What if I told you that there's a work for full orchestra, by Beethoven - the most renowned of all classical composers - that was 70 minutes long - as long as his Ninth Symphony; twice as long as most of the others - that hardly anybody has ever heard, and only real Beethoven fans are likely to know even that it exists?
Well, it does, and last night I heard it played live in its entirety for the first time - both them playing it and me hearing it - from the SFS, with EPS conducting.
It's a ballet score, The Creatures of Prometheus. It dates from around the time of the First Symphony, so it's fairly early Beethoven. One reason it's rarely played is because nothing of the dance content has survived beyond a few notes towards a scenario, so we don't even know what's happening on stage most of the time.
Never mind, we now have Gerard McBurney, who - having performed reconstruction acts on a lot of Shostakovich - is ready to undertake this also. He's taken the existing hints and put together a coherent scenario that fits the music. This was read aloud as between-pieces narration by Keith David, in much the same tone of voice that James Earl Jones used to describe the flamingos in Fantasia 2000.
This was accompanied by cartoons by Hillary Leben, projected on screens - animated during the narration, still while the music was playing, so it wasn't distracting. These were charmingly goofy and often quite silly.
The title The Creatures of Prometheus suggests a retelling of the story by Ovid - a very popular author in Vienna at the time - about the demigod Prometheus fashioning the first human beings out of clay, and asking the gods to help show them how to live and be human.
The net result is that most of the scenario consists of various dances in which the gods show off their dancing on top of Mount Parnassus. Beethoven's music has a stable dancing base, a lot like his sets of contradances, except there's less pure repetition, more variety and development. It was interesting to hear, especially the finale, which featured a contradance tune that Beethoven made more use of, as the theme to variation sets for solo piano and for orchestra, the latter as the finale of his Eroica Symphony, which is where you may have heard it.
If you want the whole thing, when the Philharmonia of London played the work - also with EPS conducting and Leben's cartoons, some of Leben's cartoons anyway - McBurney's narration was read by Stephen Fry, and you can watch and listen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment