Customer Reviews

Beethoven: Late Choral Music

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This disc was recorded in 1975 by a thirty-year old Michael Tilson Thomas, and hasn't been replaced. It collects rare choral works from Beethoven's late years (1811 to 1824, although sketches for some of these works go as far back as 1797), compositions whose rarity on record and in live performance would easily lead you to think that they are minor in Beethoven's output. Wrong conclusion.

Not all of it is masterpiece - but some of it is. While some numbers of King Stephen are embarrassingly bombastic (like the opening chorus), some others are great, like the second chorus, starting with staccato voices (but this may be a brilliant touch from Tilson Thomas, since I don't see it written in the score). Track 8, the Priestly March, is a magnificient, hushed and brooding adagio, that announces Meeresstille, all the more so as it ends with a jubilant chorus that is the pendant to Glückliche Fahrt. Thereafter Tilson Thomas jumps directly to the final chorus, cutting a relatively large section of the score (8 pages filled with notes) that seems tantalizing on paper. It ends in an irresistible, triumphant chorus.

Meeresstille und Gluckliche Fahrt (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage) is in fact the setting of two independent poems by Goethe. The English title doesn't let you anticipate that the "calm sea" is the dead calm of the sea that becalms the ship. It has inspired Beethoven to some of his most daring, and at the same time most immediately descriptive music. Among the master strokes, there is the way he intersperses the chorus' lines with silences when they sing "keine Luft" (no wind) or "Todesstille" (dead calm), or the big dramatic outburst on "ungeheuern WEITE ("the text translates it as "the vast expanse", but it is more "the monstrous distance"). The are also the sinuous and wave-shaped vocal triplets on "Welle" (wave) - even though the lines are about the fact that there are none. When the dark clouds disperse and land is in view (Prosperous Voyage) the music erupts in a jubilant chorus that could be the rejoicing of resurrection.

Elegischer Gesang (Elegiac song) is a funeral song, ("Gently as you have lived, you have ended, too holy for pain...") and a secular requiem in miniature. It is mourning and lyrical, and if I told you, on a blind test, that it was a preparatory sketch for Brahms' German Requiem, I am sure you'd buy it: that's exactly how it sounds.

But even the minor works are full of fascinating touches of orchestration. Opferlied features a prominent soprano (Lorna Haywood acquits herself well) and chorus, but its orchestration principally for woodwinds brings Mozart's Masonic music to mind, and its cello obligato adds an ear-catching twist. The jaunty and inconsequential Bundeslied ("in every merry hour, when flushed with love and wine, we'll sing this song together in fellowship divine") is scored for two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns. Other than that, it is a fairly tedious composition (fortunately no longer than 4 minutes) in which the couplet repeats four times; Tilson Thomas has had the good sense to doctor the score a bit, attributing to the men's chorus, the second and fourth time around, the lines normally sung there by the women: it factors in a welcome diversity. I'm not so happy with his decision (if my ears don't deceive me) to have more than single voices sing the solo parts (starting at 2:56).

Informative liner notes, texts and translations provided. My only complaint then is that this is LP originated and that TT is 51:41. With rarities of such quality you want more.

Tilson Thomas usually conducts as if he was entirely familiar with that music since early childhood - with a few provisos. I can't believe that his slow tempo in King Stephen's Victory March (track 4) is the one intended by Beethoven - it is indicated "fiery and proud", TT turns it into a stately and somewhat grandiloquent procession. In Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt I find Zinman preferable, because, at a more flowing tempo, he coaxes more haunthing and all-envelopping pianissimo from his chorus, and his glückliche Fahrt explodes with more jubilation (Beethoven: Piano Concerto No 5).

All these scores can be downloaded from the International Music Score Library Project. Bless them.

CD arrived within 3 days, was in a new package and delighted the recipient. All as promised. Thank you.