Beethoven at 250 Nine crucial works. The best recording of each. It’s Beethoven’s 250th birthday year, and concert halls all over the world were going to resound this spring — even more than usual — with his nine epochal symphonies. But with live performances suspended by the coronavirus pandemic, we classical music critics decided to take matters into our own hands and create our dream cycle, featuring our favorite recording of each symphony with just one rule: No conductor or orchestra could appear more than once.
This is by its nature a debate-provoking endeavor, but (and? ) we hope you enjoy it. Please tell us your picks in the comments! Beethoven was 29 in 1800, when his First Symphony premiered in Vienna.
Though his reputation had been growing, a symphony was a major statement, and this piece exudes the freshness and imagination of a new arrival on the scene. I love Otto Klemperer’s 1957 performance with the Philharmonia Orchestra because he makes the piece sound so assured and grand, even majestic, while subtly bringing out the humor and intricacy. New arrival? Maybe, but the Beethoven who emerges in this account sounds like someone confidently taking his place as a master.
ANTHONY TOMMASINI Beethoven’s impeccably crafted Second Symphony is one of his most underrated, perhaps because its unflappable grin and surface-level nostalgia are not exactly in keeping with his wild-haired, anguished image. Sure, the Second, which premiered in 1803, has its share of dramatic volatility, but it’s predominantly cheerful and witty. Roger Norrington’s recordings with the London Classical Players set the tone for historically informed Beethoven performances as a corrective to the weighty Romantic fashion of the mid-20th century. His Second has a sunniness that peeks out with the opening and shines brightly through the finale.
Especially wonderful is his lithe and sweet Larghetto, delicate like the light dabs of a ballet dancer on point. JOSHUA BARONE “Because of inclement weather,” the satirist Kurt Tucholsky once quipped, “the German revolution took place in music. ” The first shot of that revolution resounded in 1803, at the premiere of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, nicknamed the “Eroica. ” Beginning with the epically proportioned first movement, this piece tears up the rule book of the Classical symphony.
Head across the pond from the comfort of your couch with our favorite British television shows, all available on streaming services. Across cooking shows and ta...
In Leonard Bernstein’s 1966 recording with an invigorated New York Philharmonic, the jarring accents, placed in all the metrically wrong places, almost literally sound like someone ripping up paper. They’re decisive, unsentimental and quick. The tempo is so brisk, the articulation of the strings so snappy, that the movement seems to proceed in an exhilarating swirl of confetti. Bernstein is not above milking pathos: The second movement’s funeral march unfolds with lugubrious viscosity.
But such moments only deepen this interpretation’s humanity. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM Well, one of them had to be the least popular. Beethoven’s Fourth is not the ugly duckling of the symphonies so much as the modest, slender person crushed on the subway bench between two massive manspreaders. Written a few years after the pathbreaking Third and in the midst of work on the grand, roiling Fifth, the Fourth is lively and genial.
With frisky dotted and off-the-beat rhythms throughout, it can feel like a symphony playing hide-and-seek in a sunny backyard. Despite and because of all this, it’s lovable. And Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra make a warm, graceful case for the piece, with an excitement generated by honest, rich yet crisp playing rather than by exaggerations of speed or volume.
“ZACHARY WOOLFE “Dun-dun-dun DUN.”
” And then the half-hour that follows: packed with indelible motifs and a triumphant ending. In sum, the most renowned symphony of all time. How best to take it in, 200 years later? There are fast, refined interpretations, like Carlos Kleiber’s with the Vienna Philharmonic.
But try the diabolically slow 1968 take with Pierre Boulez conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra. Those famous first four notes can sound turgid, wrong. But the angsty churn has dramatic purpose, with a peculiar emotional power. Later, when the trumpets re-enter, they have Mahlerian gravitas, instead of sounding like they’re hurrying to join a party already in progress.
The coda is crushing. Boulez later confessed to having second thoughts about the performance. And while this may never be your reference recording, I’ve found catharsis in it that I would be loath to trade for more idiomatically “correct” beauty. SETH COLTER WALLS Given its premiere alongside the turbulent Fifth in 1808, the Sixth, nicknamed the “Pastoral,” all too often comes across in performance as a pretty but harmless landscape — or, worse, a lumbering countryside stroll.
Trust Carlos Kleiber to blow the cobwebs away. Kleiber, the most elusive and perfectionist of musicians, could easily be allotted several spots on this list: the Fifth and Seventh, certainly, in his justly fabled recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic, and even the Fourth, with the Bavarian State Orchestra. But Kleiber’s “Pastoral,” a taping his son preserved on a cassette of the only time he ever conducted the piece in concert, is arguably the greater achievement. It is an experience of shocking vigor, carefree dance and true danger; it’s fast and rhythmically insistent, but flows with such freedom that by the last few glorious minutes it has taken on a salvific, transcendent quality.
In a way that isn’t quite true of Kleiber’s Fifth or Seventh, there is nothing else like this. DAVID ALLEN The Seventh, first performed in 1813, requires both unbridled power and unceasing precision, savagery in its finale tempered by sensitivity in its sorrowful Allegretto. And not even Kleiber’s recordings have the force of Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony. What Honeck provides is a capital-I Interpretation, something notably lacking from most of those conducting Beethoven with full, modern-instrument symphony orchestras at the moment.
While conductors like Daniel Barenboim still stay close to Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Romantic tradition, and others, like Osmo Vanska, hew closer to the anti-Romantic ways of Arturo Toscanini, innovation in the last few decades has otherwise been limited mostly to an extended negotiation with historical performance practice. But Honeck seems to move beyond all that, delivering a thrilling account of Beethoven’s most purely exciting piece. DAVID ALLEN Pity the Eighth Symphony’s placement between the Seventh (with its beloved Allegretto) and the immense, immortal Ninth. But this 1814 installment in Beethoven’s symphonic output — his shortest, at only 25 minutes — is a wonder of concision that asks more questions than it answers, and masks its innovations in lightheartedness and seeming irony.
It’s a work that goes down easily, yet listen closely and you’ll hear intricacies and enigmas that reward repeated hearings. As John Eliot Gardiner’s recent, eye-opening Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall showed, he could fit pretty much anywhere on this list. But his recording of the Eighth with his period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique is particularly revealing, his brisk tempos an ideal fit for the locomotive drive of this breathless symphony — which, radically, doesn’t have a slow movement. And Mr.
Gardiner doesn’t skimp on humor: In the opening of the mad-dash finale, with its playfully prolonged ending, he emphasizes an intrusive C sharp that halts the scampering theme for a moment that’s laugh-out-loud funny. JOSHUA BARONE Few works were more central to Wilhelm Furtwängler’s artistic identity than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He conducted it famously — some say notoriously — in an extraordinary live performance with the Berlin Philharmonic as part of celebrations of Hitler’s birthday in 1942. The Furtwängler Ninth I cherish also carries some political baggage: It took place in 1951 to herald the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival after Word War II.
Though the playing is sometimes a little rough, the performance is magnificent, featuring the festival’s orchestra and chorus and four starry vocal soloists: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth Höngen, Hans Hopf and Otto Edelmann. Furtwängler sometimes takes boldly restrained tempos, as in the opening of the first movement, which hovers with suspense yet maintains intensity. The Scherzo is weighty yet hurtling; the slow movement, radiant and spacious. The “Ode to Joy” finale has the fervor of a great opera performance.
The closing of the Manhattan institution, born in the days of Gershwin, after an ill-fated effort to relocate illustrates the struggle for small nonprofits. Dec...
Cooped up and looking for a new form of entertainment? Consider gaming. Intimidated? We’re here to help. You’re one of the millions of Americans working from ho...
