‘Eroica’s’ evolution

IN the early ‘60s, Roger Sessions, the cheerless American composer, offered a course in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony at UC Berkeley. Like a lot of other terribly serious philosopher-musicians before and after, however, he became distracted by the profundity of it all. I’m told he had gotten no further than the development section of the first movement when the semester ended.

The urge to explicate the “Eroica,” Beethoven’s Third Symphony, is an irresistible one. Leonard Bernstein recorded a penetrating yet concise 15-minute introduction to the first movement to go along with his 1965 New York Philharmonic recording. Michael Tilson Thomas offers an introduction to the symphony on one of his engrossing San Francisco Symphony “Keeping Score” videos. In 1999, early music specialist John Eliot Gardiner devoted a program to the score’s revolutionary spirit with a period instrument band at the then-named Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The latest “Eroica” explainer is also a British early musicker, but a less likely one. Andrew Manze may be best known as a jovial violinist with a special flair for smoking out wonderfully oddball Baroque composers, but Wednesday night at what is now called the Orange County Performing Artscenter, he offered an introduction to and performance of the “Eroica” with the Helsingborg Symphony. Although he remains in demand as a period-instrument soloist, Manze became music director of this 54-member conventional Swedish orchestra two years ago.

Groundbreaking work

The first half of the program was lively music appreciation. Manze set the scene with the overture to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” the first thing he said Beethoven heard at the Theater an der Wien after he arrived in the Austrian capital as a struggling 21-year-old composer in 1792. Thirteen years later, the “Eroica” -- what Bernstein described as a little bigger, a little more, a little stronger than any symphony before it -- had its first public performance in the same venue.

For Manze, the “Eroica” changed the nature of musical possibility by shattering the sense of frailty of 18th century music. With two movements from the Second Symphony of Joseph Eybler, written a few years after the “Eroica,” the conductor later demonstrated how the influence of the “Eroica” caused a Viennese composer to move from a merely graceful style to a deeper one.

Tilson Thomas’ thesis is that the “Eroica” is Beethoven’s self-portrait. In this interpretation, the onset of deafness was as responsible as the French Revolution for a symphonic revolution. Full of frustration, Beethoven threw off his youth in the stormy first movement. The funeral march in the second movement reflected his initial suicidal reaction to his hearing loss. But he got over it, and in the Scherzo and Finale, he became even more sure of himself, wrapped up in the sheer joy of creativity.

Manze takes a little less angst-ridden and more historical approach, but he is nevertheless gung-ho. He described the symphony’s opening E-flat chords as Beethoven punching Haydn in the nose, and that is how he set off. Manze didn’t draw blood, but he didn’t look back either. Momentum was his strong suit, and his “Eroica” was, if not momentous, never less than engaging.

His orchestra is pretty good, not great. He doesn’t insist on too many period instrument imitations, although he keeps string vibrato understated. The sound is big, agreeable and homogenous.

Although the band, which has just released a recording of the symphony on Harmonia Mundi, is evidently well rehearsed, some rhythmic detail got smudged. As a conductor, Manze is on the wild, arm-flapping side, and interpretively he rarely nudged the nuance meter past the middle point. But when chords needed stabbing entries, they got them.

Sparse crowd

Certainly the evening was engaging enough, and reasonably priced enough, to have attracted a decent-sized crowd. I am sorry to report it did not. Nine years ago, Gardiner’s Beethoven filled the original Segerstrom Hall, which has about 3,000 seats. Manze appeared in the newer Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, with about a thousand fewer seats, and it was half-empty. A single couple sat in the terrace facing the stage, looking awfully lonely.

OCPAC might at least have offered unsold seats to students or the community. The center clearly has to do something to overcome its elitist reputation.

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mark.swed@latimes.com