Beethoven has dominated the City of Birmingham Symphony's 2012-13 concert season, and Andris Nelsons' cycle of the symphonies has been at its heart. The journey finished, of course, with the Eighth and Ninth, in performances displaying the sense of special occasion that Nelsons, announced last month as the next music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, brings to so much of his conducting.
His Beethoven is very much his own – neither irresistibly dynamic in the Carlos Kleiber mould, nor monumentally imposing like Klemperer, but somewhere in between. As always, there was plenty of evidence of Nelsons' awareness of drama in the Ninth, and of his ability to create memorable musical images, whether it was the sense of mystery with which he veiled the development section's opening in the first movement, the timpani strokes that punctuated its Scherzo like rifle shots, or the little quickenings of tempo in the Adagio that provided extra buoyancy as the variations unfolded.
The choral finale was kept on a tighter rein, as if it had more than enough theatrical grandeur of its own. With a fine quartet of soloists – Lucy Crowe, Mihoko Fujimura and Ben Johnson, led off by bass-baritone Iain Paterson – and the CBSO Chorus as secure as ever, the sheer impact of Schiller's Ode was never in doubt. The Eighth Symphony had been a different matter: the way it sprang bristling into life signalled immediately that this was not a work to be treated lightly, or one that would be out-muscled by its more monumental sibling in the second half. Nelsons and his superb orchestra made sure that every bit of its rhythmic and harmonic detail packed a punch.
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