beethoven in lake wobegone

This week we’re doing a program which includes Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony (along with Ives’ Unanswered Question, a percussion concerto by Christopher Rouse (with soloist Colin Currie), and Wagner’s Overture to Die Meistersinger).

It’s been a while since I’d listened to a recording of any of the Beethoven symphonies (the last time was after buying the awe-inspiring DVD set of Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic performing the cycle live), so I thought that I’d go to iTunes and download the Minnesota Orchestra‘s recording under the direction of their music director, Osmo Vänksä.

What grabbed me first were the sonics of the recording. In a word, stunning clarity (ok, two words). Ask for more words and you’d get depth and warmth in addition to the clarity. There seems to have been relatively little in the way of tinkering with the sound stage other than that the woodwinds seem to be artificially present on the aural stage. I don’t know the sonics of the hall or the stage at all, so that might just be something that they’ve accurately captured in the recording process. After the initial reaction to the acoustics, what is clear is that the Minnesota Orchestra has clearly risen to the top rank of US orchestras, and by extension, to the top rank of orchestras in the world. There is unanimity of phrasing that goes beyond mere “playing together” – it’s not just a matter of ensemble anymore. Tempos are fairly middle of the road, tending neither backward to the excesses of the middle of the last century (i.e. Klemperer, Karajan), nor adopting the aggressive, hyper-tempi of the historically-informed conductors (Zinman, Norrington) of this century. Flexibility, ease, and virtuosity go hand-in-hand in these accounts of the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, and I’m now eager to listen to the other volumes already released (thus far the Ninth, Third, and Eighth have been released). Vänskä has clearly inheirited a world-class orchestra and is transforming it into a front-rank world-class orchestra. Kudos to all of the fine musicians in the Minnesota Orchestra – represent!

On a side note, the orchestral formation is much as Beethoven might have used, with the first and second violins divided between left and right sides of the stage, and with the cellos on the left and violas on the right.