Over the next three years, Thomas Adès is conducting all of the Beethoven symphonies with the Britten Sinfonia. It’s planned as a chronological cycle, but that’s the only conventional aspect of the project, for each of the concerts also includes a work by Gerald Barry, whose music Adès has regularly championed.
Starting as they intended to go on, the Sinfonia launched the series with Barry’s work called Beethoven, his 2008 setting for bass and 15-strong ensemble of the famous Immortal Beloved letter, the declaration of love that Beethoven wrote in 1812, but never sent, to a woman whose identity remains unknown. Typically, Barry sets every word of an English translation of the text. Mark Stone was the soloist, veering between speech, falsetto and gravelly rumination, while the ensemble followed an independent path. This at times took it into Stravinskyan motor rhythms, sometimes dissonant punctuation and, in the final section, into a slow, chorale-like version of the melody of O Come All Ye Faithful, to underpin Beethoven’s affirmation of his undying fidelity.
In a different way, the first two Beethoven symphonies that followed seemed strikingly original, too. With an orchestra of more than 40 players, unprecedented for the Britten Sinfonia, Adès’s performances were emphatically modern ones. The use of hard sticks for the timpani seem to be the only concession to period niceties, but tempi were brisk, and vibrato was never overdone, so that the textures always remained wonderfully detailed and teemed with rhythmic life. Every bar of each symphony seemed thrillingly restored, honed down to their muscular core.
- Repeated at the Barbican, London, on 2 June. Box office: 020-7638 8891. Then available on BBC iPlayer until 2 July.
