Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in c minor Op. 67. Symphony No. 7 in A major Op. 92. Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck. Reference Recordings FR-718 SACD. Total Time: 71.27.
Toronto is, without a doubt, one of the great classical music centres of the world in terms of the number and quality of the concerts presented here year in and year out. The Toronto Symphony is arguably the finest orchestra in Canada and among the top ten in the entire Northeast. But there are other fine orchestras in the our region, many of them doing excellent work: the Detroit Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Pittsburg Symphony are all major ensembles with first-rate conductors, all of them making recordings on a regular basis, and all of them within a shorter driving distance from Toronto than even Montreal.
Years ago, when I was a young music student growing up in Toronto, I used to commute regularly to hear the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and on each occasion I returned enlightened and newly invigorated. If you’re a Toronto classical music lover, you might want to consider making the effort to hear what is going on just around the corner, as it were, in Detroit, Cleveland or the other cities I have mentioned. I don’t think you would be disappointed.
Over the course of the next few months, I will review recordings by all these orchestras to whet your appetite. In the meantime, you might want to watch and listen to the Detroit Symphony (DSO) and its music director Leonard Slatkin in one of its live webcasts at www.dso.org. Nearly all the DSO concerts are available via streaming; that includes most of its current concerts, as well as past concerts, archived in “DSO Replay”. A four-week Brahms Festival is scheduled for this February with soloists Baiba Skride and Helene Grimaud.
This week, I would like to draw your attention to a new CD featuring Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburg Symphony. Honeck, who used to play violin with the Vienna Philharmonic, has recently emerged as a major conductor. The Pittsburg Symphony, which has an illustrious history playing under legendary figures such as Fritz Reiner, William Steinberg, Lorin Maazel, Andre Previn and Mariss Jansons, has already made some exceptionally good recordings of music by Richard Strauss, Dvořák, Janáček and Bruckner under Honeck’s direction.
In this new CD, Honeck injects freshness and excitement into very familiar Beethoven. The conductor himself has written several pages of detailed program notes explaining why he does what he does. I suspect that while most listeners will find his comments very helpful, some will be taken aback by his choice of tempo for the opening bars – much slower than the main body of the movement. He argues that this tempo is necessary “to capture the greatest possible drama with this famous first statement so as to depict the heroic character of the movement.” Elsewhere he adds accents to Beethoven’s original score “because one can read it in the musical language.” You get the idea. Honeck is not interested in a mere literal interpretation of the score; he wants to capture the spirit of what the composer intended.
Unlike some other recent Beethoven interpreters, Honeck also uses a fairly large orchestra. As justification, he cites a diary entry by the composer from 1813 and the first performance of the Seventh Symphony, which featured 69 string players plus winds, brass and timpani.
These are live performances and sound like it. One can imagine the players on the edge of their seats and Honeck totally focused on making great music. The Pittsburg Symphony is also fortunate in having “state-of-the-art” recording quality from the Soundmirror recording team.
Incidentally, Honeck was mentioned at one time as a possible successor to Alan Gilbert as music director of the New York Philharmonic, (NY Times, January 22, 2016), but the NY Philharmonic search committee announced this week that they had chosen Jaap van Zweden for the position.
Noah Bendix-Balgley, the concertmaster on this December 2014 recording, has moved on. Since September 2015, this outstanding young American violinist has been the first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck is available for purchase at amazon.com and iTunes.
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