Beethoven's Ninth: Uplifting masterpiece for Urbanski's return to ISO podium

 

Krzysztof Urbanski in action as music director

The key to the transcendent feeling that overtakes Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor in the fourth movement is the vigorous response of the lower strings to brief recollections of the first three. I've never heard such ferocity in that episode as that produced by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's cellos and basses Friday night at the urging of Krzysztof Urbanski in the former music director's return to Hilbert Circle Theatre.

During the tremendous ovation the performance received at the end from the capacity audience, the four vocal soloists and the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir received due and repeated recognition. But the conductor pointedly cued a collective solo bow from that string contingent. It called particular attention to an interpretive detail that was characteristic of the appropriate stress Urbanski elicited from time to time during the performance, the first of two this weekend.

The significance of this expressive fury shouldn't be overlooked.  Is Beethoven rejecting the message of the mixed tragedy, solace, and uplift of the preceding music? A better answer than the "no" anyone might consider is that the  lower strings' retort is intended to point the way to the crowning message of the work: Universal joy conferred by unearthly powers can be the promise of human life.

In today's context, this is not the joy promised by countless products of commercial culture. Nor is it a synonym for happiness, which is so subject to shifts in human disposition. When the bass soloist (Daniel Okulitch in these performances) puts a cap on the lower strings' complaint by recommending more pleasant and suitable tones to assuage the anxiety of the movement's opening discord, he is carrying forth the composer's vision (via the poet Friedrich Schiller) of an emotion underlying all creation.

Hard as it may be to believe in this vision, Beethoven demands that we consider it. Thus, I have a hard time accepting, despite some scholarly advocacy, the substitution of "Freiheit" (freedom) for "Freude," as Leonard Bernstein did in 1989, using the Ninth to celebrate the destruction of the Berlin Wall as the Iron Curtain collapsed. The substitution was understandable at the time, but the word "freedom" has been subjected to so much misuse in cultural politics since then that "joy" conveys a transcendent reality and an enduring value much better.

Similarly, the recent ballyhoo about Marin Alsop's editing changes to the work, which her Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is performing this very weekend, offends me less as a self-appointed gatekeeper of "purity" than because it fails to accept the greatness of the original within its limitations: the obvious focus on men, including the luck of those who find good women to help them celebrate; beyond that, the proclamation of universality in music that doesn't attempt to be universal beyond the clever "Turkish march" borrowings as the tenor solo (well projected by Dominic Armstrong) emerges. 

This only proves that musical masterpieces are both of their time and, by common agreement, for all  time. We need to come to terms with perpetual uneasiness about the  concept of immortality in products of mortal minds. Alsop's attempt  to inject 21st-century sensibility into music nearly 200 years old is questionable, and to suggest that Beethoven would approve is flimsy speculation. 

The work thrives because of what it really is, not what it implies. To show this off it's best to have the kind of program companion provided in these concerts: a new work commissioned by the choir and dedicated to Urbanski by the French  composer Guillaume Connesson. It's called "Heiterkeit" (Serenity), a dappled setting of texts by a Beethoven contemporary, Friedrich Hölderlin, with a  backstory amply described in Marianne Williams Tobias' program note. If only the audience could have been provided with texts to aid its understanding of the premiere!

In Baltimore, the idea of a new piece to set beside the Ninth also was followed— the work of the young Indian-American Reena Esmail. With the addition of a rapper and an African drum corps to the Beethoven Ninth, the concerts there this weekend come close to a new-music showcase. That aside, let's let worthy old music stay old without apology, and apply our 21st-century artistry toward having it speak to us in terms of our lives.

The excellence of the ISO's Friday concert was confirmed from the start of the Beethoven. That's when "there is only darkness over the face of the deep," in the words of English music scholar Basil Lam. The pacing and tone of these early moments were under superb control Friday night. Throughout the first movement, short wind phrases were made to sound essential in putting the strings' theme across.

With Jack Brennan's timpani leading the way, accents in the second-movement scherzo had an unabashed assertiveness to them, put in relief by the easy, well-supported flow of the contrasting Trio. The slow movement, leisurely and suggesting a heavenly abode that was to be displayed explicitly in the finale, was subtly impelled forward. 

Eric Stark directs the Indianapolis Symphonic Chorus.

The feeling of any collapse of tension was avoided; that wouldn't have been the kind of contrast Beethoven's design calls for. The second violins and the violas gave a fresh character to the movement's secondary theme. About the Adagio's vision of peace there's something slightly anxious, which emerges in a repeated trumpet fanfare near the end.

Without excessively anatomizing the finale, it should be noted that the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, trained by Eric Stark, gave its usual sturdy account of the choruses. Expression was forthright: "Do you apprehend the Creator, World?" they shouted. Balances were always assured, and the tone soared, even into the punishingly high reaches of the soprano part. 

The guest vocal soloists meshed well as a group. In addition to Armstrong and Okulitch, they were soprano Joelle Harvey and mezzo-soprano Renee Tatum. The quartet  made such a complementary force to the massed voices that they well deserved to overlay the choir's thrilling peroration. It's the singing that at length reverses the order of the Schiller line and upholds full-force the spiritual import of the work: transcendent joy is the beautiful spark of everything godly.