Classical music:
Credit to Author: Tracey Tufnail| Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:00:20 +0000
When: March 7–21
Where: Various locations
Info and tickets:vancouversymphony.ca
It’s Beethoven Year — the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van’s birth. There are any number of special events designed to commemorate this, including the Vancouver Symphony’s Beethoven Experience set of concerts and events March 7 through 21.
But, I hear you ask, isn’t every classical music season a Beethoven year?
Ludwig van Beethoven.
In 1959, the great Leonard Bernstein talked about our fixation with the composer in his book The Joy of Music. In one of his landmark essays he noted, with more than a hint of exasperation: “Ever since I can recall, the first association that springs to anyone’s mind when serious music is mentioned is ‘Beethoven’. When you walk into a concert hall bearing the names of the greats inscribed around it on a frieze, there he sits, front and centre, the first, the largest, the most immediately visible, and usually gold-plated.”
Yet Lenny had his answers about why Beethoven’s stature remains larger than life, and I have a few ideas too: he’s that good, that radical, that human, that uplifting.
Good thoughts to keep in mind during a year of multiple helpings of the great master’s work, mostly good, sometimes bad, rarely indifferent.
What has the VSO got in store for us, and how will it add to our understanding of LvB? I think it’s all about creating a nuanced understanding of context: what his music meant in his own time, and how his legacy evolved through the ages up to the present day.
The centre of the Beethoven Experience is two concerts, A Most Remarkable Night, Parts 1 and 2 (March 13 and 14 at the Orpheum). This is a two-evening duplication of a single early 19th century program the VSO describes as “an astounding four-hour concert that saw the premières of both the 5th and 6th Symphonies, the Choral Fantasy, and his Piano Concerto No. 4, along with an improvised piano fantasy — Beethoven conducting and playing all of it.”
This program is pragmatically stretched out over two evenings to suit 21st century audiences, for whom a four-hour-plus extravaganza would be too much of a good thing. Placing three masterworks in proximity enables a new way of hearing ultrafamiliar repertoire, just like conductor Otto Tausk’s trilogy of late Mozart symphonies last season.
In the Heart of the Symphony (March 11), takes the renowned Fifth Symphony to unfamiliar turf for the orchestra: the heritage Commodore Ballroom. The strategy is bring the audience up close and real personal with the orchestra, and I think it’s a simple, great idea.
Tracing how the Beethoven myth grew and mutated over time is another aspect of the Beethoven Experience. BeethovenFest: Chamber Concert(March 9, Christ Church Cathedral) will include a performance of Brahms’s landmark Piano Quintet. It demonstrates how Beethoven impressed the best and brightest of the mid-19th century composers, and also includes baritone Tyler Duncan singing Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte.
The decision to reprise former VSO composer-in residence Rodney Sharman’s Archaic Smile in Beethoven The Modernist(March 7 at the Orpheum), shows that contemporary figures still feel a connection to Beethoven as the grandfather (I use the gender intentionally!) of the radical tradition.
Beethoven’s Eroica (March 20 and 21 at the Chan Centre), led by Australian-born composer, conductor and violist Brett Dean offers another object lesson in how today’s composers still think of Beethoven as almost a contemporary.
Dean’s program includes the Eroica Symphony and his own Beethoven-themed Testament. Provocatively, and the concert starts with Die grosse Fuge — a contrapuntal behemoth originally designed as the ending of an already elephantine string quartet; Beethoven’s idiosyncratic homage to the fugue will played here by a full string orchestra.
As with the VSO New Music festivals, the hope is that audience members see themselves as participants rather than passive listeners. To that end, various discounted series pass options are on offer.
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