Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s Beethoven Cycle: Spinning New Tales, or Just Wheels?

Conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe have had a relatively intimate Beethoven symphonic cycle set out for awhile now and streaming at Spotify. How does it compare with the gold standard, Jordi Savall and Le Concert Des Nations’ revelatory recording of the first five symphonies?

This is like a missing puzzle piece. It literally fills in the gaps. Savall’s careening yet meticulously detailed (and often rowdy and hilarious) recordings of the core Third, Fourth and Fifth symphonies will have you literally hearing things in otherwise familiar old scores that you have never heard before. The rudimentary, boisterous percussion section in the Fifth is worth the price of the whole collection.

But where Savall goes for rustic – and sometimes the jugular – Nezet-Seguin excels especially with the later symphonies. Reducing them to more manageable proportions pays whopping dividends in terms of clarity and punch. Granted, listeners who think they’re getting any realistic approximation of what Beethoven’s audiences experienced are missing the point because those few who enjoyed that privilege did so as part of a concert audience, not on their own time with earbuds in. But as orchestral sprawl has grown over the last two centuries, details get subsumed in the ether and this cycle is a welcome antidote,

You might think that Beethoven Three, Four and Five would be Nezet-Seguin’s most central focus here, but strangely that isn’t the case. The temporal liberties he takes with Five are a head-scratcher: you simply don’t mess with the most iconic classical riff of alltime. Three and Four are perfectly enjoyable and have plenty of detail to recommend them, but none with the fire that Savall brings.

Instead, it’s Six through Nine where Nezet-Seguin and the orchestra provide a most welcome antidote to the contention that Beethoven was on autopilot by the time he wrote these, and that they’re mere plush entertainment for the era’s mercantile and financier classes. In the Sixth, Nezet-Seguin’s clarity and balance emphasizes a robust foundation of strings, keeping the high winds from floating away on a bubble. The carefree and unhurried courtly dance of a second movement gets a little airy angst to keep the focus sharp. The big shivery rainstorm toward the end of the third is a sudden and rewardingly jarring interlude in contrast to the warm sunset scenery on the way out.

A seriousness comes out in the striding opening movement in Seven, conspicuously absent from most other recordings of the symphony. To Nezet-Seguin’s infinite credit, he sticks with intensity that throughout a wary but insistent second movement. Conversationality typically comes into clearer focus in smaller-scale recordings like this, notably in the fourth movement, which echoes the vigor of the Savall recordings most strongly.

The version of the Eighth Symphony here harks back to the first two, emphasis on frequent individual voices popping up amid the comfortable, Haydnesque nocturnal lustre, with punchy winds in the second movement and momentary stormy shivers in the third as entertaining diversions.

The premise of a chamber orchestra version of Beethoven Nine may be a bit of a stretch: it’s hard to imagine the composer objecting to any attempt to further enrich the layers of this sonic mille-feuille. But Nezet-Seguin and the orchestra validate their choice with a particularly lithe, dynamically understated first movement, richly bracing baroque cadences in the second and vividly fond lyrical balladry in the third before the fireworks kick in.

Obviously, in nine symphonies worth of material from an acclaimed conductor and chamber orchestra, there are other levels of detail too innumerable to fit into a single digestible review. All this is meant to point you in the direction of the most noteworthy pieces of the puzzle, but there are so many more, and most of them are worth seeking out.

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An Iconic, Haunting Schubert Song Cycle Reinvented For Our Time

Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin‘s new live recording of Schubert’s Winterreise – streaming at Spotify – is heartbreaking on more levels than usual. DiDonato isn’t phased by singing a male role: she’s done that before. Unquestionably, she brings new levels of depth and angst to Wilhelm Muller’s interminable, metaphorically loaded journey through a winter wasteland. Maybe listening to this from a male perspective actually doesn’t give her enough credit, considering how troubling it is simply to hear a woman channel so much emotional devastation. In her liner notes, DiDonato relates how she’s been intrigued by how little we know about the nameless love interest whose ex was sent off stumbling into the snow. In this interpretation, the breakup was just as hard on her.

Nézet-Séguin’s clear-eyed, meticulous focus is a welcome backdrop and guide for everyone involved. He lets what might well be the most famous classical song cycle ever written tell itself, carving out a path of subtly blinding lucidity. The elephant in the room here is that this is a concert recording, from Carnegie Hall in December 2019. Just over four months later, the venue was shuttered and remains cold and dead. That context is as heartbreaking as the story itself. How much longer are New Yorkers going to tolerate Cuomo and the lockdowners’ relentless campaign of terror?

With that in mind, the suite is an even more potent metaphor – it’s hardly a stretch to read Muller’s tale of lost love as a parable of freedom lost to forces of evil, followed by an escape attempt whose end remains in doubt. Take The Signpost, a muted, troubled, spare interlude about eighty percent of the way in: is this simply an embattled individualist’s lament, or a subtle revolutionary cry? This duo leave that possibility wide open.

DiDonato’s downward cascades in the sarcastically titled overture pack quite a wallop as Nézet-Séguin maintains a very light-footed stroll, eschewing any temptation to go for either grand guignol or florid operatics. It’s a portent for the rest of the record.

There’s an almost furtive scramble to the fourth segment, Numbness, the anguish of DiDonato’s narrator wanting to melt the ice with her tears and rekindle the affair. Happy memories under the linden tree seem more ghostly here, at a distance: sleep in heavenly peace, ouch!

Rivers rise with DiDonato’s voice as Nézet-Ségui serves as anchor, both musically and emotionally. Rest proves tantalizingly elusive, a spring thaw vastly more so, in a rare crushing crescendo. Increasingly somber intimations of mortality are much more vastly spacious and funereal. The scene where the traveler ends up sleeping in the graveyard because the inn is full seems only logical, and Nézet-Séguin really makes those cruelly conclusive chords sink in. And the hushed coda, out on the ice with the homeless, drunken hurdy-gurdy player, makes for sheer horror. These two really go to the core of this music. Newcomers to the Winterreise who discover it through this recording are especially lucky.