Beethoven Symphony No. 9
- Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra
- Tafelmusik Chamber Choir and guest soloists
- At Koerner Hall in Toronto on Thursday
The rush hour for period performances of Beethoven symphonies happened two decades ago, when historically minded orchestras and their record companies jockeyed to produce the most audacious rethinking of these familiar pieces. Tafelmusik has been more patient, attempting the symphonies at long intervals, arriving at its first performances of the Ninth only this week.
Hopes were high among the orchestra’s fans, and seemed for many to have been fulfilled, to judge by the cheers that followed the final crashing chords of Thursday’s concert. But even if the piece represented a kind of milestone for Tafelmusik, the journey there was for me a fierce disappointment.
I’ve never heard a duller performance of this piece, with less sense of light and shade, or of what this still surprising symphony might mean. For much of the time, people played the notes, accurately or not, with about as much expressed collective understanding as you might expect from a phonetic reading of Shakespeare by actors not fluent in the language.
The first and especially the third movement seemed to last forever, not because some vision of eternity had opened up, but because the performance rolled over so many chances to give a phrase an urgent shape, or to acknowledge a dramatic turn in the narrative with some apt preparation or response. It seemed incredible that such fine players could saw through this music to so little effect.
Unfortunately, Tafelmusik set itself an insoluble problem in this performance, in the form of conductor Bruno Weil. The most charitable view I can take of Weil’s participation was that he was reviving, for reasons of historical principle, the conductor’s earliest role as the one who waves a stick or beats a staff on the floor simply to keep the players in time. Less generously, it occurred to me that he might be showing misplaced sympathy for Beethoven by pretending to be deaf.
He beat doggedly through the score, ignoring any and all opportunities to provide some intelligent contour to the notes streaming by. I can’t help thinking that his empty direction not only didn’t help the players, but wore them down: How can you do exciting things, when the stick is telling you to just plow on?
Even the opening of the finale, one of the most dramatic openings of any work by Beethoven, was a clumsy and incoherent succession of ideas, a failure as I’ve never heard before. The piece recovered, because in the end, once the soloists and chorus dive in, nothing can stop this music from making an effect. The four solo voices (soprano Sigrid Plundrich, mezzo-soprano Anita Krause, tenor Rufus Muller and baritone Christopheren Nomura) and the excellent Tafelmusik Chamber Choir entered the piece exactly like the cavalry coming to save the settlers in a bad old western.
The concert opened with three sacred pieces for choir alone: an exuberant prayer setting by Mendelssohn (Ehre sei Gott in der Hohe), a self-consciously archaic Missa canonica by Brahms and Arvo Part’s Nunc dimittis. Part, too, composes in a style mindful of centuries past, but unlike Brahms, he doesn’t make it seem like he’s putting on old robes just for the occasion. His piece was for me the most satisfying of the three, and the most pure in execution from a choir and conductor (Ivars Taurins, who unlike Weil really does enact the music with his body) who might have preferred to do these pieces in the more forgiving acoustics of the Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, where Tafelmusik usually performs.
Tafelmusik repeats this program Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3:30 p.m., at Koerner Hall.
