Hum the first eight notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Go ahead. Give it all the Elmer-Fudd-in-a-monkey-suit drama. Just like you’ve heard it countless times before.
Dit-dit-dit-Daaahhh! (dramatic pause) Dit-dit-dit-DAAAAHHHH!
Something like that, right?
With slight variations (and probably not that much drama), that’s the way those thundering opening notes live in our memory. Great conductors like Toscanini, Bernstein and Ricardo Muti don’t take it to Looney Tunes extremes, but there’s a certain gravitas there that confirms audience’s expectations.
But hearing Edo de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
play that phrase—to open their third season together at Uihlein Hall—told you a lot about de Waart’s musical sensibility.
There was certainly power in those first few notes. But they rolled by with barely a pause or dramatic “hold,” cascading right into the famous variations that danced around the strings. This is, after all, not simply a fanfare but the beginning of a symphony. And de Waart wants to consider it as a symphony and not simply a series of sensational moments.
There were several such moments, but they were part of the architecture of a great piece of music. The opening established the foundation, building it quietly and certainly with each permutation of the original idea. After the muscular opening to the third movement, with cellos and basses leading the way into a grand fugue, the music becomes delicate and a bit introspective, as if the composer is weighing his options. Here de Waart’s attention became acute, shaping each line and pause with great purpose, so that the glorious chords of the fourth movement registered with explosive and joyful force. If you looked closely, you could see many of the orchestra musicians smiling—a sure sign that de Waart was taking the group on a fabulous ride.
The concert opened with two pieces that showed what Beethoven meant to musical history. The First Symphony, one of his earliest works, shows him pushing against the coolness of his inherited Classical style with occasional splashes of Sturm und Drang—a bon bon with a little bite. De Waart brought clarity and a little bit of abandon to the piece—particularly in the Menuetto, which unspooled at a breakneck pace. And the Grosse Fuge, adapted for string orchestra from the original late string quartet, is Beethoven’s Everest. A piece composed near the end of us life that is severely and rigorously introspective. De Waart and the MSO negotiated the challenges and captured the restless and forward-looking spirit of the piece as well. Stravinsky’s description of the Grosse Fuge made perfect sense after this performance: “It will always be contemporary.”
