Columbus Symphony (and Koussevitzky): Beethoven Ninth

TWO AUDIO PIECES   The Columbus Symphony performs Beethoven's Symphony 9 in d, Op. 125,  this weekend at the Ohio Theater: Friday and Saturday at 8 PM, Sunday at 3. Gunter Herbig conducts. Yours truly gives pre-concert talks one hour before each performance. The Saturday night concert will be broadcast live over WOSU 89-7 FM. What to say about Beethoven's Ninth? It re- wrote the rules for the symphony. What had been a divertissement, an entertainment became a sprawling, emotional hymn, written for a large orchestra and a chorus. Nobody told Beethoven this couldn't be done and I doubt he bothered to ask-or would have cared. At the end of his life Beethoven felt he had exhausted the standard form, and he had long since ceased to write the kind of music the Viennese-or Germans, or French, or British-could chatter through. This was music as a different kind of entertainment-music which made demands on the audience and which exerised the audience's conscience. Beethoven made you think, not hum. During my visits many years ago with the critic and broadcaster Edward Downes,  we spoke about his early days as music critic of the Boston Evening Transcript.  Edward, son of New York Times music critic Olin Downes, had access to nearly ever important artist of the 20th century: Casals, Heifetz, Toscanini, Beecham, Lehmann, Flagstad, you name 'em, he heard 'em.  Edward met Sibelius and Richard Strauss. Here's what he told me about performances of Beethoven's 9th in Boston, conducted by Boston Symphony Music Director Serge Koussevitzky,  in the late 1930s: "Koussevitzky was famous for French and Russian music. It was all very ' wring the last drop out of the Pathetique!'  But I remember a performance of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, the very greatest performance of this work I ever heard.*  This ran very much counter to the reputation Koussevitzky had. He did not program for himself a lot of the core German repertoire. He conducted the Ninth with a great grasp of the big architecture. Koussevitzky brought a depth to this work, very different from the frenzied, hysterical kind of Russian interpretation, and a real emotional connection. I was always very impressed by this,  and I feel that to this day Koussevitzky is very much underestimated." I found a recording of Koussevitzky conducting the Beethoven 9th. It is not (alas) with the Boston Symphony, but with the French Radio Orchestra in Paris, July 26, 1950. He died less than a year later. Here,  Koussevitzky builds the the big tune in the 4th movement [audio:koussevi-1.mp3] And here's the finale, with the chorus singing in French (O Freunde! becomes Mes freres!) [audio:kouss2.mp3] Serge Koussevitzky, 1974-1951, composer, double bassist, conductor, director of the Concerts Koussevitzky in Paris, Music Director of the Boston Symphony, 1925-1949, founder of the Berkshire Music Center and Tanglewood. *Edward told me he heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony conducted by Toscanini, Richard Strauss, Barbirolli, Stokowski and Bernstein, among others.