OSC/Marriner
National Concert Hall, Dublin
Beethoven — Symphonies 1, 2, 5.
Neville Marriner, who conducted the Orchestra of St Cecilia for the fourth time at the National Concert Hall on Monday, is not just an ordinary middle-of- the-roader. He’s one of the men who helped define and paint the white line there in the first place.
Marriner, who turned 86 last April, was one of the conductors who helped set new standards in terms of tonal refinement, transparency of texture, and poised elegance of phrasing in a stream of recordings from the 1960s onwards. And it’s been genuinely revelatory how successfully he’s managed to stamp his style on the Orchestra of St Cecilia. That said, Monday’s programme was a bit slow out of the starting blocks. His approach to the first two movements of Beethoven’s
First Symphony
was just that bit too relaxed. There’s an energy to the first movement and a buoyancy to the second that weren’t fully expressed. The Scherzo and Finale were delivered with an altogether firmer grip.
He opened the
Second Symphony
with a sharply-etched call to attention that set the scene for a performance of bite and brio. Beethoven’s First is actually a more popular symphony than his Second. But Marriner presented the Second as by far the stronger work, with an especially persuasive thrust reserved for a turbo-charged account of the finale. The size of the orchestra on the stage for the
Fifth Symphony
may have looked strangely small. But the sounds were projected with clarity and power, and the musical argument was always cogently presented. Yes, there were moments of fallibility in the playing, as there were in the other two symphonies. But there was also a kind of interior illumination, a musical chiaroscuro, which has long been Marriner’s trademark, and which rendered clear and vital so much that’s often allowed to remain muddy in this most uplifting of symphonies.
The audience loved it, and clearly wanted more. Three of Marriner’s OSC appearances have been in all-Beethoven programmes. If the orchestra brings him back for one more concert of the
Eighth
and
Ninth
, it will have achieved a complete Beethoven cycle with him.
