Word: beethoven
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...Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) performed Beethoven’s Third (“Eroica”) and Fourth Symphonies under James Levine on February 19 with an ironically self-possessed mood of adolescent naïveté. Cleverly and convincingly, the BSO managed to make the Beethoven symphonies come alive with a sense of artistic honesty and real intensity of spirit...
...contrast, performances from the standard repertoire, like the Beethoven symphonies, offer dozens of ways to lapse into ceremonious inauthenticity. The audience, aware that they are listening to a top orchestra under a celebrated conductor performing the masterworks of one of the greatest composers, strains to rise to the occasion with a reaction of appropriate greatness. When the quality of the composition and the technique of the performer are beyond dispute, the audience’s response is a foregone conclusion, and the concert becomes a set of protocols rather than a genuine performance...
...performers, then, the challenge of crafting a concert of canonical anchors like the Beethoven symphonies is to avoid easy recourse to the habit of flawless dignity. Consummate artistry involves not only the meaningful realization of a composition, but the further ability to destroy and then resurrect its grandeur—to connect with the inner greatness of the work while stripping away the pomp that surrounds it. The goal is for the audience to like it not because they are supposed to, but because they can’t help...
...introduce it in a way that is relevant and makes sense, but almost everyone responds to it. Top tens are good. CDs on a desert island. Then you get into arguments about whether you can have whole catalogs of CDs or just one CD. Is it all of Beethoven, or just one string quartet? What happens is when you do a category like that, the discussion often deteriorates in a good way into actual substantive conversation. But it takes work to talk to a bore. And you have to save yourself at some point. I always say, Keep an empty...
...famous and brilliant people who also suffered from a combination of alcohol and mental disorders, including Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Cole Porter, Yves St. Laurent, and Vivien Leigh. Add these names to a more general list of brilliant people with mental disorders, including Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Isaac Newton, and one starts to get the sense that one has to be insane in order to truly accomplish anything great...