David Zinman’s Beethoven Cycle with the Tonhalle Orchester Zurich

I was thinking about the Morton Feldman interview with Peter Gena where Feldman said that Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony should be played at least once every three years or so. I rarely have a burning desire to listen to Beethoven these days, but when I do, I usually find the experience exhilarating and not at all academic. I don’t know what accounts for this, but at least some of it comes from the exuberance with which musicians play his work. (Ralph Shapey said that Beethoven's music has an indestructible architectural structure that is impervious to bad performance. I agree.)

Anyway, when my friend and colleague William Kempster recommended a new recording of all nine Beethoven symphonies conducted by David Zinman and performed by the Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, I had mixed feelings. I already own three performances of these pieces conducted by Furtwängler, Hogwood, and Gardiner. I hadn’t listened to them recently, but in my mind’s ear I remembered the feeling of peculiar excitement I experienced when I heard the Prestissimo from 9:IV under Hogwood; I thought, This must be what it must have been like to be in the audience at the premiere. I also remembered Zinman’s performances of these symphonies during his tenure at the Baltimore Symphony. The orchestra couldn’t quite handle the original tempos that Zinman insisted on using; and the whole enterprise didn’t make sense anyway, because I think he left out some of Beethoven's original repeats. And on top of all that was my usual disinclination to listen to Beethoven. Did I really need to have another cycle of Beethoven symphonies, even though Bill insisted that the performances were the best he’d ever heard?

Sometime after I scaled back my writing for American Record Guide, I decided that I had the time and the inclination to revisit some of the great Western classical works that I never had a chance to listen to because I was reviewing what seemed like the 800th recording of the Goldberg Variations. And I remembered Bill’s recommendation. The price was right: I think the set costs only $30 or so. So I bought it and began listening with no. 1, continuing in order until I finished listening to the Ninth yesterday.

I have to agree with Bill that these are amazing performances. The musicians play from the critical performing editions of the works prepared by Jonathan Del Mar and published by Bärenreiter. Zinman takes Beethoven's metronome markings for the tempos, but this time the orchestra plays beautifully; all the original repeats seem to be there. The phrasing follows eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century principles of performance practice: short, articulated phrases—no “long line”; and sometimes the musicians embellish their melodic lines just a bit, a practice some think was quite common at the time. The instruments sound modern except for the percussion: the timpani have a crisper sound that suggests the use of calfskin heads and harder mallets; the metal percussion instruments have an interesting timbre that’s hard to explain but that sounds unlike modern examples. And the Del Mar edition differs from the classic Breitkopf in a number of cases (most audibly in slurs and other expressive markings).

No, it’s not perfect. Sometimes the trills sound absurdly metronomic (introduction to Symphony no. 2); some added embellishments distract more than they delight (oboe cadenza in Symphony no. 5:I); and some of the phrasing will strike more than a few listeners as overly articulated. (I have to say I like playing Beethoven’s music with this kind of space between the phrases myself, even though I wonder if I’m wrong to do so because I know Beethoven criticized Mozart’s playing as too choppy.) Even so, for anyone who has thought that the period instrument movement was no more than an interesting side enterprise that could never seriously affect the modern orchestra, this recording will be a revelation.