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SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW

 Beethoven & Wine Festival: Gerard Schwarz, conductor, Sara Davis Buechner, piano, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 9.9.2009 (BJ)


Pairing Beethoven with wine might seem, on the face of it, a curious idea. I think of Beethoven as probably more of a beer guy than a wine connoisseur – Vaughan Williams, discussing Schiller’s Ode to Joy in his fascinating essay on the Ninth Symphony, memorably observed that “Beethoven evidently considered that the stars were jolly good fellows, fond of a rousing chorus, fond of a glass of beer and a kiss from the barmaid.”

In the event, however, this first in a pre-season series of three concerts, each played without intermission and preceded by a low-priced wine-tasting, suggested that the idea might well be an experiment whose time has come. The Seattle Symphony management was delighted to welcome nearly two thousand enthusiasts into the hall, many of them doubtless drawn at least in part by the social aspect of the occasion, and I should not be surprised to find further initiatives along similar lines showing up in future seasons.

Unlike the music, the wines were all of local provenance. I especially enjoyed a Viognier and a reserve Syrah from Walter Dacon Winery. (When I became a critic some time in the middle of last century, I made a rule not to drink before a concert. But then I thought, “I’m a much nicer person after a glass of wine – why not give the musicians the benefit of that?”)

As to the music, it consisted of the First Piano Concerto and the Seventh Symphony. I found the concerto a shade disappointing. Availing myself of a neat distinction that my respected colleague Conrad Osborne made many years ago, I would say that the soloist, Sara Davis Buechner, showed much more mastery of “how the music should go” than of “how it should sound.” She was rhythmically lively, and articulated with a good sense of the rhetoric of a phrase. But the tone she draw from the Steinway was fairly puny and wooden; it neither rang nor sang.

In the circumstances, the Seattle Symphony acquitted itself with honor under Gerard Schwarz’s direction, and conductor and orchestra came splendidly into their own in the Seventh Symphony. It was already clear from his handling of the scale passages in the first movement’s introduction that Schwarz’s reading was to be one rich in affectionate detail, and so it proved. Though this was by some margin the longest program of the three, he was laudably generous with repeats. All four movements were sensibly paced. And the finale worked up a more than adequate head of Beethovenish steam to bring this enjoyable evening to a suitably exciting close.

Bernard Jacobson