Rattle breathes life into one of Beethoven’s least inspired pieces
Classical Lso/simon Rattle
Barbican ★★★★★
As the 250th anniversary of classical music’s defining genius Ludwig van Beethoven gets under way, the little-known corners of his output are being brought to light. Few are more obscure than his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, composed in a hurry in 1803 and revised a few years later. The conventional view is that it’s an uninspired piece of hackwork. Even Beethoven felt the need to make excuses for it (“my brother was mortally ill at the time,” he explained years later).
Yet it seems unlikely that it could be totally uninspired. Beethoven was deeply pious, and he must surely have been stirred by the narrative of Christ wrestling with his despair about his coming horrible fate, at the dead of night. The pre-echoes of the isolation and despair of his operatic hero Florestan, locked in his dungeon, are unmistakable. And the arrival of the soldiers and Christ’s arrest offer moments of high drama.
What Sunday night’s performance revealed was a strange but moving hybrid, poised somewhere between genuine Beethoven-like high drama and Handel-like stateliness. Rattle made us keenly aware of the moments of real originality, not least the overture, where stony trombone chords and distant percussive thuds summoning the awfulness of the scene were offset by moments of consolation. Christ’s first aria, flung out with ringing noble intensity by tenor Pavol Breslik, was like a faint pre-echo of the dungeon scene in Fidelio, composed only two years later.
It has to be said these occasional echoes of the “real” Beethoven were vastly outnumbered by things that were perfectly traditional. There were Mozartian arias for the Seraph, sung with rapturous sweetness by Elsa Dreisig. There were the inevitable choral fugues, sung with commendable lightness and verve by the London Symphony Chorus. There was even a chorus that was almost a direct steal from Handel’s Zadok the
Priest. But far from being a weakness, these things took on a glow of sincerity in this performance. Rattle understands that conventions only sound conventional if you play them boringly; shape them imaginatively, fire them up with dramatic contrast, and those rum-ti-tum passages spring to life. If only there had been a similar intensity in the performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto, when the orchestra was joined by violinist Lisa Batiashvili. Every note was golden, every phrase beautifully turned, but one didn’t feel the work’s keen edge of anguish, nor the turn to consolation at the end.
A second performances is on Feb 13. Tickets: 020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk