The notebook is closed and there is little to do but rave.
I don't think I've ever heard Beethoven's Emperor Concerto and Eroica Symphony back to back in one programme.
In a way it's audacious: not everyone likes Beethoven. Indeed, Andrew Manze, conducting the SCO, and pianist Llyr Williams, in the epic event on Friday night, cited the famous story where one bamboozled listener in Beethoven's time was said to have shouted that he was prepared to pay Beethoven just to stop. if anyone in the City Halls felt the same, said Manze with a grin: "Don't shout abuse, just leave."
Not a chance. I have rarely sensed an audience so comprehensively pinned to their seats. It was a very big audience. And what a tour de force of performance we witnessed.
Williams, a ruthlessly self-critical pianist, produced one of the finest performances he has ever given, with mind, heart, soul, fingers, wrists and shoulders in seamless unanimity of purpose, projecting all the grandeur of the Emperor with a magnetic account of the slow movement that was characterised by its clarity of definition rather than its dreaminess.
Then Manze and the SCO, totally locked together, and with the band playing like the virtuoso outfit it is, tore through a revelatory account of the Eroica that, without overcooking the music, underlined, in its big structure and its every pristine detail, just what an unprecedented and revolutionary work the Eroica is, even to this day.
For the record, the colossal, long-range performance of the slow movement, assembling like a huge edifice in sound, was a masterpiece of music-making.
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