Haitink’s Beethoven II: London
Symphony Orchestra, Bernard Haitink,
Barbican, 21.11.2005 (TJH)
Beethoven: Symphony No. 2
in D
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3
in Eb
What better way could there
be to demonstrate the revolutionary nature of Beethoven’s
Third Symphony than by preceding it with his Second?
The two symphonies seem so far apart in terms of
style and ambition that it is hard to believe they were
written just one year apart: where the Second is playful
and rather inconsequential, the Third is a frontal assault
on the entire Classical symphonic tradition, stretching
it and remoulding it into something quite new, something
that had greater impact on symphonic thought than any
other piece in the repertoire.
Bernard Haitink
placed these two works side by side in the second concert
of his Beethoven cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra
on Monday, and the contrast was indeed palpable.
Unfortunately, so was the contrast in enthusiasm.
The Second is a long but fairly conventional work,
a poor relation that would be performed far less often
if not for its illustrious extended family – or at least,
that was the impression one got from Haitink’s
performance. He
seemed to find little joy in its rather cheeky first movement,
and even less in its extremely cheeky Scherzo: what should
have amounted to a series of musical pratfalls was at
best po-faced and at worst plodding.
The slow movement fared a little better, with Haitink
showing off the subtlety of Beethoven’s long-disdained
wind writing, and he found a bit more joie de vivre
in the stop-start finale. But by Haitink’s standards,
this seemed little more than a tick in a checkbox, a necessity
performed for completion’s sake.
If it was a rather pedestrian
reading of a rather pedestrian work, the Eroica
that followed sounded as radical in performance as it
had been in the course of musical history.
When he is on form, Haitink has the ability to rejuvenate a tired old classic
like no other stick-waver in the business, and that is
just what he did here.
With an unexpectedly full LSO on stage, he brought
out details in Beethoven’s all-too-familiar score one
scarcely knew existed, bringing especial clarity to the
subsidiary string parts with the help of a little desk
shuffling. But
his eye remained firmly on the big picture at all times,
and anyone who has ever harboured the guilty thought that
the Third is just a teensy bit lopsided would have been
greatly heartened by Haitink’s
remedial performance.
By pushing the centres of gravity in both the opening
Allegro con brio and the famous Marche funèbre back
quite a bit further than in most performances, he gave
each of them an almost parabolic quality of growing and
subsiding intensity. The latter was a particularly fine example of
his innate sense of pacing, for – although it was pretty
fleet-footed for a funeral march – its sense of defeated
heroism was perfectly encapsulated by the twin emotional
peaks of Haitink’s structure:
a joyous outburst in C major followed by an anguished
outpouring of fugue in C minor.
But the last two movements quickly dispelled this
Sturm und Dräng, exploding
triumphantly with an infectious energy that ensured this
Third had never a dull moment.
Just a shame about that dull Second.
Tristan Jakob-Hoff
