Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Symphony No 9 (1824)
Christina Landshamer (soprano); Jennifer Johnson Cano (mezzo-soprano); Werner Güra (tenor); Shenyang (bass-baritone)
Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck
rec. live 6-9 June 2019, Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts, Pittsburgh, USA
Text included
REFERENCE RECORDINGS FR-741 SACD [62:44]
Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony have made quite a name for themselves already with their previous recordings of Beethoven’s
Symphonies Nos 3,5 and 7 having been released to noteworthy and well-deserved critical acclaim. If a whole cycle is perhaps in the offing, some readers may then be surprised that the Choral Symphony was the next to be set down. Usually it’s the ‘grand finale’ of the series, reserved for the final sessions, but this live recording was taped over a number of concerts in 2019 to be released in February 2021 to commemorate the 125 years since the orchestra’s first concert was given on 27 February 1896.
On the basis of this recording, the orchestra is currently in exceptionally fine fettle and they are treated to superb sound of great warmth and depth from the Sound-Mirror team, with orchestra, chorus and soloists all superbly balanced. The presentation from Reference Recordings is up to their usual high standards and features extensive notes (in English only) by the conductor explaining his interpretation, full texts and biographies of the performers, plus even a full listing of all the names of the chorus, orchestra and - a nice touch- the ensemble’s librarian and stage technicians.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has of course enjoyed many great recordings over the years and everyone reading this review will have their own favourite versions, be they historical ones from Weingartner, Toscanini and Furtwangler, hewn out of granite as with Klemperer, those from the stereo era from Szell, Fricsay, Karajan and Bohm, from the digital era with Giulini, Wand, Blomstedt and Bernstein, all the way through to those of recent times from Vänskä, Chailly and period instrument ensembles (there were so many others I could have included in this list). It must be daunting for any conductor approaching this music to try and find something new to say about it, or to deliver a performance good enough to challenge the significant competition delivered by some of the greatest podium masters of the past.
If perhaps, in my opinion, Manfred Honeck doesn’t quite deliver a recording worthy enough to stand alongside the very greatest, he certainly has a very good go at it. Most readers will know by now that Honeck’s ‘Beethoven style’ is more traditional than what has become the norm these days, particularly when compared to his contemporaries like Vänskä, Chailly and Rattle, plus even older conductors like Haitink and the late Claudio Abbado in their final cycles – and many, myself included, are grateful for that. The strings still use vibrato, albeit sparingly - justified and explained in the notes by the conductor - as opposed to Roger Norrington and others who exclude it completely, furthermore, one gets the sense of a full-sized ensemble and chorus, rather than something more intimate and chamber-like as seems to be very much in vogue these days, as with Paavo Järvi and Seiji Ozawa, plus smaller period instrument ensembles. However, Honeck does not seem beholden to a particular style of presentation or dogma, as some others appear to be; he has his own ideas and interpretation and it just so happens that they are delivered via the modern-day ensemble that is the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Mendelssohn chorus, with a tacit acknowledgement of historically-informed practices typical of our times.
Some of these ideas have already attracted criticism in some quarters, to which I will address in due course. However, the whole thing opens very impressively, where the combination of the superb sound and a very fine orchestra really pays dividends, with the music emerging from the softest pianissimo before exploding into magnificent life, where we can hear that Honeck has divided his fiddles, plus he has instructed his timpanist to use hard sticks. In fact, I did rather think that this conductor’s priorities have evolved since his apparently more Romantically-infused Fifth and Seventh symphonies. Honeck is here seeking out considerably more clarity from Beethoven’s score than before; this transparency of sound, plus forward moving pulse and intensity often put me in mind of Georg Szell’s recording with his Cleveland Orchestra - not a bad point of reference by any means. Throughout the first movement, Honeck generates much drama and involvement and while he writes over a page and a half about this movement in the liner notes, there is only one real moment that noticeably deviates from traditional norm, occurring just after the orchestra has exploded into life, as mentioned above in bar 17. Shortly after that first outburst and just before the orchestra winds down back to the opening material once more, there are two repeated fanfares for trumpets and timpani, both marked fortissimo of with the final note is marked piano. Every time this phrase is repeated throughout the movement, Honeck treats it as a very steep, hairpin diminuendo, which I have to say I found interesting the first few times I heard it, less so thereafter. To my surprise, a quick spot check with the aforementioned Chailly, Vänskä and Paavo Järvi, plus a handful of period instrument practitioners including Norrington, Harnoncourt and Gardiner, revealed that none of them treated the phrase in the same way, with just Norrington attempting to observe the piano on the final note. In fact, the only time I can recollect anything remotely similar to Honeck’s treatment of these phrases was with Simon Rattle, on his first recording with the Vienna Philharmonic for EMI. This may be the key, for Rattle’s first set of the Nine seemed (to me at any rate) to be in thrall to the latest editions by Jonathan del Mar, enthusiastically - sometimes, over-enthusiastically - highlighting all the editor’s amendments to the scores, not always to the music’s benefit - so maybe the diminuendo is taken from that edition, rather than the standard score (or at least the Eulenberg version that I have). However, during those passages in the opening movement of the Ninth, because Rattle’s basic pulse is noticeably slower than Honeck’s; the diminuendo is not as jarring, more a gentle receding back into the mists, as opposed to Honeck’s hairpin decline. There is always a very fine line between interpretive brilliance and being merely wilfully mannered and, on this occasion, I am not sure if Honeck falls on the correct side of the divide, although I must admit, it is brilliantly executed every time.
In fact, swift tempos are the watchword throughout all four movements in this recording, the second movement also going at a tremendous lick, although Honeck’s rhythmic tautness and the magnificence of his orchestra means that it never turns merely aggressive or one-dimensionally manic. At the Trio, Honeck observes the Presto marking and makes sure the music sounds even faster than before, even though Beethoven’s metronome marking doesn’t change, with no relaxation at all for the lyrical subject being taken by the violas and cellos, before the violins join them later in the phrase (bars 436-438). This isn’t as controversial as it sounds – Schuricht did something similar with his recording from Paris for EMI as far back as the late 1950’s, but this is the point where perhaps Honeck’s reading gets controversial and may/may not be to everyone’s tastes. For while with Schuricht it sounds as if he and his orchestra are being chased by all the demons of hell as they tear through the first and second movements, it all seems to make sense when the opening of his Adagio soothingly begins, like oil being poured on troubled waters. In Schuricht’s hands this movement takes a ‘traditional’ 16 minutes, but with Honeck at a more flowing 12 and half minutes, it is perhaps more andante than adagio. To put this into perspective, people used to grumble at Karajan for taking a similar speed to Schuricht, especially those who favoured the prayerful approach of Furtwangler who habitually hit the twenty-minute-mark with this movement in his later years. So Honeck is much more flowing than usual which, as a consequence, then makes his Adagio faster than his Scherzo – and this has caused some controversy already in some quarters.
The irony of this is that those who grumbled also praised Chailly’s recording with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to the skies – and yet his Adagio is likewise faster than his second movement too. Similarly, Vänskä’s much lauded recording with the Minnesota Orchestra on BIS, has an Adagio that is only a handful of seconds faster than the preceding scherzo. To my mind, this could be a consequence of modern thinking – with a swifter tempo for the adagio and all the repeats observed in the scherzo (not a given; even Tennstedt as late as the 1990’s was selective in his observation of repeats with this movement), there is perhaps an inevitability that the two movements would end up becoming closer in timings than what we have been used to up until now. That said, it is very beautifully conceived in this performance by Honeck and his Pittsburgh players, very flowing. Admittedly, it doesn’t quite ‘steal’ in as performances used to in the past, but rather it sounds as if it is in “full cry” from the very first bar. Later on, towards the end of the movement, the fanfares are urgent, terse and dramatic – a call to arms, rather than the grand and stately pronouncements of yore. To be frank, if you have no problem with the basic pulse of this movement being swifter than normal, then you will not be able to imagine a more beautifully conceived performance than the one delivered by Honeck and his players on this recording.
Predictably, Honeck opens the final movement with great drama, but immediately reigns in his timpanist so not to obscure Beethoven’s inner writing. To my ears, this is the least successful movement of the performance, largely since Honeck, similar to how Simon Rattle can sometimes be, is not above the charge of drawing attention to his interpretive ideas at the expense of the whole. For example, shortly after the baritone has finished his introduction, the chorus sing the phrase “Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle, Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!” (bars 52-56) which starts forte but ends on piano from Weinend onwards, something which is exaggerated by Honeck who makes it sound as if it starts on fortissimo and ends on pianissimo. Further on, just before the central march episode in this movement, the chorus sing “und der Cherub steht vor Gott” (bars 85-88), a passage which has long vexed interpreters, for Beethoven writes each syllable as a minim (half note), but with a staccato indication on each note. Traditionally, conductors have assumed this to mean Beethoven wanted each syllable to be heavily accented, but more recently some conductors have prioritised the staccato over the note value and Honeck is one of these: in his hands, each syllable sounds as if it is a staccato quaver (eighth note), which then begs the question, if that was what he wanted why didn’t Beethoven write that? Personally, I found both of these examples interpretatively a touch exaggerated.
I suppose the time when a star-studded solo quartet was parachuted in for a red-letter day Choral Symphony is long gone, and the performers used for Honeck’s recording are no exception to that trend. In his notes, the conductor explains that he specifically chose ‘lighter more agile voices’ for his quartet for, while conceding that the opening solo bass as well as the tenor march episode require considerable intensity, what he was ideally seeking was ‘transparency’ in the final (vibrato-less) solo quartet. However, to my mind I was less convinced for, while Honeck never lets them get overwhelmed by chorus and orchestra, it does sound as if they are singing a Mozartian singspiel while being accompanied by the red-bloodied might of the powerful sounding Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in full cry. In short, they sing with minimal vibrato and are decent rather than memorable.
The March episode has generated some negative commentary already, inasmuch that it is taken at a swifter tempo than traditionally – although I would contend that this is hardly controversial. In his notes, Honeck makes a point about how Beethoven would probably have had French revolutionary marches in mind, rather than the slower German marches and sure enough, in the 1994 recording by the aptly named Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique on DG Archiv, John Eliot Gardiner takes a similarly brisk tempo. Most readers will know that Gardiner has made a speciality of early nineteenth century French music, especially Berlioz, so perhaps he too may have been persuaded to adopt a similar brisk tempo at this point for comparable reasons, although he actually cited the tenor’s words - “Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen, Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan, Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn, Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen” (Gladly, as His suns fly through the heavens' grand plan, Go on, brothers, your way, Joyful, like a hero to victory) – as being like that of a messenger, breathless with excitement, who cannot wait to pass on his message. At the time, Gardiner cited it as evidence of his self-proclaimed conducting genius, conveniently overlooking that (on record at least) Furtwangler was also drawing similar conclusions in his pre-war performances of the work (listen to his 1937 BPO Queens Hall performance to hear what I mean). Honeck is actually faster than Furtwangler (and considerably more modest than Gardiner) and I have to say I rather prefer a faster tempo here, rather than the more plodding one from more ‘traditional’ performances. Needless to say, too, that Honeck’s Pittsburgh Symphony despatch his fast tempos with considerably more accuracy and panache than Furtwangler’s pre-war Berliners – just listen to their prestissimo coda exuberantly flying along and then compare it to Furtwangler’s attempt(s) at a similar tempo, all garbled and blurred.
Any recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a significant event – and make no mistake, this is a major entry into the recorded catalogue, hence the length of, and detail, in this review. There has also been a larger number of comparative recordings mentioned as well, probably too many if I am to be totally honest – but that is the point, for there are so many significant recordings of this work already available in the catalogue, that any newcomer needs to be really special to make its mark and, for me, for reasons that I have tried to explain above, this one doesn’t quite do it. That said, those readers who have been avidly collecting Honeck’s recordings from Pittsburgh, including those previous releases of Beethoven’s symphonies, should still acquire this release with a degree of confidence – it is by no means a bad performance. However, for the more casual collector, I am less sure; for me, the one key thing this reading lacks is a sense of culmination, a feeling of overwhelming joy and excitement as the chorus sings at the end: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium!” (Joy, brilliant spark of the gods, daughter of Elysium!) just before the orchestra races towards the finishing line. Maybe that sums up the whole recording for me – a very good Ninth Symphony, probably of our time, just not a great one for all time.
Lee Denham
