BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO.3. LES SIÈCLES/FRANCOIS-XAVIER ROTH. HM 20/27. QOBUZ 24/44.1
First things first - Roth’s 1st movement is absolutely thrilling!
Great speed and drive, a sweeping, sharply-defined performance in a single breath yet with many individualising touches of micro-dynamics (those subtle shadings between soft and loud), superb transparency to contrapuntal and subsidiary detail, and a wonderful sense of timing in each musical event - the surge to a climax, the leading away. This is truly heroic, and reminds me of Norrington explaining that he took this movement so fast (pioneering at the time) for that very reason: he’d heard too many that weren't nearly heroic enough. Roth matches Norrington for pace; but of course, this tempo never seems controversial now, simply right - giusto to the Beethovenian modes and moods. (We remember, of course, that Scherchen got there before anyone - slipshod, to say the least, though his later stereo taping may be). At this (swift, instinctively yet intelligently varied) tempo, the structural innovations and excitements are thrown into brilliant relief.
You think Currentzis corners the market in dynamic articulation? Just listen to Roth at the start of the funeral march, from vanishing-point softness, through to each catch-your-breath sudden emphasis, ominous swell and reduction; such close musical observations - always alive, never routine, in its repetitons; keen, sharp, compelling attention.
What a remarkable performance of the marcia funèbre this is - unusually urgent and intense, yet with such articulation (those crisp, colouristically varied, open-weave period-instrumental textures, the pure, almost entirely vibrato-free stringplaying, really telling here) formality and discipline, it seems a musical parallel of Racinian tragedy.
Such perfectly timed solos, entries and pauses; the ebb and flow of pacing; nothing overdone, but no phrase understated or smudged.
There is an exceptional expressive subtlety here: but, like a great movie, conveyed through dynamics, pace and timing; not any phrasal disturbance or, in the reviewer-cliché, “mannerism”. One marvels again, at the freedom and innovation of the form itself.
As they should, the last two movements release all the pent-up tension - and, on waves of exhilaration, don’t disappoint your own pent-up anticipation.
The faster string passages in the scherzo are flighted, light as air; but the climactic consequences wonderfully weighty, of high definition and impact, the timpani thwacks hard and dry. I relished that metallic edge to the horns in the buoyant trio, the tempo flowing through after the vivace.
Just listen to the purity of those vibrato-less strings again, as they state the finale themes. Great momentum and schwung here, on-the-edge-but-never-quite-losing-it; yet Roth, so sure of his trajectory, broadens to allow some grandeur into the last variation and the coda.
As throughout, there is little to fault in the tonal balance, detail or presence of the recorded sound. Very natural.
The World isn’t short of great Eroicas; my own favourites go back to Toscanini (NBC 1939) and Mengelberg (Amsterdam 1940); yet I feel I’ve been waiting all my life to hear it played like this.
By the sound of it, Roth has been waiting all his life to play it like this, too.
First things first - Roth’s 1st movement is absolutely thrilling!
Great speed and drive, a sweeping, sharply-defined performance in a single breath yet with many individualising touches of micro-dynamics (those subtle shadings between soft and loud), superb transparency to contrapuntal and subsidiary detail, and a wonderful sense of timing in each musical event - the surge to a climax, the leading away. This is truly heroic, and reminds me of Norrington explaining that he took this movement so fast (pioneering at the time) for that very reason: he’d heard too many that weren't nearly heroic enough. Roth matches Norrington for pace; but of course, this tempo never seems controversial now, simply right - giusto to the Beethovenian modes and moods. (We remember, of course, that Scherchen got there before anyone - slipshod, to say the least, though his later stereo taping may be). At this (swift, instinctively yet intelligently varied) tempo, the structural innovations and excitements are thrown into brilliant relief.
You think Currentzis corners the market in dynamic articulation? Just listen to Roth at the start of the funeral march, from vanishing-point softness, through to each catch-your-breath sudden emphasis, ominous swell and reduction; such close musical observations - always alive, never routine, in its repetitons; keen, sharp, compelling attention.
What a remarkable performance of the marcia funèbre this is - unusually urgent and intense, yet with such articulation (those crisp, colouristically varied, open-weave period-instrumental textures, the pure, almost entirely vibrato-free stringplaying, really telling here) formality and discipline, it seems a musical parallel of Racinian tragedy.
Such perfectly timed solos, entries and pauses; the ebb and flow of pacing; nothing overdone, but no phrase understated or smudged.
There is an exceptional expressive subtlety here: but, like a great movie, conveyed through dynamics, pace and timing; not any phrasal disturbance or, in the reviewer-cliché, “mannerism”. One marvels again, at the freedom and innovation of the form itself.
As they should, the last two movements release all the pent-up tension - and, on waves of exhilaration, don’t disappoint your own pent-up anticipation.
The faster string passages in the scherzo are flighted, light as air; but the climactic consequences wonderfully weighty, of high definition and impact, the timpani thwacks hard and dry. I relished that metallic edge to the horns in the buoyant trio, the tempo flowing through after the vivace.
Just listen to the purity of those vibrato-less strings again, as they state the finale themes. Great momentum and schwung here, on-the-edge-but-never-quite-losing-it; yet Roth, so sure of his trajectory, broadens to allow some grandeur into the last variation and the coda.
As throughout, there is little to fault in the tonal balance, detail or presence of the recorded sound. Very natural.
The World isn’t short of great Eroicas; my own favourites go back to Toscanini (NBC 1939) and Mengelberg (Amsterdam 1940); yet I feel I’ve been waiting all my life to hear it played like this.
By the sound of it, Roth has been waiting all his life to play it like this, too.
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