There are more than 10 months still to go, but if anyone comes up with a more inventive way of celebrating Beethoven’s 250th anniversary year than François-Xavier Roth and the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne, I shall be very surprised. Inspired by the historic 1808 benefit concert that included the premieres of the Fourth Piano Concerto and Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Roth and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard devised a programme mixing Beethoven’s music with 20th-century classics and specially commissioned works.
The two seamless strands, each an hour long, included solo piano as well as orchestral pieces – the first Beethoven to be heard was four of the Op 119 Bagatelles, emerging from the percussive haze of Isabel Mundry’s Resonances, which provided the connective tissue throughout the programme. The last bagatelle was still dying away when the orchestra launched into the only Beethoven work played complete, the Emperor Concerto, in a brisk and occasionally brusque reading by Aimard. The first half closed with Francesco Filidei’s Quasi una Bagatella, assembled out of material from the Emperor Concerto and generating grinding climaxes and a manic final presto.
Part of the Moonlight Sonata, first heard as an offstage recording and then taken over by Aimard, began the second half. It launched a sequence that took in Helmut Lachenmann’s Tableau, the first movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony, the allegretto from the Seventh, and then the finale of the last piano sonata Op 111, breaking off before its final ecstatic trills to lead into BA Zimmermann’s Photoptosis, which quotes Beethoven as well as Scriabin, Wagner, Bach and Tchaikovsky. Impressively well played, with visual choreography and lighting effects too, it was all weirdly compelling, though in a “what’s going to happen next?” way rather than a genuinely revelatory one.
