Underrated Classical Musicians 2/20/20

I went to a highly mediocre concert at Carnegie Hall last night and came away disappointed enough to wish I hadn't made the trip. It was the beginning of a Beethoven Symphony cycle performed by some of the world's most famous Beethoven performers, L'Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. 

Twenty five years ago, these musicians turned the music world upside down by showing that you could play Beethoven's symphonies at Beethoven's absurdly fast proscribed tempos with no loss in the quality of the playing. Hearing them do these works in person should be a once-in-a-lifetime event, and perhaps in the next few days it will prove to be one. 

But I should have known better than to go last night: classical musicians performing cycles is always a foolhardy idea. If musicians have to prepare five or more concerts to play over the course of a week, some music will inevitably get short shrift. In a Beethoven cycle, the music that gets the shortest shrift is the worst music. In this case, works like the ballet music from the Creatures of Prometheus, Ah, Perfido! and the First Symphony. Even if you prepare it within an inch of its life, the audience won't feel the curvature of the earth change the way they will in a great performance of the Eroica (tonight) or the Fifth (tomorrow). 

Beethoven's First is a perfectly decent piece of music, sometimes even inspired (listen to Paavo Jarvi's video recording to hear it at its best), but it is not worthy of a 'giant.' If the first symphony had not been written by Beethoven, we'd be playing it roughly as often as one of the best symphonies by Hummel or Mehul. Meanwhile, it ought to go without saying, instead of lesser music by Beethoven, there's so much music more worthy of performance than lesser Beethoven that gets far far less performances than a marginal piece like Beethoven's First. 

Let's start with the 'Historische' Symphonie by Louis Spohr. I am agog at both its quality and its ambition. It's a musical tour through the styles of various generations: taking us from 1720 in the first movement, with counterpoint and pomp in the style of Bach and Handel, to 1780 in the second movement, which gives us slow music in the style of Mozart and Haydn, to 1810 in the third, a scherzo in the style of Beethoven, to 1840, which is an obviously ironic and partially disapproving parody of Wagner's Rienzi. 

In his time, Spohr was probably most renowned as a violinist, and in addition to writing literally eighteen violin concertos and three dozen string quartets, he wrote a still widely read manual on violin technique and, believe it or not, invented the chinrest (if you think 'violin hickies' are bad now....).

Spohr is not Beethoven, nobody but Beethoven is, but if you listen to his music, you will be aghast at how good this is and mystified that a work like this fell out of the repertoire so long ago.