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TSO and the living Beethoven: Heroes for our time
By R. Glenn Curry
Toronto
February 19, 2003
The TSO and Chinese pianist Lang Lang perform an all-Beethoven program under the direction of American pianist / conductor Jeffrey Kahane.
Beethoven's music is still very much alive and relevant today, remarked Toronto Symphony Orchestra guest conductor, Jeffrey Kahane. A reference, perhaps, to comments made last week by Canadian composer Dr. Glenn Buhr and the National Post’s Tamara Bernstein. The two attacked the 2003/2004 TSO season and declared its programming as humdrum and irrelevant to who we are as Canadians. Wanting more modern and Canadian works, they seem to have forgotten that such programming alienated its audience and nearly sunk the city's Orchestra. The TSO has choosen to rebuild its audience with proven classics.
Wednesday evening’s packed Roy Thomson Hall clearly expressed its love for the music of Beethoven. Indeed the heroic composer laid to waste the humdrum irrelevancies of Buhr and Bernstein as real music fans, instead of academic and journalistic hacks, declared with a rare standing ovation at the concert’s conclusion what is and is not relevant.
Kahane, a splendid ambassador of music, opened the concert with the intensely dramatic Leonore Overture, No. 3. Almost as much tone poem as overture, its opening progression is a descent into a frightening dark place where a man lies in chains. The orchestra adeptly established this mood, taking hold of the drama that would characterize the evening, allowing Kahane to invoke the restless passion of Beethoven. Yet we had come to rescue this man. A trumpet sounded off stage signaling the prisoner’s freedom and foreshadowing the triumphant finale. We emerged with a rising determination to celebrate those highest of human aspirations: freedom and love.
At the age of 20, technically adept and full of youth’s energy and strength, pianist Lang Lang still runs the risk at this point in his career of being seen as little more than a virtuoso. Lang may well have learned this concerto at an early age, but if so, the work has matured with the artist. Here was a performance of technical and interpretive brilliance, utterly devoid of arrogance and nothing less, or more, than honest music making. He played with great clarity, responding to the music as if receiving it from the composer himself, not just reciting it from memory. Where Lang ended and the music began was uncertain. He fell into the concerto like a shaman possessed.
The interplay between pianist, conductor, and orchestra was silken and electric. Lang even seemed able to shape passages around the inevitable coughs during solo passages. Responding to an enthusiastic standing ovation and sanctioned by an even more enthusiastic Kahane, Lang treated us to an astonishing romp through Alfred Brendal’s arrangement of Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. In the hands of a lesser, it would have been dismissed as gratuitous, but Lang pulled it off with a gymnast’s dexterity and grace. His obvious enjoyment of these works and his delight in sharing them made for an optimum concert experience.
Royalty neither opens nor closes the door, Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti quipped during a pre-concert reception. Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto uncharacteristically begins with a few bars of solo piano and concludes with both orchestra and piano in a unified voice. Here are the Romantic politics of Beethoven that elevated the citizenry and disallowed royalty its presumed eminence. Beethoven’s democracy speaks powerfully from a time when it was not so popular in Europe, to the present when world issues demand democracy. Performing the music of Beethoven, both Lang and Kahane were the very models of elected officials, serving instead of ruling, reminding the audience of the power of the human spirit.
This was an evening of musical personalities and a unified Orchestra. An evening of such intense music must take a physical toll on the players, yet the Orchestra executed the program with gusto. Never once losing pace and synchronicity, the living Beethoven was held aloft, just as at the conclusion of this remarkable concert Kahane held aloft his score of the 7th symphony to the delight of all.
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