Great music festival was celebrated today 22 June 2019 at the Teatro S. Carlo in Naples with the "Beethoven Marathon", a curious initiative that saw the performance of all nine symphonies in one day, distributed in four shifts by 11 to 21.
The orchestras involved were that of Theater San Carlo andRAI National Symphony Orchestra. On the podium Juraj Valčuha, a young Slovak conductor with extensive experience with various prestigious international orchestras. Since 2016 it is also Musical director of the S. Carlo Theater.
Personally I only participated in the first round of 11 with the Symphony n. 1 and n. 7. First of all, I would have expected a chronological order of execution, but evidently it was thought so for organizational reasons. However, from my side box (very close to the stage) I was able to listen carefully to both the performance and admire the orchestral team. It is true that music of this kind could be heard with closed eyes, but it always intrigues me to see orchestral players especially in their gestures and expressions.
I must say that the orchestra was fully staffed, just a couple of empty lecterns. In short, details. With a theater full but not packed, the concert started with the Symphony n. 1, the first major work of a young Beethoven not yet thirty, originally performed for the first time in 1800 in Vienna. Being a young work (but not so much from an aesthetic point of view) this symphony is inspired by the classic models of Haydn e Mozart from which Beethoven respectfully he mutates the form quite canonically, but concedes those snags to the rule that make it original. Like the three seventh chords in the slow introduction of the first movement. Never before had a symphony been seen, at the time of its first performance, that opens, against all academic rules, brazenly on a dissonant chord that almost finds it hard to implant itself in the implant key of the magical initial violin theme.
From an executive point of view, I noticed a bit of executive shyness in the strings. I am referring above all toallegro con brio of the first movement where I would have expected a greater detachment of the dynamics to better make the contrast between the full orchestral chords and brilliant passages of the violins. This executive shyness seems to have disappeared when they performed the Symphony n. 7 which, after all, shows a very different compositional maturity than the first since it is a work performed for the first time in 1813.
In this symphony Beethoven unleashes all his creative arsenal entrusting the prevailing guidelines to dance and rhythm. A rhythm that shapes engravings and melodic ideas, which accelerates the harmonic changes, distributes the themes better in the different timbre bands and energetically pushes the dynamics. Perhaps also due to the type of writing here the S. Carlo orchestra seems to have revitalized and awakened from a tenuous initial "drowsiness" especially in theAllegro con brio final, showing great cleanliness and homogeneity of sound.
Conductor Valčuha seemed at ease to me, conducting with moderate gestures as if he knew well the orchestral players available.
At the end of the concert great applause from an audience that you might not expect so warm and numerous on a hot day in early summer. I leave the theater and see the streets flooded with tourists and the typical liveliness of the city. It occurs to me that such marathons should be done more often, perhaps with symphonic cycles of other sacred monsters and perhaps also in other places that are not really canonical for classical music.
Let's hope.
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