The space between notes: listening to the whole of Beethoven in 2020 – Part II

Instead of a long meander through Michelangelo on the way to Beethoven, how about if I cut to the chase and give you a Top Ten list – the swellerest goodest of the best, the pieces and performers that throw me onto my back so I can see again the stars floating just above me in the beautiful emptiness of space? Without further ado, if you wish to hear Beethoven freshly and newly, trust me and do yourself and Beethoven a favor by listening with good speakers or headphones and, for God’s sake, listen to the music without distraction.

Op.20 – Septet in E♭ (1799) – This is the first piece, a sweet and lovely piece for woodwinds, that jumps out with a sound that isn’t very Beethoven-like but has a lively, beautiful sound. My favorite recording is a YouTube live one with Janine Jansen and friends but it’s not on iTunes, where the rest of my selections can be found. It’s on this list because it was the first piece that made me say, Oh! Beethoven has a lot of sounds I don’t know.

Op.30 – 3 Violin Sonatas - No.2: Violin Sonata No.7 in C minor (1803) - This sonata feels like the first time we see Beethoven’s maturity and understanding of the piano and violin playing with each other seamlessly. The sonatas before this sound like he hasn’t yet figured out how the voices of these two instruments work together, but unfortunately many of the recordings still feel awkward like that. One of the things I noticed throughout my listening is that many of the “great” soloists who also perform pieces like this (duets, trios, etc…) want to remain soloists and instead of two instruments playing together there are two separate ones vying for dominance. The 1962 recording by David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin is breathtaking, especially the adagio, an intimate conversation between the two instruments, two lovers, so sensitive and gentle between these instruments/voices.

Op.53 – Piano Sonata No.21 in C, "Waldstein" (1803) – (See Part I for commentary.) Ronald Brautigam on the fortepiano and there’s also a live recording on youTube that is fantastic!

Op.61 – Violin Concerto in D (1808) – Violinists have written cadenzas (crazy-ass guitar solos, except for the violin) for this piece, beginning with Louie himself, who started the whole business for this concerto when he reworked the piece for piano and orchestra (Op. 61a) and wrote one, which others transcribed back to violin or wrote their own. This is a piece that I think has suffered from some of the great mid to late 20th century conductors who have weighed it down. Then along comes Patricia Kopatchinskaja (with Philippe Herreweghe conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony) who, for my Minnesota friends, is a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Artistic Partner, and her blazing energy and profound sensitivity reignites the greatness of this piece. Her violin emerges from the unanimity of the strings, pulling them, drawing them out, dancing above them and never dismissing them – although sometimes leaving them, and everyone else – behind, as she goes into raptures. Again, this is a recording that needs good speakers – the violin’s high notes will sound like a screech without it.

Op.67 – Symphony No.5 in C minor, “Triumphal” (1808) - Da-da-da-daah! We hear those four notes and think we know the 5th symphony, the most familiar notes in all classical music, the equivalent of “To be or not to be.” The joy, the majestic narrative sweep of this symphony never hit me until I had the thrill of listening to a live recording of John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique wearing a good pair of headphones with the volume turned up and the swell at the beginning of the fourth movement shivers me and I think this symphony should be called the “Triumphal” symphony! A pioneer in historically informed performances – thus sayeth his website – Gardiner and the ORR – so sayeth me – brings clarity, energy and the musical tension of different voices in the orchestra by letting them be heard.

Op.95 – String Quartet No.11 in F minor, "Serioso" (1810) – Holy shit, listening to the Chiaroscuro Quartet playing on gut-stringed period instruments with an interpretation that sounds like Beethoven doing acid with John Cage. Wow. There are times when the music almost falls apart and at its edge, the dissolution of sound, he pulls it back together with an aching beauty. The end of the second movement, the third movement, is breathtaking. Like Op. 30/2, he pushes sound beyond what it’s been capable of before, a sonic dissolution that threatens the order of sound and, for a moment, sound decays the structure of the known world until by the brilliance of the composition and playing, the world comes again into focus and when I hear it I think of the ending of V. Woolf’s The Waves, where language breaks down until its limitations render Bernard and others incapable of speech and word but still, still, they fight against this cosmic anarchy and return to a pattern of the world that allows for human connection and contact, lets us be in each other’s presence and be able to communicate.

Op.97 – Piano Trio No.7 in B♭, "Archduke" (1811) If Beethoven was alive today he’d be a hip hop artist called Fat Louie and he’d be sampling and mashing sounds and making new ones like no one’s business. What fascinates me the most about Beethoven now is when his music decays and almost falls apart and yet there’s a tension in it that even at the edge – especially at the edge, of dissolution its belief, hope, certainty – what do I call it? – in life and the ability or power of music to bring back to life that which was on the edge of death or non-being – silence, in fact, nothingness, no atoms against which to collide and create friction and heat and energy and love and life and he stares into the abyss of silence and draws even greater energy from it, and the indomitable spirit of his, even in despair, affirms life like nothing I have ever heard, and it is the musicians who bring this music to us today, their courage and sensitivity to devote themselves to being instruments themselves, a discipline that is monastic in its intensity and focus, and what they bring to us is this vision of life, of light, of sound on the boundaries of silence, joyous and alive. Two equally brilliant recordings are worth listening to: one by Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov and Jean-Guihen Queyras, and the other by the Van Baerle Trio.

Op.106 – Piano Sonata No.29 in B♭, "Hammerklavier" or “Symphony for Piano” (1818) – What a wild sonata! I keep listening to it – I don’t know if it’s my favorite but I keep coming back to listen again and again because there’s so much in it. This sonata keeps growing on me, layers and textures of sounds and themes and melodies and at first it was just a big mash and now I’m listening for how these parts of the sonata make a whole. It’s like Beethoven had three different things to say and put it all in one place, with digressions, sidebars and an eventual return to the points he wants to make. Rather than naming this a sonata, perhaps it should be called a “Symphony for Piano”. But to come back to Annie Fischer (the Bruce Springsteen of the piano,) she plays with an intensity that Beethoven would appreciate, especially for this sonata. And then a definitive interpretation by Ronald Brautigam, who demonstrates the tension in the fortepiano better than modern pianos and techniques, clearly articulating the different voices.

Op.120 – Diabelli Variations (1823) It’s like someone takes your PB&J sandwich and turns it into a 33 course Michelin-starred meal. So many choices – Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim, Ronald Brautigam, Andras Schiff…

Op.125 – Symphony No.9 in D minor, "Choral" (1824) – Go old-school on this one, or maybe David Zinman conducting the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra.

Op.130 – String Quartet No.13 in B♭ (1825) is searing, he takes apart sound, dissects patterns he sees in it, pushes instruments to the brink of what they can do to further this exploration of sound, relying on the sheer will of the music and the performers to accomplish this exploration of sound. There is literally a struggle in the music, the performers, and my goodness, the Artemis Quartet, struggle to actually play the music, there is struggle in the music because the sounds have not before been shaped this way, put together in this fashion and the actual struggle is aural and so is the resolution and consummation between instruments, performers and audience. We are baptized, confirmed, and married in this music and shall be sanctified in its last rites.

Op.132 – String Quartet No.15 in A minor (1825) – Starting this penultimate quartet with a 1930s recording of the Busch Quartet – great playing! These last quartets are religious. The third movement – molto adagio, is trembling. His dive into the human spirit and the depth of feeling is revealed so beautifully in this movement, and it’s so different from other pieces where he is pushing the boundary of sound or an instrument. Here, he teaches us how to pray – with all our heart and attention and devotion. Layer after layer of sound coming in waves, pushing down the music that precedes it and building upon it in a slow rhythmic swell after swell, and the Hagen Quartett’s end of the third movement is spectacular.

Op.135 – String Quartet No.16 in F (1826) And here we are at the end, together again, beginning with Artemis Quartet. Jesus, the relentless strings of the 4th movement before it resolves itself.

It shouldn’t be difficult to share how profound this year-long endeavor was but it reveals the gap between art and our apprehension of it, demonstrates that unless the art itself is seen heard read touched or otherwise engaged with by you the reader then it’s as worthless as the ingredient list on the side of a cardboard cylinder of Comet cleanser with its bright green color and in a small font at the bottom there’s a number to call if you have questions and maybe pieces of art should include a number to call and likewise a warning label because as an old girlfriend and I wrote on the tee shirts we made, poetry kills, and unless the viewer reader listener engages with the work at hand it’s just a bunch of scribbles or words or sounds and it’s why we can say, I don’t like jazz or I don’t like contemporary music or art – we have failed to engage with it and art is an act a verb and the viewer is an integral part of the art and whether it’s Pablo Casals who found sheet music for Bach’s cello suites in some back alley music store as a boy and committed himself to understanding and explaining them with his cello, pulling them from forgotten obscurity and ensuring they don’t remain just squiggly lines of ink on pieces of paper, or you on a Tuesday evening walking through a vacant lot with dandelions pushing with insistence through cracks or maybe a cleansing bone-cold day in late January when the air you breathe hollows your lungs or perhaps any other time when you look, listen, write,