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NO wonder they proclaimed Beethoven mad in 1813, at the premiere of his Seventh Symphony. They did the same to Stravinsky a century later at the premiere of The Rite Of Spring.
In its time, Beethoven Seven must have seemed outrageously aggressive, assaulting its listeners with its brazen, repetitive, juddering rhythms, its relentless drive, and its wholly uncompromising character. Not for nothing did Wagner describe it as the apotheosis of the dance. Something of that character fed into the electric, gripping performance of the symphony by the SCO on Friday night, blazingly conducted by Emmanuel Krivine on his first visit to the SCO in eight years. It touched every movement of the symphony: each moved along. Even the slow movement, one of Beethoven's trickiest to gauge (which can seem to drag on interminably) had a real sense of momentum – and, in plain English, it didn't seem to last as long as usual.
The high-voltage performance of the symphony was preceded by an extraordinary account of Schumann's Piano Concerto with Argentine soloist Nelson Goerner, incredibly, making his SCO debut in a wonderfully accomplished, mercurial and poetic account of a concerto that, stylistically and technically, eludes many pianists, notably in its finale. Goerner, with poetic and technical mastery, in tandem with Krivine and the SCO at their best, produced an electrifyingly immediate account of the concerto, one which included in the intimacy of its slow movement, before that great cello theme sweeps all else aside, a gloriously conversational aspect to the opening theme. It actually did sound as though orchestra and pianist were having a discreet conversation, one which drew the listener into its sphere.
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