Word: scherzo
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Another problem was his inability to perceive the organic emotional continuity of this great work. He missed the miracle of the Scherzo, in which Beethoven keeps an ostinato theme from becoming mechanical, by adopting a slow tempo. There was hardly a touch of gentleness and sway in the priceless slow movement in which every phrase should be continent and compassionate, where lyricism and drama should perfectly intermingle. Yannatos tolerated reticent playing, displayed an at times staggering lapse of taste in phrasing, and generally enervated the performance by failing to grasp the dramatic ethos of Beethoven's universal consciousness...
...OTHER TWO WORKS. Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, and Dello Joio's To St. Cecilia, were surpassingly unremarkable. The only marginally interesting section of the Britten piece, which uses a problemmatical Auden text, was a Queen Mab Scherzo passage affording relief from the "flickering flames" of "Blonde Aphrodite." The unidentified soprano soloist thrilled us with another seismic performance whose beauty might be compared to an autumnal wheat field methodically bending to the breeze. Mr. Dello Joio, whose star has been rising ever since his epochal Air Power brought home the Caligulan glory of the air force to the musically...
...with dash, sweep and refined lyricism. His performance of the Second, in B-flat minor, offers something more. Although not the performance of a mellow master like Rubinstein, it displays a subtle feeling for the shifting, subterranean currents of Chopin's emotion. There is an urgency in the scherzo, a brooding pathos in the famous funeral march, a bizarre mysteriousness in the final skittering octaves, which Anton Rubinstein described as the winds of night blowing over churchyard graves...
...Conductor Karl Böhm, who, he thinks, has an "impossible" technique and is too lax with singers. Partly because of these traits, partly because of the didacticism of his approach, Swarowsky has never made great headway as a practicing conductor. It is only when he conducts his classes-scherzo, andante, furioso and rondo-that his true mastery appears...
...were particularly expert; and all the hornists negotiated their treacherous parts with real heroism. There were some bad moments, such as the ragged fiddling at the start of the first movement's coda and the end of the funeral march; and a woodwind passage in the trio of the scherzo was muffed the first time, but went admirably the second. The finale, which is the one weak movement in the symphony, suffered much of the time from a lack of ensemble, and had doubtless gone much better in rehearsal...