I don't generally post on Sunday, but trying to catch up from last week.  Here is the second of 3 reviews from the Minnesota Orchestra's fascinating Beethoven cycle.  (Part 1 was posted Feb. 6.)

Symphony #9 in d, “Choral”, Op. 125 (BIS 1616)

The final of the first three releases in this cycle features Beethoven’s crowning achievement.  It comes before we get to hear this orchestra and conductor’s performances of the 1^st, 2^nd, 6^th, and 7^th symphonies.  I have not yet heard a performance of this work that makes me think of it as definitive.  Perhaps that is because we all have our own views as to what this sounds like.  So releasing this last piece in the middle of the cycle is a wise move since it allows us to hear the work on its own before assessing it as part of Vanska’s complete survey of these symphonies.

Vanska gives us an exciting study in contrasts with the vivid orchestral colors enhanced by BIS’s recording engineers.  Listen in at around 8:00 in the first movement and the separation of the various instrumental sections is just amazing to hear.  The string lines are crystal clear and the energy that surges underneath drives the music forward.  The subsequent wind section is equally wonderful to behold.  All of the comments about the other performances in this cycle hold true here as well.  There is a hint that this is the symphony that begins to land closer to the later Romantic ideal.  Yet, Vanska is not interested in connecting this historically to Brahms.  Instead we have a symphony with a style that is both a unique testament to Beethoven’s musical contribution and a symphony that one can hear the pre-history of say Haydn’s final “London” symphonies.  Here Beethoven truly can be heard taking the form and motivic development to a new level.

The tempo in the Scherzo is simply breathtaking.  It is not that the pace is too fast, it is due to the orchestra responding again in uniform fashion to the various accents and musical textual guides in true fashion as one mind instead of as 75 or more people making their own musical statement.  This is what has continuously set these performances apart from being simple run throughs of familiar music. 

The operatic recitative like orchestral statements are truly instrumental statements without a lot of overly emotive phraseology.  Vanska just lets them play themselves out so that they sound a bit more like thoughts preceding from the whole rather than some deep-seated philosophical juggernaut.  For that we must wait and let the text speak for itself thus pulling us into the exhilarating choral sections.  And what a chorus the Minnesota Chorale is as well.  The diction clear and precise and they sound so much a part of the orchestra as a whole.  We finally get to hear vocal sound as an extension of the orchestral palette.  The solos have the feel that a musician in the orchestra is so moved that they must rise and sing along.  Each of the solo voices complement one another well.  The little marching band that shows up halfway in is just as delightful as it grows in its own variation of the theme.

This is by all accounts one of the finer 9ths.  Someone asked me how many standard repertoire recordings they needed.  It is a good question.  But I would say in an age where music is so accessible to all that these BIS recordings remind us why we must support our regional orchestras and why music is a living art.  Memorializing performances of great masterpieces is an honorable task and 100 years from now someone will still be recording and performing these works in even more intriguing ways.  Vanska’s recordings remind us that sometimes we need to let the musical text speak for itself, get out of the way, and let a great orchestra be led with intelligence and understanding perform.  The results are worth every penny.

[Been traveling the past few days so sorry for not updating as usual.]

Beethoven from Minnesota?  The question is not as odd as it may sound.  The superb Minnesota Orchestra, like any orchestra, must be able to work its way through the standard repertoire on a regular basis.  Years ago, when Stanislaw Skroaczewski was the orchestra’s music director, the orchestra embarked on an awesome set of recordings for the Vox label featuring Beethoven’s overtures and some incidental music.  If I remember correctly these earlier releases were made before the orchestra’s current performance venue.  The orchestra more recently recorded for Reference before that label disappeared.

Now we find the orchestra turning, like many American ensembles, to a foreign label to record and continue their musical legacy.  Osmo Vanska is the orchestra’s tenth music director and hails from Finland.  All three of the discs discussed below come from the Swedish BIS label.  The label is one of the first companies to have abandoned LPs and to go completely digital back in the 1980s.  All three of the discs are recorded in 5.0 SACD Surround Stereo, but can be played back on conventional equipment.  I can tell you that switching between the two is a world of difference.  The surround 2.0 stereo sound is superb, but when you go to 5.0 it is like you are sitting in the concert hall.  The sound is unbelievably clear with an extensive dynamic range that really makes you strain to hear the pianissimos passages and glory in the power of the fortissimo passages.

Symphony #3 in Eb, “Eroica”, Op. 55 (BIS 1516)

Symphony #8 in F, Op. 93 (BIS 1516)

Usually when standard repertoire recordings come my way, I heave a big sigh.  Is it really necessary to have yet another Beethoven recording when we already have so many superb performances to choose from?  Well, if you missed getting one of those others, and it really depends on what you like here, you would still be missing something.  This disc brings together two somewhat different symphonies.  The “Eroica” is often marked as the work that pulled the symphony into the Romantic period.  The 8^th symphony was “an old man looking back” as Beethoven would refer to it.  It is a Classical symphony in every sense straddled oddly between two musical periods.

This is clear right from the start as the opening thematic statement in the 3^rd symphony appears as if by magic after the opening chordal statement.  The double bass lines are audibly present and insistent throughout.  There is excellent woodwind playing throughout.  The “Marcia Funebre” is just amazing to hear as thing move along with a steady tempo.  There are times when the string lines are emphasized like a Venetian waltz thus bringing an even more bittersweet flavor to the proceedings.  This is a funeral march that truly hits its mark on counts.  The scherzo hear just bubbles along as relentless in its quickness as the second movement was in its restraint.  The trio shows off why the old classical hunting horns were phased out for the modern French horn!  Here the MN Orchestra’s horn section provide a wonderful dynamically nuanced performance as well.  The final movement’s playful beginning knocks about the orchestra before beginning to move insistently to its exhilarating conclusion.  Throughout the work tempos remain faithful to linear progression of the music without being affected by some “personal” vision. 

The performance of the no less wonderful 8^th Symphony is an interesting study in Vanska’s approach to Beethoven’s rhythmic accents right from the start of the first movement through to the end of the fourth.  It has been a while since I have heard each orchestral section comprehend the similarity of “>” marks over notes with such singleness of purpose from the percussion right through to the various woodwinds and string lines.  It makes this performance an equal joy because the ambience of the hall makes the “echos” work just right.  The performance marvelously displays Orchestral Hall for the wonderful acoustic structure that it is.  This is on great display in the scherzo.  You could not by a better ticket to hear this piece and the disc would be recommendable for the performance of the 8^th alone.

Vanska’s Beethoven manages to pull together period performance sensibilities with a contemporary “Romantic” orchestral sound.  The nuances of the music are improved upon by the acoustics of Orchestra Hall which the BIS engineers have captured so beautifully here.  Vanska’s vision is to let Beethoven’s music work on its own.  And doing so makes the experience worth every minute.   Some late Haydn from these forces in the future would be wonderful indeed.  The current release increasingly cements this new cycle as highly worthy of notice.