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Prom 14 - Beethoven: Hilary Hahn (violin) Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Parvo Järvi (conductor) Royal Albert Hall, London, 27.7.2010 (GD)

Beethoven: Symphony No1, in C major, Op, 21
Beethoven: Violin Concerto, in D major, Op, 61Symphony No 5, in C minor, Op, 67

Beethoven: Symphony No 5, in C minor, Op, 67

Järvi's Beethoven symphony cycle with the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen - which has evolved over 4 years and has been recorded - has received general high critical acclaim within the context of continuing and distinguished Beethoven cycles both from period and more modern bands. The Bremen sound is basically that of  a chamber orchestra with mostly modern instruments, but with period trumpets and timpani. The strings play with an absolute minimum of vibrato, and the violins are correctly arranged antiphonally.   As with many period, and period influenced performances, Järvi emphasises the dynamism in Beethoven, the rhythmic contrast, and what Tovey used to call the music’s 'lean athletic' qualites. This approach was evident right away in the buoyant matching dynamics of the 'Allegro co brio' first movement of the First Symphony. But here, and very uncharacteristically, the opening harmonic wind and string pizzicato chords sounded peculiarly slack, lacking focus and structural anticipation. These latter mentioned qualities, were abundantly 'there', with a full sense of anticipation of the main allegro, when reheard in the old 30's recording with Toscanini and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which I played soon after I arrived home. But the rest of the symphony was a joy, with the 'Andante cantabile' nicely paced and superbly inflected with p trumpets and timpani. The 'Menuetto', really a prototype scherzo and the finale had real 'Haydenesque' energy and high spirits, but with that extra dimension of rough play (for want of a better term) so typical of early Beethoven.

Throughout the whole concert I could not remember hearing orchestral  playing of such exactitude, or with such meticulous attention paid to tonal subtleties and textural detail; never for their own sakes, but always in the service of the music itself, which we know from the score is  what Beethoven expected. Hilary Hahn's performance here was similarly exact, immaculate and attuned to every harmonic, dynamic nuance. Sometimes I wanted more of that dark aspect, that occasional grain and thrust, so superbly realised in a violinist like Isabelle Faust, an element particularly evident in the G minor first movement development section. Järvi shaped this well, without quite eliciting that degree of  'mystery' and suspense found by conductors like Klemperer and more recently Harnoncourt, but on the bonus side this movement, and indeed the whole work, was excellently 'symphonically' structured. Although in the passage just mentioned, and in the 'Larghetto' I didn't always have the sense that conductor and soloist were in total accord, this is not to say that they were ever out of tempo with each other, far from it. But I had a regular sense that Miss Hahn’s playing was note perfect, even while she did not immerse herself into the ‘Panglossian’ spirit of the concerto, to use an old fashioned piece of rhetoric. It was aguably in the 'Rondo' finale, with its rhythmic, and at times humorous, thrust that Hahn and the conductor came together. The corresponding G minor section of this finale, now with a slightly ironic, bucolic inflection, again could have been more aptly characterised. Miss Hahn played it beautifully straight, but with no sense of the irony, fun, with which Isabelle Faust imbues the music. Curiously, for a period style performance, Miss Hahn played the old Kreisler cadenzas. I would have though that maestro Järvi ( in terms of period approximation) could have persuaded her to play the much more innovative cadenza with piano, and/or timpani accompaniment, which Beethoven wrote and intended to be played. As an encore, Miss Hahn played a characteristically elegant rendition of the 'Gigue' from Bach's E major Partita.

In a recent interview Järvi made it clear that in the C minor symphony, particularly in the famous opening four-note rhythm, he wants to eschew, as much as possible, all manner of 'heavy' rhetoric surrounding its interpretation and literary definition egs. 'fate, 'destiny', knocking at door', and a whole legacy of romantically inspired jargon. Of course this is a kind of 'sine qua non' of historically informed and 'period' performing practice. And it opens out a whole range of musical, historical debate and controversy. H ave the period practioners got it right or did Furtwängler come closer to the 'spirit' of Beethoven, whatever that means?

Järvi must be a musician of considerable conviction. The way he launched into the famous opening (not even waiting for the Prom audience to settle down) he seemed to be sweeping away the cobwebs of the 'heavy rhetoric' of tradition. Another famous conductor Weingartner was probably the first to point out that the first movement of this symphony is really remarkable for the 'length of its sentences' noting that the first sentences , instead of building up from a 'single figure', break up into other sentences of even greater 'variety and breadth'.  All through the movement, Järvi seemed to totally imbue the music with Weingartner's, or more accurately, Beethoven’s symphonic innovation. He observed all the 'mutatis mutandis' stylistic points like the oboe cadenza in the recapitulation, as the symphonic outcome of  a melodic line it had been tracing for the last sixteen bars. Additionally the following statement of the four note phrase, just before the coda, on bassoon, now in E flat,  was adhered to; although there is a perfectly logical argument to support the phrase being played on  horns.

Tovey's remark about the 'Andante' having the 'courage', 'beauty', and 'humour' of 'Shakespeare's women' would no doubt mean very little to Järvi, whose eye was on the 'con moto' marking. Played this close to Beethoven's 92 crotchets, the movement takes on a correspondingly dramatic aspect, although Järv attended superbly to the pp 'sotto voce'. 'piu mosso' sequence towards the movements end, realising here the hushed tension and anticipatory resilience as eloquently as Toscanini.. The 'Scherzo' (in reality hardly a joke at all) had enormous thrust and integrity in terms of orchestral balance. Järvi didn't take the da capo repeat here, which is more optional, but paid  incredible attention to detail in the    ‘sempre pp’  initiating the crescendo leading to opening of  the C major finale. Here, we were allowed to hear the pp accents in celli and basses which inflect the primal rhythmic drum figure. And unlike many conductors, Järvi correctly refrained from any kind of crescendo before Beethoven asks for it, eight bars before the Finale proper. The finale itself had enormous thrust and energy, Järvi never letting the 'allegro', but sustained tempo,  run away with him. The extended coda, with its last twenty-four bars of C major, here ceased to sound like curtain-lowering chords, as it were, achieving a coherence with the essential pattern of the whole work. The extra grainy, even raucous, tone quality in the horns/brass, woodwinds and timpani in particular, gave this music an open air, festive, revolutionary tone, in line with post-revolutionary context of the piece. I would suppose that this sound and tone was very much what Beethoven had in mind when he conceived this most famous of all symphonies.

As encores Järvi gave us a suitably rhythmically inflected but playful rendition of the second movement 'Allegretto scherzando' from Beethoven's Eighth Symphony. And closer to home in geographical terms, at least for Järvi, a beautifully lilting performance of Sibelius's 'Valse triste'.

Geoff Diggines

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