In the summer of 2012, Hänssler released the
audio portion of Michael Gielen’s Beethoven symphony cycle, sourced
from a trio of DVDs on Euroarts. As will become evident, the set’s
impact on me was immediate, so I decided to take some time to reflect,
as the coming year was to see several other sets issued and reissued.
Amongst others, Eugen Jochum’s third traversal was made available
in EMI’s Icon series, Béla Drahos’ Naxos readings
were boxed along with overtures and concertos, and, most impressive
of all, Glossa treated us to Frans Brüggen’s second cycle,
in excellent sound and still as beautiful and as raw as his Philips
recordings of twenty years ago. Despite the many merits of these issues,
I kept returning to Gielen, when the HIPP sound’s transparency
or the more archaic opulence proved temporarily off-putting.
The point was reached when only one cycle entered my player as much
as this new one from Gielen. In 1961 and 1962, René Leibowitz
recorded what has long been my yardstick for measuring Beethoven symphony
cycles. He brings a no-nonsense approach to the justly revered but often
preciously interpreted pieces that I have always found refreshing, making
the set my palate cleanser when all others have disappointed me in one
way or another. With the CD release of Gielen’s second survey
of the symphonies, this is no longer the case. I had not imagined that
Leibowitz’s penchant for combining the best elements of emotion
and detail could be bettered; I was wrong. In my opinion, all things
considered, Gielen’s is now the most consistently satisfying Beethoven
symphony set available, from any era.
First, it seems important to clear up what I perceive to be a myth about
these performances. To my surprise, I have seen them called conservative.
This could not be further from the truth. If we accept that a performance
of a work can be conservative or its opposite - liberal? - then Gielen
goes against any establishment you’d care to cite in everything
he records, or rather, he cherry-picks from various approaches. Like
Leibowitz, Gielen is a composer, and he brings a composer’s sensibilities
to his interpretations. A firm sense of the work’s architecture,
or structural integrity, is always juxtaposed with an absolute treasure
trove of surprisingly rendered inner detail, which is most certainly
not the case in many traversals of this hallowed ground. It should be
stressed, though, that neither conductor is afraid to allow dramatic
concern to coexist in tandem with this structural predilection.
Two considerations that now place Gielen’s cycle apart from other
similar ventures involve recorded sound and what I’ll call scholarship,
in the broadest sense of the term. Both are employed in consistently
fascinating ways throughout this cycle. Hänssler allows Gielen’s
live recordings a bloom and resonance that eclipses every other cycle
I’ve heard. While Leibowitz’s Decca-engineered tapings were
state of the art for the time, these 1997-2000 recordings are simply
more spacious and warmer. As with ECM’s Andras Schiff performances
of Bach and Beethoven, the listener is somehow simultaneously placed
up close and at an appropriate distance. No, it’s not a particularly
realistic perspective, nor should it be, and yet, there is nothing overtly
artificial-sounding here, as was the case with so many spot-mikings
of days gone by. In fact, the impression is one of naturalness, despite
the fact that you would never hear this sound in a hall, no matter where
you sit. I am always suspicious when people evaluate recordings as if
they were documenting the experience of attending a concert, which can
never be the case. All that said, this treatment is typical of Hänssler
for Gielen, whose Mahler symphonies, not to mention his absolutely spellbinding
version of Schoenberg’s
Gurrelieder, benefited from similar
production values.
Then, there is Gielen’s approach to historically informed performance
practice, an issue still enjoying some scorching debate. Gielen is by
no means an “authenticist”, but there are certainly elements
of the historicist movement that obviously colour his interpretations.
Like Leibowitz, Gielen’s tempi are fairly swift, mainly conforming
to Beethoven’s prescriptions, but not rigorously so, as might
be said of the constantly driven Norrington’s Stuttgart cycle
on Hänssler, of Gardiner’s 1990s traversal, or even of Chailly
in his highly problematic recent cycle with Leipzig. While Norrington’s
approach works quite well on many levels - he’s a wise Beethoven
interpreter - Gielen finds room to breathe, or to let the music breathe,
where others drive it relentlessly forward. Even so, Gielen keeps the
energy up where appropriate. He shares the historicists’ penchant
for taking all repeats as well as emphasis on the brass, coaxing a powerfully
raw sound and impressive swells from his players quite similar to the
then unusual relationships Harnoncourt coaxed from the Chamber Orchestra
of Europe in the early 1990s. Here though, it is balanced by the warmest
and most lush string sounds imaginable, loaded with juicy vibrato, though
the ebbs and swells of “period” phrasing are also often
manifest, a startling and winning combination. Despite these allegiances
to recent scholarship, Gielen has no qualms about augmenting brass parts
as many have done before him, as in the Ninth’s Scherzo. No, there
is nothing conservative about these performances. They represent a balance,
a unity of purpose that draws, moment to moment, from both sides of
the emotional/scholarly dichotomy, in whatever guise will produce results
fostering Gielen’s vision of what the music should entail.
These conceits would be inconsequential on their own, but they are heard
in the service of something else that Gielen brings to the table, something
quite personal to his approach and very difficult to articulate, but
it was also integral to his Mahler cycle. He allows the music to represent
the journey from youth to maturity, not in any strictly programmatic
or even strictly linear sense, but in the abstract, dare I say the universal,
or at least the multivalent, sense of travelling the circuitous road
from innocence to experience that Blake elucidated so beautifully. This
mystical approach, so infrequent but so important, is one that those
conforming to “authentic” performance practices, or their
polar opposite, often neglect. For me, it makes the cycle the success
it is. Leibowitz was heading in the same direction, as his brisk tempi
indicate, but Gielen takes everything a step further. There is no way
to catalogue this aspect of the cycle with anything approaching completeness,
so perhaps a few moments will illustrate the multi-leveled nature of
the progression. Listen to the way the slow introduction to the first
symphony becomes the movement proper. Gielen renders the introduction
with a combination of youthful vigour and proto-romantic flexibility
that seems strange on first hearing but, given the volatility of the
movement to follow, makes sense on repetition. Hard-malleted timpani
strokes, as Beethoven might have heard, in tandem with strident brass,
are brought to the fore; the downward scalar passage that leads into
the main theme is not rushed, and the theme’s jagged motif takes
a moment to get up to tempo, and a brisk one it is. In the proverbial
fell swoop, Gielen captures the hot point of flux that is Beethoven’s
music in 1800, a classicism in dialectic. A similar point of definition
in context, or of mutability, occurs as the second symphony’s
final movement lurches to life. The opening strings-and-winds motif,
with its revolutionary inter-registral leaps and knife-bladed violence,
is given more weight than allowed by those wanting to pass it off as
neo-Mozartian fluff; immediately, with the slightest increase in tempo,
the strings do indeed re-enter classical land, the juxtaposition rendered
by Gielen with stunning power and import.
In offering up these micro-detailed moments as indicators of Gielen’s
unique aesthetic, I do not mean to imply that they are somehow intrusive.
To his credit, the opposite is true, and as with the recordings themselves,
there is an inevitability about the way the music unfolds that puts
each movement’s innovations into the proper perspective. The first
symphony’s youthful excitement emerges undimmed, despite glances
forward, and the third brims with vigour and vitality offset only by
orchestrational maturation as the strings, winds and brass engage in
their neo-classical dialogue using proto-romantic harmonic language.
If you like such interaction, listen to the fifth’s first movement
development section, as I’ve never heard the winds presented so
clearly while still maintaining string clarity. Gielen takes obvious
and nearly prankish delight in the same symphony’s scherzo, with
its orchestral whimsies, but the transition to the final movement is
appropriately shattering.
To say that any good Beethoven symphony cycle should be judged by its
Ninth is unfair but somehow also correct. Whereas a mediocre Ninth can
stand on its own, the same diminishes the parent cycle’s overall
achievement, as witnessed in Paavo Järvi’s often excellent
set. To these ears, a Ninth needs to carry the burdens of weight, clarity
and emotional import squarely on both shoulders, but they often fail
in at least one aspect. The fact that Gielen manages all three is outweighed
by his rendering of the music as a summation of Beethoven’s development.
While the opening drone is allowed a certain haziness, its accompanying
two-note string motifs are given with sharply regular clarity as past
and present histories are embraced in a single gesture. The crescendo
and subsequent cataclysmic utterances are given all the weight and heft
one might expect from Furtwängler or Weingartner while the tempo
remains youthfully brisk. The second movement is taken slow enough to
allow every detail to emerge, most of all those dotted rhythms, while
still encouraging forward momentum. The third movement’s tempo
may, in fact, be ideal, most conductors either taking the tempo marking
too literally or allowing the emotional content to impede the music’s
ebb and flow. Gielen’s sense of contrast is superb as he brings
out each melodic line and orchestration - this is one of Beethoven’s
best in that regard - without ever compromising form or flow; just listen
to the bassoon’s doubling strings in the D-Major section and the
delicate pizzicati throughout.
No conductor can satisfy everyone in the fourth movement, that multi-headed
beast alternately roaring and praying, bating and switching its first
critics into paroxysms of incomprehension and pity for the deaf composer
who’d obviously lost control of his faculties. Suffice to say
that, as might be expected from a conductor exhibiting “modernist”
tendencies amidst historical concerns, Gielen has no fear of contrast,
even of the starkest variety. In polar opposition to an approach such
as Skrowaczewski’s, the lower-strings recitative is rendered strictly,
in stark opposition to the bass’s similar declamations, here given
operatic scope by Hanno Müller-Brachmann. He and tenor Glenn Winslade
are of a single voice, the latter proving quite satisfactory in his
heroic role during the B-flat march. That march, it should be said,
seems just a shade faster than those enamoured of Karajan or Blomstedt
might prefer, but it represents neither the whirlwind of Gardiner nor
the plodding nightmare of Norrington’s first traversal. The Rundfunkchor
Berlin has a sound that is both intimate and full, so that its delivery
of the words “Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen” takes on
the close but far-reaching communal power of a chorale.
Yet, Gielen’s master-stroke lies beyond the private and public
worlds of reflection and declamation that characterize his Ninth. Just
before the gargantuan fugue that brings the movement’s themes
together, there is a sustained sonority, a rapt dominant on which the
chorus intones, “Über Sternen muß er wohnen”.
This is one of the most enigmatic moments in Beethoven’s music,
suffused with energy and movement but somehow static and deeply introspective,
prophetic of many things, the tone colours of Schoenberg and the proto-minimalism
of Reich and Riley coming immediately to mind. Gielen’s entire
approach to conducting is distilled in these few bars; the winds pulse
just softly enough to be felt and not heard, the text is distinct without
each syllable coming too close to the surface, and the strings take
on a glassy sheen over the timpani’s sublimated power. This transcendent
moment of delicate balance encapsulates, but exists beyond, the historical
dialectic underlying Gielen’s vision of Beethoven and of all music.
I’d go so far as to speculate that for Gielen, music is an ideal
rather than a cultural landmark, its permeable boundaries existing in
an ultimately unreachable realm, over the stars where its creator must
surely dwell. The celebration that follows is at once for the triumph
of brotherhood and for the similarly inclusive unity Gielen brings to
these symphonic cornerstones.
Marc Medwin
Masterwork Index:
Beethoven
symphonies
Full Contents List
CD 1 [69:37]
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 [24:45]
Symphony No. 3 in E Flat Major (
Eroica), Op. 55 [44:35]
rec. 16-18 February 2000, Konzerthaus Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
CD 2 [72:27]
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36 [31:52]
Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 [40:35]
rec. 16-17 June 1998, Konzerthaus Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
CD 3 [57:10]
Symphony No. 4 in B Flat Major, Op. 60 [32:23]
Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93 [24:32]
rec. 21-22 January 2000, Konzerthaus Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
CD 4 [73:54]
Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 [31:08]
Symphony No. 6 in F Major (
Pastoral), Op. 68 [42:30]
rec. 29 November-1 December 1997, Konzerthaus Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
CD 5 [64:32]
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (
Choral), Op. 125 [64:35]
rec. 15-16 July 1999, Konzerthaus Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
