Beethoven: Symphonies Nos 1 & 6 'Pastoral'

Hybrid/SACD - playable on all compact disc players

"Osmo Vänskä's Beethoven cycle with his own Minnesota Orchestra represents a triumph of basic musical values as much as keen interpretive insight. This is particularly worth pointing out today, when listeners are bombarded with "new" approaches to Beethoven, ranging from "period instrument" interpretations, which frankly are getting old, to Pletnev's recent "return to Romanticism" vision of coldly calculated, perverse tempo manipulations masquerading as 19th-century spontaneity. So let's be clear. No period instrument group in existence can play this music as well as a superbly trained, regularly constituted major symphony orchestra such as we find here, and no blathering about different approaches to Beethoven has more inherent interest or staying power than the vision of a conductor in command of Beethoven's idiom, able to express his ideas about the music in terms of what the score self-evidently requires, as opposed to whatever distorted nonsense can be imposed on it.

All of this is a prelude to the fact that once again Vänskä has turned in two outstanding performances. To understand how it's possible to make the music sound fresh, alive, and yes, "different", while remaining stylistically on point, consider three examples from the First Symphony. At the initial forte outburst in the opening movement's first subject, listen to how Vänskä and his players energize the texture by making the accompaniment in the strings unusually clear and present, but still in balance. Next, pay particular attention to the delicious woodwind detailing that gives the second subject a welcome wash of color. Finally, note the exceptional rhythmic precision from the violins in the fanfare figures that immediately follow. And this is all just in the exposition of the First Symphony. In these two minutes of music you will find more interpretive musical substance than in several competing cycles I could name, and believe me, the remainder of the work is just as illuminating.

After the Ninth, the "Pastoral" symphony just might be the most difficult of all the symphonies to carry off successfully, largely on account of the extreme placidity of the musical surfaces in the first two movements. They have to be gorgeously played, flow as easily as, well, water in a stream, but still have sufficient energy and contrast to sustain their ample length. Solutions such as Pletnev's, in which arbitrary tempo disruptions accompany a glacially mechanical handling of rhythm and phrasing, only exacerbate the problem. Vänskä once again finds all that he needs in what the score plainly says. I'm thinking now of the first movement's second subject, with its unprecedented clarity of texture permitting the melody to well up through the orchestra, from strings to woodwinds, like a bubbling spring. Or consider the exquisite woodwind playing in the second movement, floating atop a perfectly judged accompaniment that never allows this brook to meander into a bog.

Vänskä's handling of the scherzo is as rustic and lusty as anyone could ask, the precision of the playing in the country dance episodes only adding to the music's uninhibited sense of abandon, and the storm manages to be at once powerfully graphic but also sensitively shaped and phrased when considered purely as music. The transition to the finale also is particularly evocative, and after a truly joyous "Hymn of Thanksgiving" the final pages have all of the warmth and glow that Beethoven's pellucid scoring exudes--without ever letting us forget the basic tempo that steers the music so satisfyingly into the concluding chords.

The outstanding SACD sonics let nothing stand between the listener and a visceral encounter with Beethoven's genius. These performances represent the difference between interpretations whose curiosity value rapidly wanes with each encounter, revealing a musically hollow core, and those--such as we find here--that have genuine staying-power and substance. They are permanently enjoyable."
(10/10 Classics Today)

"To sum up, Vänskä's approach remains consistent with that I noted in his SACD of symphonies 3 and 8. The distinguishing characteristics are highly cultivated playing and fidelity to Beethoven's dynamic markings. The surround sound is luxuriant, cushioned. The resultant emphasis on the polished and urbane aspects of Beethoven works better in the first symphony than the Pastoral...the detail that Vänskä reveals nevertheless make this SACD a very rewarding experience."
(musicWeb May 2008)

The fact that Beethoven was nearly thirty before he completed his First Symphony is indicative of his great respect for the genre. His careful preparations included a year of regular lessons with Haydn, the 'father of the symphony', as well as the composing of piano sonatas and piano trios that exhibit distinctively symphonic elements. Meanwhile he mastered the art of writing for orchestra by composing a number of concertos. As we know, these preparations paid off and the First Symphony has been part of the repertoire ever since its première in 1800. Already some years later Beethoven sketched some ideas for an orchestral work based on pastoral themes, but again he took his time in bringing them to fruition. The sketches were laid aside until 1808 when Beethoven, in his Symphony No.6, took up the challenge of combining two highly different traditions: the symphony genre and the pastoral idiom. As Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper states in his liner notes to this disc, 'Beethoven's great achievement was to reconcile two opposing elements, so that the work is thoroughly pastoral in character yet thoroughly symphonic in form.'

Together, Symphonies Nos 1 and 6 make up the fourth instalment of the Beethoven Cycle of Osmo Vänskä and Minnesota Orchestra, a cycle which has received almost universal praise. It follows upon a Ninth Symphony which the reviewer in BBC Music Magazine termed 'a Beethoven Ninth of our times' and designated a benchmark recording, an Eroica containing 'one of the finest performances of the Funeral March ever recorded' (Classics Today.com), an Eighth described as 'terrifically taut, yet playful' (The Times, UK), and a Fourth and a Fifth which the Financial Times called 'the modern Beethoven recording par excellence'.