Much to Admire in Last of Beethoven Concerts

Amid more than 200 people Saturday night in Costa Mesa scouring for tickets to a sold-out concert of Beethoven’s Eight and Ninth symphonies, one was dressed like the composer. He had taken considerable care in his costume and gotten many details right, including the hair. His sign, in German, beseeching an extra ticket, bore a reasonable facsimile of Beethoven’s handwriting.

Even so, he stood out remarkably little. European designers have set up exclusive shops in the mall across the road from Segerstrom Hall, and many concertgoers looked like customers. They, too, had gone through considerable care selecting their wardrobes, and they, too, were on display for the conclusion of a weeklong cycle of Beethoven symphonies--and of a season featuring Beethoven’s music at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Most remarkable of all was that such a stylish and eager crowd would clamor not just for Beethoven symphonies, but for them performed by John Eliot Gardiner and his period-instrument tongue-twisting Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique. It wasn’t long ago that the early music movement, of which Gardiner is a star, was seen to be renegade--and to some extent it still is. In Vikram Seth’s musically astute new novel, “Equal Music,” about a British string quartet, the “early birds” are, from the point of view of conventional musicians, seen as exceedingly hairy creatures who wear sandals and are not quite fit for proper society.

Not so the mostly young and dashing musicians in this British band, several of whom have been rushing off to midnight showings of the new “Star Wars” film in the mall after performances. And not so Gardiner, who is one of the few modern conductors whose recordings of standard repertory sell well these days.

He may not be a great podium personality, nor is he one of the early music movement’s more original voices. His Beethoven symphony performances, for instance, reveal neither the quirky insights of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s nor the elegance and depth of Frans Bruggen’s. But their most distinctive trait, a hurtling momentum that seems daring yet is never unmusical, can drive an audience wild. And for the weekend concerts, that meant a Seventh Symphony on Friday that had the rhythmic propulsion of Stravinsky and a Ninth on Saturday that seemed less a momentous contemplation of the divine nature of mankind than the taming of a wild beast.

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That quality of taming the beast of both Beethoven and of an orchestra made of less technologically efficient instruments than a modern one is also, I think, what keeps Gardiner’s Beethoven from being either radical or great. The faster he pushes the players, the more frenzied it becomes, the tighter he makes the music sound. One attends to the broader outlines of harmonic progressions more clearly at these speeds, less the weird details. Phrase answers phrase with near Cartesian conformity. With the sense of outcome always so assured, the result can be more exhilaration than ecstasy.

Still there is much to admire. The programmatic Sixth, with its pastoral scenes of the country, was often beautiful Friday night, especially with the special tints of color from the piquant period wind instruments. And one advantage of period orchestras is how lovely they sound when playing softly. The Eighth, though, lacked charm.

But Gardiner does have a flair for drama and his Ninth was, if nothing else, gripping theater. He knows what period instruments can do, pushes them to their limits, and makes heroes of individual performers. The whooping of valve horns to the point of breaking can be hugely exciting, and these extraordinary players were treated to the deafening roar of the crowd when Gardiner had them stand for bows after the Ninth. The solo quartet in the Ninth (soprano Christine Brewer, alto Michelle de Young, tenor William Kendall and bass Rodney Gilfrey) was exceptional, and so, too, the vibrant Monteverdi Choir.

Heroes, indeed, they all were. It takes an extraordinary effort simply to play these nine symphonies in a week. But Gardiner and his adrenaline-charged players (and singers) did much more, making arcane early music practices seem so lively and--above all--making a long-dead white male composer downright fashionable.