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Return to regular viewBeethoven's smaller works show a more practical side
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Friday, May 21, 2004
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Like any working composer, Beethoven spent his career turning out both large masterworks and smaller made-to-order pieces. The fact that we only hear the former in concert nowadays may be our loss.
That, at least, was the upshot of Wednesday's most recent program in the San Francisco Symphony's summer festival, "Beethoven's Vienna." Under the intermittent tutelage of Michael Tilson Thomas, members of the orchestra and the Symphony Chorus together with a few welcome guests led the audience through the byways of Beethoven's extensive catalog.
The result, especially taken in conjunction with last Friday's top-10 program of the "Eroica" Symphony and the Third Piano Concerto, was to sketch a more rounded picture than we usually get of Beethoven the musician.
What's coming into particular focus as the three-week festival progresses in Davies Symphony Hall is the economics of musical life for Beethoven and his contemporaries. Being Beethoven, it's clear, was a matter of more than just raging at the cosmos in Promethean fashion.
It also meant supplying amateur singers with handsome little folksong arrangements, three of which were robustly sung by baritone Christòpheren Nomura. It meant dazzling the public with flashy, ingenious keyboard improvisations, and outgunning rivals hoping to do the same.
It meant writing incidental music for theatrical performances, instrumental variations for the home market, and songs of serenity or semi- drunken fellowship for various choral groups.
All of these, and more besides, were represented Wednesday in an engaging burst of formal diversity. Pianist Anton Nel gave lively, responsive accounts of the G- Minor Fantasy -- whose free-ranging thematic and harmonic nomadism may well give a hint at Beethoven's improvisatory style -- and the proudly swaggering C-Major Polonaise.
Beethoven's lifelong engagement with variation technique shows up not only in such summary achievements as the "Eroica" and "Diabelli" Variations, but in a more humble vein as well.
There was, for instance, a set of variations on "Là ci darem la mano" from Mozart's "Don Giovanni," scored for the improbable ensemble of two oboes and English horn and rendered with plummy grace by William Bennett, Jonathan Fischer and Pamela Smith. Flutist Robin McKee, with Nel at the piano, made sweet work of some variations on Irish and Russian folk songs.
Then there were the straightforward genre pieces -- a graceful little Mandolin Sonatina played with utter delicacy by Paul Binkley and Nel, or a trio of military marches.
Not that anyone would necessarily pay too much attention to this music if not for its lofty provenance. There are odd echoes here and there -- a ringing phrase at the end of the "Yorck'scher" March, for instance, that calls to mind the end of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony -- but for the most part these are no more than the products of a capable musical craftsman hard at work.
For Beethovenian music on a larger scale, there were the choral pieces, which found the Symphony Chorus executing splendidly under the leadership of director Vance George. "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," the pictorial diptych of Goethe settings that portrays the terrible stillness and lifesaving winds of a sea journey, sounded especially vibrant. And the choral interludes Beethoven wrote for August von Kotzebue's play "King Stephen" conjured up the ardent, somewhat fulsome idealism of their source.
If Wednesday's program concentrated on the little-known strands of Beethoven's art, the previous program took on some of his most powerful work - - though not always with complete persuasiveness.
Thomas' account of the "Eroica," marked by strange emphatic ritards and some heavy-footed textures in the first movement, seemed to be trying to make a point whose intent eluded me. Pianist Jon Nakamatsu was a capable but somewhat glib soloist in the Third Concerto.
Most fascinating was the opening rendition of the Overture to Cherubini's
opera "Anacréon," whose weighty rhetoric and oddball melodic modes point not
only toward Beethoven but to Berlioz as well.
San Francisco Symphony: “Beethoven’s Vienna” runs through May 30 in Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. $15-$125. Call (415) 864-6000 or go to www.sfsymphony.org.
E-mail Joshua Kosman atjkosman@sfchronicle.com.