Boston Symphony Orchestra
Lorin Maazel, conductor
Symphony Hall, Boston
November 6, 2009

Here’s what Beethoven’s Ninth felt like on Friday, with Lorin Maazel conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Imagine that you gave someone a fancy sports car, and they drove it around for a while without realizing that it had more than one gear, and then made up for it by repeatedly climbing up and down all six gears—reverse and neutral included—for twenty minutes. Yes, Maazel the Idiosyncratic was in the house for the final concerts of the BSO’s Beethoven symphony cycle, but curiously, much of the idiosyncrasy seemed devoted to dressing up Beethoven as respectable and phlegmatic—at least until the final sprint.

The program—the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies—was already, in its coincidence of chronology, idiosyncratic enough: has any other composer gone as far from one extreme to another in successive genre outlets? The Eighth is a nostalgia exercise to do Sha Na Na proud, one of the most self-consciously old-school-Classical, Haydnesque things Beethoven ever wrote. Fielding one of the smallest bands we’ve seen in the cycle, Maazel proceeded to Pledge everything to a gloss, cultivating an offhanded aristocratic dapperness. A bit of louche rubato in the opening movement’s second subject was the most prominent foible, as studiedly stylish as a dandy’s pocket square. The scherzo was all proto-Prokofiev, music-box clockwork, the throwback minuet can’t-be-bothered casual in its steps.

The thing was, it was all a bit sleepy, a drowsy afternoon at the club. One quirk from Maazel’s first outing—things not quite getting back up to speed after an expressive stretch—was far more in evidence, the group seemingly all too happy to settle into a more leisurely pace. It wasn’t eccentrically slow—Maazel saved that for the Ninth—but comfortably sedate throughout.

The opening movements of the Ninth showed the same pattern: starting off at speeds within the standard deviation but then gradually getting more deliberate, whether out of emphasis or indolence, one couldn’t quite tell. But Maazel’s conception of the music was already on the unhurried side—the “un poco maestoso” of the first movement seemed to take over, and the internally-alternating tempi of the middle movements displayed definite slowing trends. On the one hand, as in Frühbeck’s cycle opener, the temporal cat-stretch brought out a wealth of detail that more stormy Beethoven interpretation often runs roughshod over; on the other hand, well, Beethoven’s personality is pretty roughshod to begin with, so maybe that detail remains under the hood for a reason. In this case, too, I wondered how much the BSO’s familiarity with the Ninth (it’s the BSO Tanglewood finale every summer) might make the group less flexible, like trying to steer a train off its tracks.

The opening fanfare of the final movement was probably the slowest I’ve encountered; inconveniently for Romantic theories of the superiority of instrumental music, it was the entrance of the voices that finally got this one going. Bass-baritone Eike Wilm Schulte was so forcefully avuncular—Biedermeier charm blown up to Wagnerian scale—that he fairly shook the music out of its torpor, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus followed suit, pretty much singing their opening verse as loud as they could—and they can sing pretty loud. The rest of the soloists were a finely-drafted group—tenor Matthew Polenzani jumped through Beethoven’s melismatic hoops with risky exuberance, and contralto Meredith Arwady showed some impressive vocal ironwork. Only soprano Christine Brewer seemed a little out of her element, trying too hard to to finesse Beethoven’s admittedly brutally high lines.

With Schiller’s poem underway, Maazel finally unleashed the full force of his interpretive unconventionality, speeding up, slowing down, sudden passing-jet shifts of volume, each sonic fastball preceded by an ever-more-flamboyant windup—and a fermata on the chorus’s “vor Gott” held out so long that I went from thinking it was brilliantly goofy to thinking it was ridiculous then back to thinking it was brilliant again. Part of the problem with the Ninth is that it’s become such an ironclad masterpiece that it’s easy for both performers and listeners to forget how crazy the piece really is, how off the beaten path of musical and aesthetic history it was when Beethoven wrote it. So when I say that this was one of the strangest versions of Beethoven’s Ninth I’ve ever heard, that’s at least partially complimentary. Did it work? Not really. But if you’ve ever wondered what it must have been like to be in the Kärntnerthortheater in Vienna in 1824, hearing the premiere, trying to figure out just what the hell this thing was, and, like more than a few, considering the possibility that its celebrity composer had actually lost his mind, then this was a performance for you.

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