The Liszt arrangements of the Beethoven
Symphonies are quite something – and something else if
you’re a pianist!
The Ninth is
a bigger work than the previous eight and Liszt uses two
pianos instead of the single keyboard on which he managed
to accommodate the others! These arrangements are not for
home consumption – they are fiendishly difficult – but
they exist to help our understanding of the amazing works
Beethoven created in the symphonic form. They also exist,
these days, for virtuoso pianists to interpret the Beethoven
Symphonies – a privilege denied to them under normal circumstances – and
how they play them! I have a recording, in my collection,
of the great Earl Wild, from the 1986 City of London Festival,
playing the First Symphony like it’s never been played
before! It’s an amazing feat! And so it should be! When
we listen to the Beethoven Symphonies we are party to something
exceptional in our world of music. These arrangements are
the music pared down to essentials. Liszt allows us not
only to hear how these works are constructed – to hear
them without orchestral garb is very illuminating, permitting
us to focus on the ebb and flow of the music, how it all
fits together – but to appreciate them as towering edifices
in the world of music, and further to understand how they
fit into the grand scheme of musical things.
I have heard
only one of the Naxos recordings of Beethoven/Liszt and
was impressed so I looked forward to this disk with some
excitement. I was not disappointed.
The Ninth is
an epic work – built like Schubert’s final Symphony, which
we now know was written at about the same time – on a very
large scale with big ideas and a generous amount of working
out of the material. McCawley and Wass begin with a real
Allegro.
Too often this first movement is played too slowly. As
we now know Bruckner’s music and his last three great Symphonies,
which all begin in a moderate tempo with a string
tremolando,
many performers see this work as their precursor but that
is wrong. This is a bold Beethovenian
Allegro which
needs to be given a proper fast tempo; our pianists rise
to the challenge and do just that. They perfectly judge
Beethoven’s marking of
Allegro ma non troppo, un poco
maestoso – not too fast, a bit majestically – and the
music is pushed forwards, but never to its detriment, as
the radical drama of this music unfolds. Especially good
is the start of the recapitulation where the pianos crash
in with the opening idea – a bold, yet frightening, moment,
and when, at the very end, the first theme is again proclaimed,
fortissimo,
in unison, it feels like the end of a long and arduous
journey.
The
Scherzo races
headlong towards the even faster trio – which is played
with such good heartedness that one can almost believe
that Beethoven wasn’t the monster he is sometimes painted.
I loved the pianists’ handling of this true joke of a
trio,
which is almost an oxymoron, so different to the
scherzo which
contains it. Their performance of the
scherzo is
of wildfire brilliance, the turmoil of the music displayed
fully in all its naked glory. An amazing performance by
any standards.
On a very basic
level the slow movement is a set of double variations – two
themes, each varied side by side – but here McCawley and
Wass weave an idyll of calm and peace, even the loud octave
statements of affirmation fade into the background as mere
disturbances in a wide open landscape.
Then
we come to the finale, and
that tune –
Alle
Menschen werden Brüder, was Beethoven, perhaps, the
first hippy? I know that I am not the only person to have
problems
with this finale. Beethoven was a born master of form,
second to none – even Schubert – at the time, so why does
he, after three truly magnificent movements, botch the
job and write a very poorly constructed finale, setting
words which make him create one of his most banal tunes
and hop from idea to idea? I know that I have just set
myself up for an attack from all lovers of this movement,
but take a moment to think about this – what this Symphony
really needs is not a vocal affirmation of brotherly love
but an heroic, instrumental, affirmation in the manner
of the great finale of the Fifth. Having said all that,
I once heard a performance of this Symphony in the Great
Hall of the Tchaikovsky (Moscow) Conservatoire, by Russian
forces, for whom the music wasn’t under their fingers as
it is in the west – the poor conductor lost the beat in
the slow movement! It was a very moving experience for
me, but that was more the idea of what was then an Eastern
bloc country singing of universal love and friendship than
the music itself. But I digress. Here we are, mercifully,
spared the singing, and the music can be heard purely as
music. It’s still a disaster as far as a formal piece of
composition but the fugue is brilliantly handled and the
double fugue glorious. Because of the lack of words the
pianists let the music speak to us as it never could if
burdened with text. The final peroration is quite stunning.
This is a very
exciting and satisfying account of Beethoven’s Ninth, given
by two of the best young pianists working today. An absolute
must.
Bob Briggs
see also review by Michael Cookson
Leon
McCawley and Ashley Wass (two pianos) 
