MUSIC REVIEW : Old Twist on Beethoven

To this we’ve come: For a concert at the Ambassador Auditorium Monday, the Academy of Ancient Music--note the adjective--brought a program of middle-period Beethoven standards. Look what they’ve done to our song, Ma.

And about time, it could be said. Paradoxically, the latest thing in Classical and early Romantic symphonic music is the oldest thing. Since eccentric bands of scholar-musicians first began turning up and tuning down, they have brought their ideology continuously forward in time. Most symphony orchestras long ago surrendered Baroque music to period specialists, and have an increasingly tenuous and semi-apologetic hold on Mozart and Haydn.

Few of the big orchestras today venture Beethoven either--other than the Ninth Symphony, which still carries a cast-of-thousands stereotype--without cutting back in on-stage personnel. But such reductions accomplish relatively little change compared to the effect of period instruments and performance practices.

From the moment the young musicians of the academy came on stage, it was clear that this was an orchestra with a difference. No end pins on the cellos, no valves on the trumpets, no shoulder rests on the fiddles, although there was a cloth or sponge on the shoulder of every violinist.

The sound they produced was buoyant and subtle, at once leaner and fuzzier than modern-instrument orchestras, yet capable of considerable din, as Christopher Hogwood and his band of 47 proved in the finale of the Fifth Symphony. Most striking were the woodwinds, each with vivid individual color and character--and seemingly each with a unique tuning system.

Hogwood led the academy in a bright, fleet, well-balanced, clarified and highly dramatic Fifth. He dispensed entirely with rhetorical portentousness in the opening, concentrating instead on line and color. The cellos and basses could provide only indistinct rumbles in the third-movement fugatos, but otherwise the musicians handled the piece with eager skill.

The joy of the doing was also quite apparent in their account of the Violin Concerto, with soloist Monica Huggett. But there, the results were considerably less compelling, once past the novelty of the sound.

The current doyenne of period-practice fiddlers, Huggett’s credentials in matters of both technique and style are unchallenged. On this occasion, though, she struggled consistently with intonation and articulation, produced some coarse noises in an effort to draw a bigger sound from her instrument, and--most startling, in context--generally played with the constant vibrato of modern practice. Her own forceful cadenzas showed traces of Kreisler.

Hogwood and company gave her a lithe, supportive accompaniment, though here those freethinkers in the woodwinds sometimes seemed in another key altogether. The larghetto was tenderly shaped, and the rondo suitably chipper, but under the fresh sonic gloss in the first movement lurked a very mundane interpretation.

The concert began with a nimble account of the Overture to “The Creatures of Prometheus,” played with particular zest in the timpani. In encore came an entr’acte from Schubert’s “Rosamunde,” almost too sweet, but warmly colored.