Two new complete sets of Beethoven’s nine symphonies have recently been published. Former OSM musical director Zubin Mehta finally looks at the cycle in a Dynamic box set, while Deutsche Grammophon publishes, a year after the complete by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Orchester de Chambre d’Europe, To Beethoven Journeysymphonies by GáborTakács-Nagy and the Chamber Orchestra of the Verbier Festival.
This is definitely the week where, based on record releases, it is possible to ask vast questions about music, art and our relationship to recorded music. With the recent approaches to Mendelssohn’s great symphonies, scrutinized in our Wednesday edition, we wondered in particular about the concept of “beautiful” in sound perception and we wondered if sound ideals were now the subject of a generational gap .
Trivialize
The publication of box sets of Beethoven’s nine symphonies was once an event and, for conductors, either the crowning achievement of a career or a very specific stage in it. Consider Karajan’s three Deutsche Grammophon integrals. In 1963, it was a big meeting with stereo and the beginning of his musical imprint in Berlin. In 1977, it was the peak of his reign, with heightened virtuosity and a means of relaunching a then-mature LP market. In 1983-1984, Karajan wanted to occupy the emerging space of compact disc and digital technology.
Let’s stay with DG, because what the publication of a complete by Gábor Takács-Nagy tells us, a year after that of a house star, Yannick Nézet-Séguin with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, is that more nothing matters, everything is evanescent. The complete Nézet-Séguin itself came to DG, two and a half years after the new complete by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Andris Nelsons. And again… two and a half years because the Nézet-Séguin project was delayed by a year due to COVID! In less than four years, pandemic included, DG has therefore published three complete Beethoven works, including two (Nelsons and Gábor Takács-Nagy) to throw in the trash. Nothing is worth anymore, even the Beethovenian massif.
It was a bit Claudio Abbado who invented that, like many things in terms of unsellables, unsold items and the imbalance of the record market. In 2000, a complete Beethoven work (also DG) was published under his direction, which was to be that of the new millennium. It was so insignificant that he himself noticed it. Having recorded on video a complete concert in Rome in 2001, he had the 2000 box set banned from sale and produced a new complete using the soundtracks of the Roman videos of the Symphonies nbone 1 has 8however keeping the Ninth anterior.
The good moment
The publication of the complete Takács-Nagy is all the more inept as it treads on the aesthetic grounds of the complete Nézet-Séguin, both using a chamber orchestra. The comparison ends there. Everything that is held and “directed” with the Quebec chef and his elite ensemble is weak-willed in a dry and agitated ensemble in Verbier. Using an online listening platform, compare the finale of the 2e Symphonythe beginning of theHeroic or the finale of the 4e Symphony of this “orchestra” which has no “sound corpus” and whose collective enthusiasm takes the place of an aesthetic line.
The case of Zubin Mehta is almost tragic. He waited 86 years to assemble his first complete which documents not musical wisdom, but decadence. It’s not even bad; it’s embarassing. The whole thing was compiled in two autumns with the Florentine Musical May Orchestra and it is so soft, bland and shapeless (the Eighth,L’Heroic !) you can’t believe your ears. Two main questions arise. Why did the boss let this be published? And if he needed a complete Beethoven in his discography, when would it have been the right time?
Zubin Mehta engraved a 7e Symphony very respectable in Los Angeles, Symphonies nbone 3, 5 And 8 disasters in New York for CBS, a 9e in New York for RCA that everyone has forgotten. The window, if he wished to leave something in the matter, was probably either in Israel in the 2e half of the 1970s or 1980s with an orchestra that idolizes him, or in Munich in the early 2000s when he was at the Bavarian State Opera.
This question of “the right moment” is crucial in the great history of the record. It provides, for example for Beethoven, the full value of the integrals Böhm 1973, Karajan 1977, Wand 1989, Harnoncourt 1991, Barenboïm 2000, Vänskä 2009 or Nézet-Séguin 2022.
The wheel, which turns indefinitely, announces for 2024 new complete works by Gianandrea Noseda in a series published by the Washington Orchestra and, probably, Antonello Manacorda at Sony. Noseda will end its cycle in February 2024 with the 9e. Manacorda, with a very small orchestra, has already released the Symphonies nbone 1, 2, 5, 6 And 7.