This thrilling Beethoven is on the nose
Julian Haylock is electrified by Musicaeterna’s delivery of the mighty Fifth
Beethoven
Symphony No. 5 Musicaeterna/teodor Currentzis Sony Classical 19075884972 29:54 mins Teodor Currentzis is famous for keeping his hand-picked orchestra on its collective toes, and in this most celebrated of symphonies the players sound at times as though they might explode with excitement. Where appropriate, they generate a rapier-like thrust that sweeps aside conventional thinking. It’s an exhilarating helter-skelter ride, which finds Currentzis (as if in full meditative flow) focusing on the music’s emotional narrative with electrifying powers of singleminded concentration.
High-tension readings of symphonic masterpieces often come unstuck in the slower movements, yet here Beethoven’s Andante con moto emerges free of militaristic bombast and (most strikingly) any sense of self-conscious orchestral sophistication. Those whose collections are heaving with recordings shaped profoundly by each orchestra’s distinctive sonic profile will find little here to suggest an established ensemble expounding traditional values. When the horns blazingly interrupt the Allegro third movement’s mysterious opening, and the sound virtually drops out as Beethoven sets up the finale with an unexpected harmonic shift, one is held entirely and undistractedly in the moment, without the slightest sense of ‘interpreter at work’. There are innumerable moments of orchestral enlightenment along the way, most notably in the finale, whose surging textures emerge with almost unprecedented clarity, as piccolo and trombones emerge on the scene for the first time and the excited (often inaudible) thrusting of the inner strings power the music along. The Seventh Symphony is due later this year as part of an intended complete cycle. I, for one, can hardly wait. PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★
Surging textures emerge with an almost unprecedented clarity
Accused*; Two Episodes
*Anu Komsi (soprano); Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/hannu Lintu Ondine ODE1345-2 55:75 mins
In the 1980s, Magnus Lindberg spearheaded a new generation of composerconductors whose emergence emphatically belied claims that the orchestra’s days were numbered as a vehicle for new music. Viscerally dynamic and saturated with colour, his scores today continue to showcase the orchestra as a powerful instrument in its own right. Yet the two works here, written while he was London Philharmonic Orchestra composer in residence 2014-17, are less assured in their deeper purposes.
Both are performed with fire and commitment by Lindberg’s compatriots, the Finnish
Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu.
For 2014’s Accused they are joined by soprano soloist Anu Komsi, who proves impressively equal to its challenging, threelanguage coloratura. However, her dramatic task feels unclear. Subtitled ‘Three interrogations for soprano and orchestra’, linked sections respectively invoke the French Revolution, communist
East Germany and present-day America. Komsi is both accuser and accused throughout, but nothing differentiates the two roles, rendering expressively vague the work’s pro-human rights stance while it hovers uncomfortably between monologue-dialogue and orchestral song cycle-operatic scena.
An array of composers from
Falla to Ravel – and especially
Berg – are detectable in Lindberg’s sumptuous neo-romantic palette. The latter re-appear in Two Episodes (2016), but here the direct prompt is
Beethoven and the purpose overtly dual: a piece referencing the iconic composer that’s both prelude to his Ninth Symphony and stand-alone. Yet quite what the episodes might signify in either case is uncertain despite their nonetheless engaging, turbulent textures. Steph Power PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★★