I HAVE to say this: I was shocked at the level of polemical debate going on around me in Perth Concert Hall on Sunday, when Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra, on an intensive all-Beethoven weekend in Scotland that hit Aberdeen and Perth, played Beethoven's Seventh and Fifth Symphonies back to back in the Fair City.
I HAVE to say this: I was shocked at the level of polemical debate going on around me in Perth Concert Hall on Sunday, when Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra, on an intensive all-Beethoven weekend in Scotland that hit Aberdeen and Perth, played Beethoven's Seventh and Fifth Symphonies back to back in the Fair City.
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Michael Tumelty
Had it been in Glasgow, relatively a dialectical rough-house, I would have understood; but Perth I associate with more modest and restrained expression. Not on Sunday, where one listener in the good-sized and very involved audience described Salonen's version of the Seventh Symphony's first two movements as "driving with the hand-brake on", while another criticised his tempi throughout, and yet another, cruelly, set about describing how "the SCO would have done this better".
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