Fire stolen from the gods: you could hear it crackling and scorching its way across London in what was a quite exceptional week for Beethoven. John Eliot Gardiner lit the touchpaper when he raised his baton for Beethoven’s overture to The Creatures of Prometheus - and the London Symphony Orchestra never looked back.
In restraining the orchestra as much as he urged it on, Gardiner brought awe and wonder to this short curtain-raiser to Beethoven’s ballet about the great fire-stealer who taught men both art and passion. And passion and purpose strode forth from his Eroica Symphony. No symphony had ever matched it in power and proportion - and Gardiner insisted that, even today, we should feel the shock of the new.
The first movement was played as fast as they dared - which, in the case of the LSO, is very fast indeed. Every note struck a spark, yet always line and phrase surged forward. The woodwind tossed ideas high into the air, and caught them again so artfully that we could feel the patterning as much as the passion.
After the titanic struggle, the tragedy. Gardiner’s funeral march was at first almost too slick and effortless in its tread. But, as he worked the inner parts of its double fugue harder and harder, the sorrow and the anger raged forth, only to be dissipated by the rapid wingbeats of the scherzo. And then, in the finale, Prometheus again: in the oboe’s variation, the regenerating skill of the creator-artist danced forward.
Advertisement
Maria João Pires was the soloist in an outstandingly sentient performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No4. Both mercurial and mighty in its outer movements, it had a still small voice at its heart.
And it sealed a week which had begun with Daniel Barenboim’s magnificent performances of Beethoven’s Les Adieux and Tempest Sonatas in the Festival Hall: part of an ongoing series in which he is playing these works with an extraordinary depth of focus, and with the insights of a lifetime. Cancel everything for a ticket tonight, Friday and Sunday.