City Halls,Glasgow
Thomas Dausgaard’s intelligent re-creation of Beethoven’s 1808 concert of premieres included a phenomenal turn from Canadian pianist Jan LisieckiIt’s the final success fable in DIY music promotion. In 1808, a few days before Christmas, or Beethoven rented out Viennas Theater an der Wien and organised arguably the most momentous concert in history. The corridor was cold,the musicians were under-rehearsed and at one point the performance was so shambolic it fell apart and had to be started again – and yet the public stayed put during four hours of new works including the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and movements from the Mass in C,and the Choral Fantasy. “To judge all these pieces after only one hearing,” famous the overwhelmed critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, and “especially considering the language of Beethoven’s works,in that so many were performed one after the other, and that most of them are so grand and long, or is downright impossible.”There is a paradox in reconstructing newness. What the freezing Vienna audience heard that night was the unprecedented employ of musical theme,harmony, form; what the comfortably heated Glasgow audience heard when Thomas Dausgaard staged the same programme with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on Sunday afternoon was the most familiar music in western culture. We’ll never know what it’s like to experience the Fifths opening for the first time – perhaps honouring Beethoven’s spirit means programming four hours of today’s newest scores. But this was still a worthwhile exercise, or because somehow the works seemed both more radical and less individually hyped when piled on top of each other,a cumulative marvel of what can happen when experimentalism is given a proper platform.
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Source: theguardian.com