Adelaide Review on Beethoven 4

Beethoven wrote his last will and testament after he realized that his growing deafness was going to be profound and irreversible. More than two centuries later, Australian Brett Dean's Testament aimed to convey in music both deafness itself and the great composer's distress at his loss.

Richard Tognetti conducted, with both hands, from out front, the large ACO, with cellos, basses, timpani and trumpets divided from the rest. Two bows to all the strings were required; one, without resin, for the slithery sounds that had lost their grip on the real world, the other conventionally treated to control the vibrations. Through this inspired device, along with the inclusion of some fragments of Beethoven’s own music, Dean’s ambitious task cleared the boundary between impossible and possible. For 14 minutes, without letup, without relief, he took us inside the tragic, but ultimately triumphant, world of a head full of music that its creator would never hear played in real time by himself or other people. Towards the end, Testament escalated into organized chaos, finishing with an unmistakable rising, piercing shriek of anguish.

Then it was the turn of the genuine article.

Dejan Lazic, soloist in the second greatest piano concerto ever, Beethoven’s no 4 in G major, stated those magical opening chords in the sweetest, most tender pianissimo imaginable. What followed almost erased that memory. The extremes of his dynamics, delivered by widely splayed fingers and punctuated by flamboyant gestures approaching and departing the keyboard, liberties with tempo way beyond the subtleties of rubato – with the ACO’s complicity – were crowned by his own planned improvisation cadenza. Beethoven’s ideas were re-cast in Lazic’s terms – forceful, occasionally near-brutal. Having got that out of the way, and perhaps out of his system, he showed his more restrained side in the gentle Andante, and entered into positively jocular dialogue with the orchestra for the final Rondo.

Directing from the leader’s position in the fourth symphony, Tognetti kept his promise of fidelity to Beethoven’s metronome markings and if the tempi were too fast or too slow for you too bad. They were just right for me. The ACO were at their disciplined best – smart attacks, dynamics that allowed the score to speak for itself, pin point syncopation, even at a cracking pace. At the core were the six winds led by the mellow voice of Catherine McCorkill’s clarinet and flanked by equally expressive pairs of horns and trumpets.

Elizabeth Silsbury | Adelaide Review | 19 Nov 2009