Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

[Sergeant Rock]

Sure I have read some of his reviews. That should be pretty obvious....Is that a waste of time? Dunno, depends on your attitude towards that. If you are entertained by it, I don't think it is a waste of time. Does that make the reader an idiot? Not necessarily, only if the reader picks up the nonsense.

Thank you, M. That was a more reasoned and rational post than your first...

The annoyed part you totally deserve for even reading that crap. Hurwitz is an extremely bad reviewer, a hobby percussionist who has snapped up a few things here and there which make him look professional in the eyes of the uninformed. But he doesn't really know much about the things he reviews, he doesn't understand music making and performing traditions.

...which I thought was utter, emotional, nonsense, and still do. Perhaps in future you should refrain from criticizing people who read Hurwitz since you read him too.

Sarge

[M forever]

Anybody can read and criticize what they like. We are all "entitled" to our opinions, remember? 

When you are saying that, you are directly contradicting what you said yourself about the first part being "more reasoned and rational".

About the second part, that is neither emotional nor nonsense. A lot of people can't judge that because they have neither studied music nor played in good ensembles themselves, but I have, so I can have a very precise opinion about that. I know exactly what certain performing and playing traditions are since I grew up and studied them right in the dead center of many of those. He hasn't and it shows that he has no "deeper" background than playing percussion as a hobby in some American community orchestra. Which is cool, that's what I do as a hobby now myself. But he often pontificates about performing traditions he obviously doesn't understand, what orchestras "have no business" playing this or that repertoire and which do, and that is all total uninformed nonsense which, like I said earlier, I find embarassing to read because they reflect an unnecessary cultural inferiority complex.

And that doesn't have anything to do at all with differing opinions. Hurwitz often says that the Staatskapelle Dresden is Germany's "true top orchestra" - and I actually happen to agree. But that doesn't "justify" his totally over the top nonsense in other areas.

[PerfectWagnerite]

But he often pontificates about performing traditions he obviously doesn't understand,

Where would that be? You have a link for that. I find that DH has strong opinions, but he seldom if ever makes gross generalizations.

[MishaK]

Where would that be? You have a link for that. I find that DH has strong opinions, but he seldom if ever makes gross generalizations.

Actually, in his Mahler reviews he usually blabs on about the "Mahler sound" or this or that Mahler "tradition" or the absence thereof in one or another orchestra. He is often at his most jaded and closed minded when reviewing Mahler for some reason.

[M forever]

Actually, in his Mahler reviews he usually blabs on about the "Mahler sound" or this or that Mahler "tradition" or the absence thereof in one or another orchestra. He is often at his most jaded and closed minded when reviewing Mahler for some reason.

I think the reason fo that is that (IMO totally unnecessary) cultural inferiority complex I mentioned earlier. The fact that Mahler was a composer whose music did not enter the "mainstream" repertoire very quickly at all and that it took a while for the reception and interpretation of his music to happen on a larger scale, the fact that Mahler was in New York for a little while  and the myth Bernstein cultivated that he went to Vienna and "taught" them to play his music leads some people in America to believe that since Mahler's music was "rejected" in central Europe, it can be "claimed" like something that doesn't hve any connection with the cultural background it came from and that just floats around. So people like Hurwitz can now have their "own" classical music, too.

[BachQ]

Release Date: 01/08/2008



LvB "Ghost" Trio; Trio no. 3; Hummel Trio for Piano and Strings in G major, Op. 65
Daniel Sepec (Violin), Andreas Staier (Fortepiano), Jean-Guihen Queyras (Cello)

[BachQ]

BEETHOVEN: THE COMPLETE SYMPHONIES VOL. III
Symphony No. 7 in A major; Symphony No. 8 in F major; Symphony No. 9 in D minor "Choral"
Ingeborg Wenglor (soprano); Annelies Burmeister (contralto); Martin Ritzmann (tenor); Rolf Kuhne (bass)
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra / Paul Kletzki






 
[T]here is a special exalted sense in these [1960's] recordings that is rarely found today. Foremost, it is clear that Kletzki has an unwavering love for these scores, evident in his continued effort to have us hear everything in them. There's a lot more going on in this music than is usually revealed. The string runs after each statement of the main theme in Symphony No. 7's finale are just one example. In the Eighth's first movement, Kletzki points up the debt owed to Beethoven by today's jazz and rock musicians: the original funky bass line. He also shows how Beethoven's antiphonal effects in the Ninth's first movement lead right to the manuscripts of Anton Bruckner.

Kletzki ... injects life-giving energy into the music, not just horizontally (though he does employ the same rubato in the Seventh's finale that Leonard Bernstein did in his later Vienna Philharmonic recording), but with a strong sonic foundation that conveys the sense of purpose that makes his interpretations so satisfying. This is true nowhere more than in the Ninth's finale, which is full of grandeur yet without any of today's "authentic" tempos. Kletzki recognizes that the vocal element is just as important, if not more important, than the orchestral. Rolf Kuhne's "O Freunde" rivets our attention and literally sweeps away all that has gone before. Tenor Martin Ritzmann's heroic singing shames most of today's interpreters of the part.

...The Czech Philharmonic Chorus ... sings with a fervency that gives truth to Schiller's poem, and despite their massive forces, the singers make every syllable distinctly audible. Audible too is the marvelous Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, performing with miraculous clarity and robustness here and in the other two symphonies. The sound on these vintage Supraphon recordings is beautifully balanced with plenty of dynamic range, though the huge tuttis in the finale do suffer from some congestion. This release caps a terrific series. Don't miss it.


--Victor Carr

[Dancing Divertimentian]

BEETHOVEN: THE COMPLETE SYMPHONIES VOL. III
Symphony No. 7 in A major; Symphony No. 8 in F major; Symphony No. 9 in D minor "Choral"
Ingeborg Wenglor (soprano); Annelies Burmeister (contralto); Martin Ritzmann (tenor); Rolf Kuhne (bass)
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra / Paul Kletzki

Beautiful writeup...agree with every word.

[BachQ]

Beautiful writeup...agree with every word.

I especially agree with the comments about "injecting life-giving energy into the music....". 

[Dancing Divertimentian]

I especially agree with the comments about "injecting life-giving energy into the music....". 

Yes, very well put...

[BachQ]

Yes, very well put...

Likewise, donwyn, your statement is very well put ......... 

[Dancing Divertimentian]

Likewise, donwyn, your statement is very well put ......... 

[BachQ]

From Wall Street Journal

Beethoven's Summation
His Ninth Symphony crystallizes all he learned and lived
By STUART ISACOFF
January 19, 2008; Page W14

In 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven, 53, deaf, cantankerous and increasingly world weary, bared his soul in a work so stunning in originality, scale and emotional power that virtually every great composer who followed has lived under its shadow. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with its final movement for chorus, four vocal soloists and orchestra set to Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy," left so great an impact on the classical music world that a superstition arose in its wake. "It seems that the ninth is a limit," stated Arnold Schoenberg, mulling over the fortunes of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and other symphonists who never managed to complete a 10th symphony. "He who wants to go beyond it must pass away."

Beethoven's last symphony seemed to sum up everything the composer had learned and lived. A critic of his day described the music as filled with "never-imagined magical secrets." The piece has everything: Universes seem to collide; intricate textures give way to wild rhythmic contractions -- the birth pangs of a new musical art. There are long, exquisite stretches of heavenly repose, passages of punctilious counterpoint, and moments of earthy humor. There is even a Turkish band thrown in for good measure. And in the end, Beethoven delivers Schiller's ardent plea for universal brotherhood.


The conception is as modern and relevant today as it was nearly 200 years ago. Little wonder this was the work Leonard Bernstein chose to perform in the former East Berlin Schauspielhaus on Christmas Day, 1989, to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, substituting the word "Freiheit" (freedom) for Schiller's "Freude" (joy). (The two words were as connected for Beethoven and Schiller as for Bernstein.) Earlier that same year, student protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square blared Beethoven's music over their loudspeakers as they stood up to armed Chinese troops.

The symphony's popularity has, if anything, grown over time. Last summer, I heard a performance at the Hollywood Bowl with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and nearly 13,000 people were in attendance; the previous fall in Turin, Italy, I witnessed the La Scala chorus and orchestra performing it in an ice-hockey stadium that had been built for the Olympics. There, 10,000 men, women and children sat motionless at the conclusion of the performance, then stayed long into the night to cheer the orchestra members and singers.

And yet, this music is not especially easy to comprehend. Composer Hector Berlioz admitted that in some ways it remained unfathomable to him. Nevertheless, he asserted, if in composing it Beethoven broke some musical laws, as some contended, "So much the worse for the law!"

These were new forms, new visions of what music could do and say. The composer had begun early in his career to construct his compositions out of small musical cells, which grew organically, as if governed by a kind of musical DNA. Now, toward the end of his life, he shattered the model, allowing elements of his structures to break free and move in unorthodox ways, blurring distinctions between endings and beginnings, forming strange convergences and unconventional resolutions. The music unfolds as a psychological drama in which themes are declared, wrestle with each other and, in the final movement, strive to re-emerge -- only to become subsumed in the flame of heavenly bliss.

There are parallels here with Schiller's poem, and with the poet's philosophy of art. Schiller later called his "Ode to Joy" "entirely flawed." Nevertheless, Beethoven, who had some trepidation about adding singers to his symphonic work (a radical move), had begun trying to set the poem to music more than 32 years earlier. He was clearly attracted to its sentiments, which were fully outlined by Schiller in a work called "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" (1795): Art leads man, in stages, from primitive sensuality to ultimate perfection -- to a state of freedom and joy rooted in morality. The process involves a series of oppositions and syntheses -- an antagonism of forces that results first in disintegration, and then in the creation of a new, joyful wholeness. This could almost serve as an outline for Beethoven's method.

Naturally, the Ninth Symphony has its critics, and chief among them is a new breed of musicologist who sees the organizing principle of Western art music -- its reliance on the gravitational pull of tonal centers, and the artful control of musical tension and resolution -- as a direct reflection of the male libido and its primal urge toward domination. One of the leading figures of this school of thought, Susan McClary, found in the opening movement of Beethoven's masterpiece the "murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release" (in her article "Getting Down Off the Beanstalk"; she subsequently toned down the language for a reprint in a published collection, but the sentiments remained the same). In the last century, thinkers like Max Weber and Theodore Adorno, who set out this sociological approach to musical analysis, quickly reached an intellectual dead end. But it thrives today on many college campuses, where scholarly rigor often takes a back seat to freakish conjecture -- especially when this serves the ideological goal of reducing great works to the mere tinkerings of "dead white men." (The irony, of course, is that cultures producing music free of those tonal principles -- the presumptive ideal -- generally turn out to be the most historically oppressive to women.) Beethoven will survive.

The genesis of the Ninth Symphony was a request made to the composer in 1822 by the London Philharmonic Society for a new work. Two years later, when word leaked out that Beethoven was considering premiering it in Berlin, a petition emerged in his hometown of Vienna, signed by some of the city's most distinguished musicians and patrons, pleading with him to reconsider because only Austria "may claim him as its own." Beethoven relented. But it's safe to say that from Berlin to Beijing, Turin to Los Angeles, when we hear this remarkable music today -- and perhaps dream a little, with Schiller, of a time when the spirit of joy "reunites all that custom has rudely divided" -- we can each claim him as our own.

Mr. Isacoff is the author of "Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization" and editor of Piano Today magazine.

[Haffner]

Opus 132 went beyond the 9th. Way beyond it. I'd daresay 131 as well. As far as being able to convey to another some of the most complex, profound feelings ...I'm not sure any music since matches those two.

Just my opinion.

[BachQ]

Beethoven Piano Trio in D The Ghost (2d movement)

2d mvt pt 1 http://www.youtube.com/v/d0iUipwyWrU

2d mvt pt 2 http://www.youtube.com/v/a5NnQeZXVF0

Cello: Jacqueline de Pré
Violin: Pinchas Zuckerman
Piano: Daniel Barenboim

[Rod Corkin]

Opus 132 went beyond the 9th. Way beyond it. I'd daresay 131 as well. As far as being able to convey to another some of the most complex, profound feelings ...I'm not sure any music since matches those two.

Just my opinion.

With his symphonic music Beethoven's 'message' was always more accessible and universal relative to his chamber music. This was a deliberate strategy as far as I am concerned, it couldn't have been any other way. You can't be so experimental with a public piece like a symphony, so the goals seeked through composing a symphony are somewhat different to a quartet like Op132. But there are things you can get from the ninth that you can't get from a quartet. For what it's worth in such a forum of elevated souls such as this, Beethoven thought Op131 was his greatest.  0:)

[Haffner]

With his symphonic music Beethoven's 'message' was always more accessible and universal relative to his chamber music. This was a deliberate strategy as far as I am concerned, it couldn't have been any other way. You can't be so experimental with a public piece like a symphony, so the goals seeked through composing a symphony are somewhat different to a quartet like Op132. But there are things you can get from the ninth that you can't get from a quartet. For what it's worth in such a forum of elevated souls such as this, Beethoven thought Op131 was his greatest.  0:)

Great post, Rod.

[George]

With his symphonic music Beethoven's 'message' was always more accessible and universal relative to his chamber music. This was a deliberate strategy as far as I am concerned, it couldn't have been any other way. You can't be so experimental with a public piece like a symphony, so the goals seeked through composing a symphony are somewhat different to a quartet like Op132. But there are things you can get from the ninth that you can't get from a quartet. For what it's worth in such a forum of elevated souls such as this, Beethoven thought Op131 was his greatest.  0:)

Certainly the greatest opening movement at least. 

[Great Gable]

For those of you who, like me, who had been looking for Furtwangler's Lucerne 1954 9th, this is now available...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000001OFV

I don't know what the Tahra edition was like but this is absolutely fine, sound wise.

[Rod Corkin]

Great post, Rod.

Wow that's the first time I've read that here.