Not everyone buys into the idea of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a celestial experience. The conductor Gustav Leonhardt condemned the setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy for its vulgarity. And though Nicholas McGegan may not share Leonhardt’s view of the text as “puerile”, he nonetheless proves that Beethoven always has a place for vulgarity.
It’s most apparent in what McGegan terms the symphony’s “high-methane moment”; the curiously off-key entrance of the contrabassoon that follows the choir’s invocation of God with a note that might emanate from the back end of a cow. Both Wagner and Mahler dismissed the cow, believing it to be a mistake – McGegan milks it for all it is worth.
McGegan’s vision of the symphony is earthbound and a little blustery, but no less enjoyable for that. An avuncular figure with an expressive range of gesture, McGegan sometimes gives the impression that he could have been a popular television weatherman, were he not established as one of the world’s leading practitioners of period performance. The energy he bestowed was possibly ideal for this symphony, bringing a historically informed influence to the Royal Northern Sinfonia’s modern instruments (though as the difficulty of the writing suggests, surely Beethoven’s horn player had valves?).
There was drama, too: just when you were beginning to worry that the soloists had failed to turn up, baritone David Wilson-Johnson burst through the doors to deliver the bold interruption of Schiller’s opening line: “O friends, not these sounds!” The Royal Northern Sinfonia Chorus made an impressive impact for such a slender unit. And if the adagio showed some moments of transparency, owing to the shortage of violins, it was a masterstroke on McGegan’s part to pair the symphony with a selection from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Chamber orchestras rarely come within a country mile of Mahler, yet the textural delicacy of these early song-settings was perfect for an ensemble of the Royal Northern Sinfonia’s size.
