a bringing of the entire symphony full circle. And more than ever the Pastorale felt like the country companion to it, another side of Beethoven's ever-turning prism of symphonic invention.

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Even critics get the flus.

An incipient bug kept me from enjoying a concert I couldn't wait to hear: the excellent pianist Judith Gordon's benefit at Emmanuel Church (appropriate venue) for the Hospitality Program, which helps place relatives of hospital patients in private homes.

Beethoven's Opus 1 No. 1 Trio was lively but, to my ears (listening from a side seat nearly halfway back), disjointed. Violinist Rose Mary Harbison's narrow-focus tone, cellist Rhonda Rider's quiet warmth, and Gordon's rippling fluency didn't mesh, though the last-movement Presto had an irresistible lilt.

There's no one today -- no one -- who sings German lieder better than baritone James Maddalena, and he was in superb voice for Schumann's Liederkreis, (Opus 39), that anthology of 12 haunting poems by Joseph von Eichendorff: ghost stories, songs of love and of spiritual isolation -- some of the very greatest songs of the 19th century. But something didn't quite click for me. Why was Maddalena so reliant on his score? Was Gordon's tender accompaniment too lightweight, more facile than deeply attached to the text? Were tempos a hair too fast? Was I sitting too far away? Or just feeling poorly?

I went home at intermission.

Apologies.

Regrets.