Playing Beethoven's Fifth – Firebrand Performance

Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor performed by Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. An orchestra founded in 1989 by John Eliot Gardiner, specialising in classical and romantic music using the principles and original instruments of historically informed performance.

00:00 – John Eliot Gardiner’s Introduction
02:21 – Principals Rehearsal
09:18 – Movement I – Allegro con brio
16:07 – Movement II – Andante con moto
24:46 – Movement III – Scherzo – Allegro
32:13 – Movement IV – Allegro

John started a period instrument orchestra because at that time symphony orchestras were still playing Beethoven as though he was a much later 19th century romantic composer, rather than the firebrand that we all know that he really was. This is the quality that they aspire to capture in rehearsals and performance of this symphony. By playing his music on instruments that Beethoven himself would have heard and recognised, paradoxically you’re getting back to something much more raw, much more immediate and contemporary, than the very plush, well-rounded sounds of a modern orchestra.

The challenges are immense because these instruments of Beethoven’s are hugely fragile and compromised, if you push them too hard they splinter, they crack, they squawk. You’re using gut strings that have a habit of cracking and splitting, or breaking under pressure. You’re using woodwind instruments that are much less technically rounded and smooth than their modern counterparts. And you’re using brass instruments that can’t play the whole chromatic scale, particularly the horns, without manipulations of the left hand inside the bell. Those are extraordinarily difficult technical challenges, and yet marvellously rewarding if you can overcome them. The result is a much more multi-layered strata of sounds, not all curdling and amalgamating in the way that they tend to do in a modern symphony orchestra.

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