Review: Simon Rattle and London Symphony Orchestra

It’s a tough life being a Beethoven symphony, you know. Always being compared to your siblings, it gets dull pretty fast, especially when your closest in age happen to be the glitzy, A-lister fifth, the cool, languorous sixth and the boisterous, bullying, know-it-all ninth. Pity, then, the poor seventh, charming as it is, but sandwiched away between its precocious brothers and sisters. Middle child issues, eh?

Slightly labored metaphor aside, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony doesn’t enjoy the spotlight in the same way that his other mature works do. Composed between 1811 and 1812, with a then near-deaf Beethoven about to embark on the late period of his career which would see him challenge many of the fundamental principles which had governed music up until that point, it’s probably fair to say that most of the symphony lacks the forthright urgency and instantly recognizable motifs that make the fifth and ninth so very memorable, and it’s certainly true that it doesn’t have the same flowery bucolicism that makes the sixth “everyone who claims to know a little bit about Beethoven’s” favorite work (myself included). Indeed, before seeing the seventh performed at the Palau de la Música Catalana on January 21, I personally was pretty ignorant of it, with only the famously tumultuous second movement as a reference point.

However, if there were any conductor, and indeed any orchestra, who could be on hand to educate me, I could have done a hell of a lot worse than Simon Rattle and the London Symphony, who were in town to play the seventh alongside Beethoven’s oratorio, Christ on the Mount of Olives. An opportunity not to be missed, then, and one which, for this reviewer, represented a number of things coming together at once: first time seeing Rattle, check; first time at the Palau, check; first time hearing the seventh, check, check and check again.

Silence, poise: a work of this magnitude in a place this magnificent deserves as much. There’s a febrile tension of locked eyes, bows and lips as Rattle gets comfortable on his podium. Baton is aloft; breath is being held. It falls and all is shattered as those silver curls begin to bounce and bob on the opening movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

The piece opens with a regal welcome into the court of Count Moritz von Fritz, who commissioned the piece, where stately dancing rhythms on strings place the work in its time—just on the cusp of romanticism-proper, still clinging to those defined structures of the classical era that Beethoven would soon put to bed forever. Rattle takes us through the early section, with its jaunty, almost Italian leaning motifs, before the entropy begins, a slow degradation of themes that quickly draws it into colder, darker realms, foreboding the anguish to come.

The seventh is Beethoven’s large-scale string writing at its most profound, especially in the aching tones of the second movement, where it turns from majesty to a dark, pained thrum. It seems to speak to the composer’s own suffering at the time, when the creeping failure of his most precious appendages was gathering speed. When it comes to reading an artist’s life into their work, I prefer to fall on the Barthesian side of the argument (and am pretentious enough to do so!), but in the seething, cacophonous mass of sound that develops in the second movement you can almost hear the maddening onset of tinnitus enraging its composer.

Rattle conducts it as a funeral dirge slowly tolling, before bringing his players into a vicious rapture—all bows thrashing and whipping, a spectacle. This makes the sudden calmer turn, with honeyed melodies and easy falling wind lines, all the more welcome, even if the previous tension never quite escapes. The third and fourth movements continue this back and forth between delicacy and drama with some success, but following ten minutes of music as powerful as the second, it can’t help but end up feeling a little lacking, a point of bathos, almost, the ecstasy and agony never quite reached again.

Applause, ups, downs, ups, downs—the interval. We return to our seats for another hour of Beethoven: now, for a lesser known work, the oratorio, Christ on the Mount of Olives from 1803, with a libretto written by poet Franz Xaver Huber. The players have now been joined by the Orfeó Català, the Palau’s 100+ strong in-house choir and self-proclaimed bastions of the Catalan choral tradition.

It’s an interesting piece that depicts Christ in the garden of Gethsemane prior to crucifixion, a subject which demands all the drama of opera from its singers. Luckily, the soloists—tenor Pavol Bresik, soprano Elsa Dreisig and bass David Soar—have more than enough charisma to lift the oratorio (a form which can sometimes feel a little staid compared to its on-stage counterpart) to the level its subject and composer deserve.

Breslik’s heroic tenor is probably the most endearing of these, his Christ in torment frequently more engaging than the orchestral writing beneath it. The piece has echoes of the composer’s only operatic work, Fidelio, that he would write in 1814. Echoes, however, is all they remain. While the pulsating drama of Fidelio’s overture is mirrored at fleeting moments, it never quite reaches the same richness of texture and depth of sound, which would ultimately come to define German orchestral writing in the rest of the nineteenth century. And what’s more, while the vocal work of Breslik, Dreisig and Soar is stellar, that we hear it off the back of the elation of the seventh means it feels a little flat. 

Some redemption, however, comes as the oratorio ends, with a glorious hallelujah chorus from the Orfeó Català that is befitting of the great redeemer (with a quite lovely fugue hidden in there too). Lots more applause, lots more ups and downs, and there we have it. A compelling, thrilling education and a pleasure of an evening.

Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.