The renowned Deutsche Grammophon label will release, on Friday July 15, a new complete Nine Symphonies by Beethoven. The successor to Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm, Leonard Bernstein and Claudio Abbado in this area within this catalog is none other than Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The Quebec conductor conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Europe there. The duty listened, savoured, then discussed with the chef.
When the cover photograph of the future box set of Nine Symphonies by Beethoven at DG with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the European Chamber Orchestra began to circulate in the spring, the traditional “encore? and “what’s the use?” were quick to emerge on social media.
The listener, who today, listening to the Symphoniesof the First to the Ninthfollows the musical journey of the conductor and these musicians who, thirty years ago, marked the Beethoven discography in the complete collection directed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, will he really still have the audacity to ask these questions?
The individual
The aesthetic relevance, the coherence and the singularity of this new integral appear very quickly. Yannick Nézet-Séguin and a team of musicians offer a coherent, tonic, chamber music, close-knit sum, in which individualities stand out clearly within a reduced collective. This affirmation of individual genius within society is entirely in the spirit of Beethoven and, orchestrally, we are close to the French model, with enhanced winds.
“If I had to describe the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE) in one sentence, the idea of individuality in the collective, that’s what I would say,” says Yannick Nézet-Séguin. That’s what makes them unique in the musical landscape and why I love making music with them. You have to know how to take advantage of this quality. These musicians, who meet a few times a year, also play Beethoven with their respective orchestras. My role is to awaken this flame in them. The conductor wants the instrumentalists not to try to rediscover their habits, for example in the balance between the woodwinds and the strings.
“Who does what and how is the hierarchy organized in symphonies that have relied for so many years on the supremacy of strings? asks the chef, who remembers his first 9e of Beethoven in Philadelphia in 2012: “I said to myself: we will have to find common ground”. He was aware of the path, but declares himself very satisfied with the recent integral in concert with his American orchestra in Philadelphia and New York.
Balance, in Beethoven, for Yannick Nézet-Séguin, “it’s not just a question of numbers, it’s really about listening. In Beethoven, what interests me is not just the melody, it’s everything that happens in the middle, the details of the 2e movement of Pastoral. We have gone far in the characterization of the accompanying figures. »
Yannick Nézet-Séguin underlines the physical challenge of the recording, over two weeks: “The part of the second violins being much more demanding than that of the first violins, in half of the symphonies the first play the part of the seconds. » Collateral advantage: taking the musicians out of their comfort zone. As for the presence of natural trumpets, it changes the color and it is a tribute to Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who had made this choice.
New text
For more contact with the musical action, DG opted for a compact and dense sound, which is not diluted in any way by a fake reverberation: “It’s a big subject of work before, during and after, which extends over several years. The Baden-Baden hall has a very neutral sound. That’s a quality. My idea was to get the stamps in the most authentic way possible and I wanted an impression of proximity. It’s a huge job, especially in post-production, to get the best out of each timbre. I’m not very control freak as a conductor, but when it comes to recordings I like to be part of the process. »
Deutsche Grammophon sought to give further added value and legitimacy to the company. The complete Nézet-Séguin is the first made from the new edition of the scores published by Breitkopf. It is, to be precise, the “Neue Gesamtausgabe” (new complete edition) of the works of Beethoven, a musicological publication (known as ” Urtetxt ”) of scores by Éditions G. Henle. Breitkopf & Härtel is the publisher of the orchestral material and the conducting score.
The publisher of the discs hopes that this premiere will lead to an effect of curiosity. That said, we have already largely toured the universe of Beethoven. For Henle and Breitkopf, it is above all a question of “regaining control” over their competitor Bärenreiter, who has monopolized the market for twenty years with a critical edition, known as the “Del Mar edition”, named after the musicologist in charge of the project.
The great revolution of the Del Mar edition had been to impose to play the 2e movement of Pastoral with mutes. There was also a lot of work on the notation of the accentuation of notes, Beethoven using sometimes strokes sometimes dots.
The question of the scores poses a problem for the critic since, in the absence of having them – some are not yet available and Breitkopf only agrees to provide the commentator with the preface and the critical commentary of the Ninth and a symphony of his choice! — it is almost impossible to know if such originality that we hear is an intuition of the conductor or a change induced by the newly used score.
In summary, the modifications of the musical text mainly affect the articulations. The two most noticeable modifications are an octave doubling by the trumpets of certain punctuations in the finale of the 7e Symphony (it makes pouet pouet and it’s strange) and the addition of a contrabassoon in the end of the 9e. As for Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s particular ideas, the most striking is the conquering runaway 3 minutes 49 seconds from the final of theHeroic.
Beyond musicology
The question of the use of a new score, however, poses a question of interpretative philosophy. When the Bärenreiter edition came out, the first complete, that of David Zinman, was like a sound calling card of this edition. Doesn’t the conductor lose his freedom of expression by getting involved in such a project? “It was the trap I tried not to fall into,” admits Yannick Nézet-Séguin. “The idea of the complete with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe dates from about 10 years ago, so long before the existence of new scores and what I have to say in these symphonies with this ensemble goes beyond editing. We have respected the few differences and have argued for them, but these are details, changes in articulation in particular. Yannick Nézet-Séguin considers that the new text “simplifies certain questions”: “There are certain times when Del Mar, by dint of putting chevrons everywhere and parentheses, loses us. This Breitkopf edition simplifies the solutions by being less obsessed with giving us all the leads. »
Beyond musicology, Yannick Nézet-Séguin opts above all for pragmatic solutions. For him, the marching tempo of the tenor solo in the Ninth is dictated “by what is after”: “The fugue is of incredible quality, Beethoven flies away with his despair. So we find the right fugue tempo and we step back. The tempo of the march stems from this. »
On the whole, the complete COE/Nézet-Séguin is a very relevant sum which, 30 years after Harnoncourt, repositions the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the field of eminent contributors to the Beethovenian cause and erases, at DG, the industrial catastrophe of 2019’s Nelsons-Vienna complete, which came after a disastrous Abbado-Berlin studio complete (1999), so insignificant that the conductor had it removed and replaced with the soundtracks of concerts given in Rome in 2001 .
In the Nézet-Séguin aesthetic, the only direct competitor is Paavo Järvi’s integral with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie at RCA.