Reflections of a stormy petrel

...that was to be come Avenging and Bright in a few years. Listen and enjoy:

A few things about 2011 have been good - such as my days in Canterbury and the lovely people I met. But I doubt many of us will be sad to see the back of it. A better year to everyone, and a question - what if the greatest musician who ever lived had rewritten the loveliest friendship song known to man?

Something like this might happen... 8-)

I shut down a CD half-way through. I shut it down because I could not stomach the music; and the music, if you please, was Beethoven's Piano Sonata op.57, the Appassionata.

The trouble is that it was played by Glenn Gould. Now I have heard GG perfomances that I liked, but this one can only be described as perverse. It was incredibly long, but that was the least of it; it was long because every figure, every passage, every note, was lingered on to an incredible extent. Trills, which are meant to trill if not to thrill, were practically broken apart into their component sounds. background figures which only serve to make the foreground stand out were brought to the forefront and treated like main themes. Over the whole performance hung a mephitic cloud of intellectual vanity. Worst of all, he makes it boring; and that is the one thing Beethoven never is. ,.

I just heard what purports to be a recording of Claudio Abbado conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica. I say purported because I have trouble accepting that such a well-regarded composer and conductor could deliver himself of such a bad performance. The first and last movements, especially, were merely frenetic, over-fast and undignified, which robbed them of the whole heroic attitude that is the heart of the music. Beethoven's music can be galumphing and boisterous, especially in his jocose moods, but you should never forget the dignity at its heart; he should thunder, not scream. It started badly, with the famous two opening chords passed by so fast that one had the impression they did not matter, and ended badly, with the close - which, to be fair, always risks being merely frenetic - done at the speed of a carnival dance, and the closing chord going by as fast as the opening one. And it may be only my perception that the brass section was louder and more prominent than it needed to be, drowning woodwind and strings (and it is the string section that is the heart of the Beethoven orchestra), but whether it was or not, it did not add to my enjoyment. I hope the recording was mislabelled, and if it was not, I am really disappointed with my fellow Milanese, Claudio Abbado.

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