Nine Worthies: The Boston Symphony Takes on Beethoven

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, conductor
Symphony Hall, Boston
October 23, 2009

Note: As civic-minded pro-Boston penance for the welcome-to-my-world schadenfreude this ex-pat Cubs fan experienced watching the Red Sox get swept out of the playoffs, today’s review will be illustrated with paintings from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra kicked off a four-concert Beethoven symphony cycle this week. This, of course, was supposed to be the meat of James Levine’s directorship this season, before his back went out. So instead, the first installment—the First, Second, and Fifth symphonies—were conducted by the veteran Spanish conductor (and frequent BSO guest) Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. (The next pair, the Third and Fourth, will be taken by BSO Assistant Conductor Julian Kuerti, after which Levine is scheduled to return to run the table.)

It’s foolish to think that the substitutions haven’t diluted the cycle’s raison d’être. Levine had talked up the cycle as a chance to dig in and refresh repertoire that’s often only programmed because it saves on rehearsal time. At the very least, it was Levine’s own chance to finally conduct all nine symphonies, one of the few conductor milestones he hadn’t reached. (The Fourth had, and will now continue to have, eluded his résumé.) Until (and if) Levine takes the podium for the Sixth and Seventh (UPDATE: nope), we won’t know just how drastic a rethinking he was intending. And, despite a wealth of stylish playing on Friday’s matinee, the feeling of being in a holding pattern was palpable.

For example, if you want to make repertoire as familiar as the Beethoven symphonies sound new, you’re really going to have to mix it up with Beethoven, as it were. I don’t think anyone was expecting Levine to go all Jackson Pollock on the symphonies—

—but Frühbeck, in many ways, went to the opposite pole. Frühbeck’s conducting is incorrigibly elegant—the slow openings of the First and Second symphonies were shaped with such efficient grace that a decent justification for an aristocratically smooth side to Beethoven seemed in the offing. But elegance was also Frühbeck’s default in more fraught passages as well. The whole reminded me of the impeccable, high-minded polish of French Academicism, like, say, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Eminence Grise:

This is not necessarily a bad thing. (L’Eminence Grise is, in fact, one of my favorite paintings, and I make it a point to visit it every time I’m at the MFA.) But, with refinement chosen over momentum every time, Beethoven seemed a little too polite to warrant the full-cycle spotlight. You could make the case that, in writing the C-major First Symphony, the young Beethoven was still in thrall to Haydn and Mozart, and that some Classicism would not be out of order. (Beethoven’s contemporary critics complimented the First for not seeming as bizarre to them as the later symphonies.) But even still, the whole thing was a bit comfortable—the first movement’s Allegro pretty easygoing, with more bounce than drive; the Menuetto starting off pretty leisurely, and then slowing a bit; the “molto e vivace” modifier of the finale’s Allegro not much in evidence. Gorgeous playing? You bet, and Frühbeck excels at getting the band to saturate every layer of the texture in vivid color. But a hint of danger would have been nice.

Frühbeck augmented the string sections for the D-major Second Symphony, which gave the opening movement some welcome heft and punch (it was an indication of how much he seemed to rely on the strings to carry the music’s accents, even with trumpets and timpani—heavy metal in Beethoven’s time—featured in all the program’s symphonies.) But here too, the proceedings gradually lost their edge: the Scherzo was fairly ponderous, which did lend some deadpan humor, and made the similarly moderate Allegro molto finale initially seem a little more brisk. But I kept wishing—and this is an odd wish—that the reading was actually a little more out of control.

Admittedly, lot of this may just be fashion—Beethoven performance has certainly tended more towards the keyed-up and gritty in recent decades, while Frühbeck’s style is a throwback: plush, grand, all the violins to the conductor’s left, &c. And a lot more of it may be my own preference, which tends to revolve around the loud-and-crazy avant-garde or the sheer glorious ludicrousness of opera. I love Beethoven’s music because, when it’s done right, it still holds its own against two centuries’ worth of attempts at one-upping it. But a full-blown cycle really needs to make the case, particularly when it’s taking up this much programming real estate.

Frühbeck’s Fifth came the closest; if the impetus was still wanting, he at least went some distance toward taking the sonic impact to the extreme. Historically-informed performance be damned—this was a big-orchestra reading, doubled winds, the full complement of strings. (The way the personnel kept expanding for each symphony, I started thinking that, if this were entirely Frühbeck’s cycle, the Ninth would have packed the stage with about a thousand people.) To give credit, this would have been a terrific introduction to the piece: the opening announced itself with heavy gravity, the zero-to-hero transition from Scherzo to Finale was marvelously eruptive, and the deliberate tempo actually brought out the extravagance of the will-it-ever-end ending with arch timing, finally hitting the last chord just on the verge of the whole thing tipping over into comedy.

But, for me, having heard the Fifth a few times, a bit of frantic urgency would have been welcome. As with a lot of those French Academic painters, I was left admiring the skill and attention to detail, but not really grabbed and shaken the way I know the subject at hand is capable of. In Beethoven’s music, I think, all of the effect—the shock, the sublimity, the beauty—is dependent on a certain amount of sensed risk, which demands at least a little disquieting momentum, not necessarily faster (although that usually works), but certainly more forward-directed. It’s like that old saw about the shark: if it doesn’t keep moving, it dies in the water.

Pollock Troubled Queen photo courtesy of Flickr member “clarity”; others via Wikipedia. Watson and the Shark image is actually Copley’s first version, now in the National Gallery of Art; the MFA’s version is the copy Copley made for himself.