From inside Beethoven’s head

No matter how many times they’ve been recorded, no matter how many times they’ve been written about, someone is always claiming there is something more to hear, something new to say about Beethoven and his nine symphonies.

In the last six months alone, there has been a major new Beethoven biography (by Lewis Lockwood), an important new study of the composer’s late career (Maynard Solomon) and a fascinating book devoted to the political implications of his Ninth Symphony (Estaban Buch).

In performance, the Ninth, especially, is ever present. The Long Beach Symphony played it two weeks ago, New West will perform it next weekend. Esa-Pekka Salonen has programmed it at the Bowl this summer; Zubin Mehta conducts it later this year in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

When it comes to recordings, however, the music industry has said enough is enough for at least a decade. With dozens of complete sets and hundreds of single symphony recordings, there are versions for every Beethovenian taste in every format and at every price range. No longer could every big-name conductor automatically expect a Beethoven symphony set.

Yet the record labels can’t stop themselves. When instrument technology was the rage about a dozen years ago, they began recording Beethoven on period instruments, and now we have several CD boxes with competing theories about how Beethoven intended his symphonies to sound. Then came the trend of modern orchestras adapting the sound and style of period instruments in the symphonies. Famous conductors continued to be indulged -- Daniel Barenboim and Claudio Abbado have had their own sets in the past two years. New super-budget Beethoven sets, performed by obscure conductors and middle European orchestras, cost less than a bottle of moderately priced wine. DVD Audio and Super Audio CD promise more new recordings for those who have several speakers and want a Beethovenian surround-sound bath.

And just when one thinks that it’s finally got to stop, that we’ve heard it all and the market can bear no more, there comes a Beethoven cycle from Simon Rattle conducting the Vienna Philharmonic that brings such vitality and personality to the symphonies that they sound revolutionary and spiritually embracing all over again.

From a marketing point of view, Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic are an obvious dream team. Still, it is a startling partnership. Rattle has reached the pinnacle of his profession: the top job at the spectacular Berlin Philharmonic. And he got there as much through daring as great musicianship. His mandate in Berlin calls for fresh programming and music-making to match the new look and feel of the rebuilt German capital.

The hidebound Vienna Philharmonic, on the other hand, remains proudly conservative and considers Beethoven a birthright not to be meddled with. The orchestra played Beethoven (the Seventh Symphony) at its first concert in 1842 and has, in a sense, never stopped. The music flows through its veins, clogged though they are with the buildup of so much tradition. This is the orchestra that until recently fought the idea of allowing women in, arguing that the players’ fabled cohesiveness has always been a guy thing.

Surprisingly, then, the idea for this cycle was the orchestra’s, and when Vienna approached Rattle some years ago, he said that he was flattered but thought the notion slightly batty. Influenced by period-instrument performances, he had begun experimenting with the band he headed then, the City of Birmingham Symphony, taking Beethoven at his fast tempo markings, asking for tart, thinner sonorities from the winds and brass and less vibrato from the strings, just the opposite of the Viennese love of a sound as sweet and creamy as the schlag on their pastries.

But Rattle decided that given its heritage, the Vienna Philharmonic was the ultimate historical instrument. And the astonishing vitality of Rattle’s performances lies in his ability to connect the modern Vienna Philharmonic with its roots.

In his day, Beethoven pushed orchestras mercilessly, always wanting more sound. As he became increasingly deaf, he moved further and further from what then seemed like musical reason, finally in the Ninth Symphony rapturously exploding the form to include four vocal soloists and large chorus. It was this extravagance that made him the idol of the Romantics. Wagner, Mahler and others re-orchestrated the symphonies and reportedly conducted them with ardor, convinced they were realizing Beethoven’s grand vision.

By the time of another great Beethoven cycle recorded by the Vienna Philharmonic -- Leonard Bernstein’s in the 1980s -- the symphonies had grown to near monstrous size. Bernstein slowed the tempos down to a crawl, giving every phrase a powerful emotional expression in his transcendental quest to uncover Beethoven’s timeless, otherworldly spiritual essence.

‘Familiar but changed’

Rattle’s approach is here and now. With the knowledge of the period practice movement and the benefit of modern musicology (the latest Beethoven scores correct hundreds of errors), he tries to get inside Beethoven’s ear while still acknowledging that modern music-making brings two centuries’ worth of experience to these works.

You hear it right from the start. Beethoven announced himself a symphonist by stunning his listeners. The First Symphony begins with a bold harmonic progression, the chords sustained in the winds but electrified by plucked strings.

Under Rattle, the passage is the sonic equivalent of a bolt of lightning suddenly illuminating a strange, beautiful landscape. All is familiar but changed. To hear this gorgeous Viennese ensemble challenged to keep all its tonal beauty but to approach the fruity and flexible sound of period instruments is eerie yet stunning.

Each symphony is, under Rattle, an event, and it is an exciting experience to hear them over a day and a half as I did. The performances make for addictive listening, so enthusiastically does Rattle challenge his Viennese colleagues to liven up their luxurious sonorities. In the process, he can be fabulously propulsive. He produces a sweep in the first movement of the “Eroica” (No. 3) that has all the thrill of revolution, while he turns the rhythmic obsessiveness of the first movement of the Seventh into proto-Minimalism.

Rattle futzes, and some will object to the taffy pulling in the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony, although I found the tempo shifts pleasantly caressing. Merrily emphasizing surprising details in these newly edited scores, Rattle indulges Beethoven’s rude, funny outbursts, such as the burp of bassoons in the last movement of the Ninth, with the delight of a P.D.Q. Bach. The CD performances were recorded live in May last year, most from a single take, and there is the occasional rough patch of intonation; not even the Vienna Philharmonic is perfect. But that makes the recordings come to life all the more.

The most extreme -- and to my mind the greatest -- of the performances is the “Pastoral” (No. 6). Rattle has said in interviews that he views it as Beethoven’s most deeply spiritual statement. In his hands, Beethoven’s gentle, flowing music of brooks and streams, the dancing peasants, the summer storm, all take on dazzling colors and staggering grandeur.

And what playing! In all the symphonies, not only has Rattle shocked a magnificent ensemble out of its complacency, he has spiked its schlag with LSD. The Ninth Symphony is nearly as extreme. Typical performances move from calm or existential wonder to unleashed joy in the choral finale. With no preparation, Rattle instead throws us into ferocious, almost unbearable Beethovenian angst, then lightens up as he goes along. The slow movement resolves into a glowing love song, and the finale -- superbly sung by Barbara Bonney, Birgit Remmert, Kurt Streit, Thomas Hampson and the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus -- reaches euphoria as playful as it is numinous. Here Rattle revisits the jubilant horseplay of the First Symphony, but elevates it to a new level.

No single Beethoven cycle can reveal all the symphonies have to say. I revere the depth of Furtwangler and thrill to Toscanini. There is no matching the dazzle of Szell, the drama of Bernstein’s set with the New York Philharmonic or the all-consuming passion of his later Vienna collaboration. John Eliot Gardiner’s period-instrument ebullience remains engaging, as does Karajan’s polish and Klemperer’s weight. And David Zinman’s exhilarating cycle is still the best deal for the money.

But Rattle’s set speaks to our times, building upon the three-quarters of a century of recorded Beethoven symphony performances that came before, upon the latest scholarship, upon the greatness of the Vienna Philharmonic, and then takes us someplace new.

The glory of these recordings, though, is that you don’t need to know any of that history to fall under their spell. In the heat of performance, Rattle, swept away by the moment, also sweeps all else aside, and that is irresistible.

Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.

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On disc

Beethoven Symphonies

Vienna Philharmonic; Simon Rattle, conductor (EMI Classics)

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