18th-century manners, 21st-century instruments - the best of both worlds or a clear conflict of purpose? One would hardly expect a period specialist of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s calibre and London’s most dynamic orchestra, the LSO, to be citing irreconcilable differences – and last night they didn’t. Their accounts of Beethoven’s first and last symphonies were, to say the least, explosive. But they were a good deal more, too, and the Ninth Symphony might well have startled, certainly thrilled, even Beethoven.
It’s strange, even unsettling, now to hear a modern violin section find beauty in phrasing rather than the vibrato and in the slow introduction to the First Symphony it was gratifying to hear the ampler sound married to such a high degree of honesty. The Allegro con brio, when it came, was gusty and big-boned with trumpets and hard-sticked timpani unbridled to an often alarming degree. The drums may have been calf-skinned but they needed to hold their own against modern trumpets and (if we are nit-picking) that made for a somewhat disproportionate racket from that corner of the orchestra. Instruments of the period can play tutta forza with impunity.
Still, I loved the brazenness of the scherzo behaving like bad-mannered Haydn and the finale’s fizzing Allegro truly was molto and vivace with string playing both nimble and dynamic and one of those moments typical of Gardiner where he’ll startle you with an incidental detail – in this case a vociferous second or two of protest from the entire wind section momentarily silencing all around them. That made us sit up.
And so did the Ninth Symphony. Come the first tutti shock and awe, sound and fury, were upon us with fiery antiphonal exchanges between the first and second violins and a strenuous fugal development that made the seismic climax itself inevitable but no less shocking for it. In its wake Gardiner had the horns go from open to hand-stopped sound replicating the effect of a semitonal snarl on a valveless horn.
He elected to take all the repeats in the scherzo so making the grim totentanz seem even more relentless and with bassoons wickedly predicting the cavorting dark spirits of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique smiles and grimaces were never too far apart.
Two significant revelations followed. The free-flowing tempo for the Adagio amplified the cantabile tone of the movement and gave the evolving variations a wonderfully improvisatory quality. The entire movement felt like one eternal cadence. The string playing was rapt and exquisite.
And then came the Monteverdi Choir – small and mighty – to show how real articulation (not a woolly note among them) and sopranos and tenors who really “ping” on the upper lines can make 36 voices sound like 360. The soloists – Rebecca Evans, Wilke te Brummelstroete, Steve Davislim, and Vuyani Mlinde – were a blissful extension of the choral style, the men pointedly stepping forward for their rallying calls lest any of us were thinking of resisting the idea of universal brotherhood. By the time the great string fugue arrived mid-movement the spirit of Schiller’s Ode was unstoppable. No circumspection from Gardiner over the tempo relationship between the big choral maestoso and the delirious final presto – he knows how it goes.