TV Reviews : Solti Puts Beethoven in the Fast Lane on PBS

Georg Solti holds up a modern score of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and the camera zooms in on a metronome marking. “I have been conducting the piece for 40 years now,” the conductor says, “and for the first time in my life I feel I dare to do what Beethoven wrote.”

Past the dramatic introduction, however, lies a rather ordinary talk-and-play presentation. “Solti’s Beethoven: The Fifth Symphony Revisited” airs tonight on PBS’ “Great Performances” (9:30 p.m. on Channel 28, 9 p.m. on Channels 15 and 24).

Missing is any indication that Beethoven’s metronome markings are controversial tempo guides, any suggestion that the Fifth was composed before the metronome was invented, that the later markings may have been botched by the publishers and that the composer himself had second thoughts about them.

Also missing is the fact that none of this is new, or unique to Solti. Listeners expecting a radical revelation will be surprised by the following performance--lively to be sure, but well within the commonalty of current interpretation.

It is the Ninth Symphony that is most dramatically affected by upholding Beethoven’s metronome markings, not the Fifth. Solti shouts “Don’t hold me back!” during rehearsal with the Chicago Symphony, but the tempo--however daring it may have been 40 years ago--is not extreme.

Solti does drive the first movement along, emphasizing its remorseless character, allowing no rhetorical embellishment of the opening notes. In the second movement, however, he is quite willing to linger caressingly, asking his players for rubato at many points.

The first half of the program mixes amusing rehearsal sequences with clips of Solti at the piano, playing themes in a simple, unrevealing compositional nuts-and-bolts demonstration. We learn much more about Solti than we do about Beethoven or the Fifth.

Then comes a complete live performance of the Symphony. It is a fine but unremarkable one, particularly for anybody who has heard the ideas of the original instrument partisans. By the end, all the drama about a daring restoration of Beethoven’s tempos seems an artificial rationale for yet another Beethoven Fifth--once more, with feeling.