When Facebook Becomes Blogging

So Petrenko's Beethoven 9 is on the BBC now for free for almost another two weeks. You'll probably have to listen on headphones in order to get any real impact, but I think this is a truly masterful performance. Is it as great as the very greatest yet? Probably not, but if Petrenko and the orchestra don't kill each other in a few years, there's no reason to expect less than something near the pantheon's highest heights. There aren't too many Beethoven conductors around now who strike me as true Beethovenians - either of the fast or slow variety. Blomstedt of course, maybe Honeck, and another couple who curtail some of the story. Petrenko is certainly quicker than average, but in no danger of meeting the metronome markings, and he never shortchanges either the rhythm and dynamism or the lyricism and gemütlichkeit. Think of Harnoncourt, or Leibowitz, or Munch, but ultimately this is a 9th unlike any other. The dynamic contrasts are absolutely enormous, and the phrasing so unbelievably well-contoured. It is highly in keeping with the performance-rubric of Beethoven's own period, Petrenko never imposes late romanticism, except for an occasional rubato to make the harmony breathe, it is all within classical form, which makes the romanticism feel all the more explosive. And this is, perhaps, the greatest, most luminous, most ecstatic Adagio I've ever heard in my life - all the more so because it's precisely the opposite of Furtwangler's attempts to capture infinity by taking an infinity of time. 

I'm a huge Rattle fan, but Rattle's great strength was the 20th century. He has interesting ideas about the old classics, but he never seemed to internalize them to the point that he could make them take flight too often in the way he does more modern repertoire. Petrenko, here as nearly everything we non-Germans can hear of him so far, is much less personalized, and yet within that lack of idiosyncrasy is an ability to subordinate his personality to the exact shape of the music. Petrenko can convince you you're hearing the 'thing in itself.' A lot of people call him the best of his generation. That's a bold claim, because the generation born in the 70s could quite possibly become the most spectacular generation of maestri since any born before 1900, and we've got a while to go with them. There's no questioning Petrenko's mastery, but his way of making music takes such enormous effort and discipline that it's almost exhausting to listen to, let alone conceive how much he must prepare to make it, I think I prefer the far more naturally spontaneous musicality of someone like Francois-Xavier Roth. But even so, this is such incredibly ideal music-making, the kind of Platonic music-making of the spheres that is everything we could only conceive of being this good in our imaginations. Some of us might prefer musicians who point up elements in the music beyond what we could imagine, but this is everything music-lovers hoped Carlos Kleiber would be, and now he's the director of the Berlin Philharmonic.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000cz33