Beethoven: The Symphonies

“There’s no such thing as routine in music. Routine is the enemy,” conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin tells Apple Music about the attitude underlying his new recording of all of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Nézet-Séguin’s in-the-moment approach to Beethoven is, he says, particularly suited to the COE’s detailed, highly focused way of working. Plus, he argues, Beethoven is a composer who demands an absolute, bar-by-bar commitment to the physical act of making music. “As we go further and further from Beethoven’s time, we tend to forget that he was someone who really wanted to shock people,” says Nézet-Séguin. “He wanted to shake every convention. It’s disturbing music, it’s sometimes unbalanced, it’s rough.” The rawness and originality of Beethoven’s inspiration is strongly reflected in the way Nézet-Séguin and the COE play his music. The finale of the Fourth Symphony sizzles with restless energy, while the famous opening of the Fifth has a lean, no-nonsense immediacy. Recording the symphonies live in concert (at the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Germany, in July 2021) also helped give the extra edge Nézet-Séguin was looking for. In making this recording of Beethoven’s great cycle, Nézet-Séguin was acutely aware of conductors who have come before him—among them Herbert von Karajan, Carlo Maria Giulini and Leonard Bernstein—who put their own particular imprint on the music. But he has no doubt about who has influenced him most in Beethoven. “The set of the symphonies recorded in 1991 by Nikolaus Harnoncourt—also with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe—is, for me, the most important of the past 50 years,” he says. “It really opened people’s minds into how this music should be played.” And when Nézet-Séguin began conducting Beethoven with the COE two decades later, it was the players themselves who had the idea of revisiting what Harnoncourt had done and updating it for a new century. “Harnoncourt was a genius, and I liked very much the idea of paying tribute to that history and seeing how performance practice has evolved in the meantime.” One thing Nézet-Séguin specifically wanted to do in his new cycle was recalibrate the sound of Beethoven’s orchestra, achieving a more even balance between the string section and the other instruments. “What is very important and maybe overlooked still is how the woodwinds—flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons—are at the heart of these symphonies,” he explains. Beethoven’s skirling woodwind writing comes through particularly clearly in Nézet-Séguin’s storming account of the choral finale to the Ninth Symphony, where the singers of the vocal group Accentus also make a stirring contribution. “There’s a real immediacy about their singing, which is one of the things I look for when I make music,” he adds. When performing Beethoven’s symphonies in concert, Nézet-Séguin avoids programming them chronologically, preferring to pair up works that compare interestingly with one another. He recommends a similar approach to those listening to his new cycle. “The most important thing in Beethoven is clash and contrast,” he explains. “If I were to pick two symphonies to start with, it would be Nos. 2 and 3. No. 2 is still very classical, like someone who’s trying to wear all the right outfits, but underneath is ready to rip it off and show all the tattoos or something! And then the Third Symphony (the ‘Eroica’) is of gigantic proportions. It breaks the mould even from the first two chords.” The Sixth and Seventh symphonies also make for sharp comparisons, Nézet-Séguin explains. “The Sixth is really tender and shows a contemplative side of Beethoven that he explored much more in works other than symphonies. The Seventh starts where the Sixth has left it, but then catches fire and ends in something like a frenzy.” Whichever way Beethoven’s symphonies are sequenced, Nézet-Séguin believes that, overall, they paint a moving portrait of how a great composer’s work developed. “It’s not necessarily a journey from one to nine, but more a vision which is there even from the beginning of the First Symphony. And as interpreters in the 21st century, we need to get back to the true spirit of Beethoven’s music, which is this element of surprise, of shock, of discovery.”