Playing Beethoven's Fifth

The reason why I wanted to start up

a period-instrument orchestra, 25 years ago,

called the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique,

was because, at the time,

symphony orchestras were still playing Beethoven

as though he was a much later 19th-century Romantic composer,

rather than the firebrand that we all know that he really was.

And that's the quality that we are trying to capture

in our rehearsals leading up to the performance of this symphony.

And by performing his music on instruments that he himself

would have heard and recognised,

paradoxically, you're getting back to something much more raw,

and much more immediate and contemporary, than the very plush,

well-rounded sounds of a modern orchestra.

Also, it was a continuity.

It was a wonderful way of carrying my other orchestra,

the English Baroque Soloists, into the 19th century.

And the challenges are immense, because these

instruments of Beethoven's are hugely fragile and compromised.

If you push them too hard, they splinter, they crack, they squawk.

You're using gut strings, which have a habit of cracking,

and splitting and breaking under pressure.

You are using woodwind instruments that are much less

technically rounded and smooth than their modern counterparts.

And you are using brass instruments that can't play

the whole chromatic scale without - particularly the horns -

without all sorts of kind of manipulations

of the left hand inside the bell.

I mean, those are extraordinary difficult technical challenges

and yet they are marvellously rewarding if you can overcome them,

because the result is that you get

a much more multilayered strata of sounds,

not all kind of curdling and amalgamating,

in the way that they do, or they tend to do,

in a modern symphony orchestra.

So we're going to show you some of the processes

that we have been going through before arriving at a performance.

OK, OK.

OK, OK, OK. Now, Michael, tell us about your instrument.

Here's the classical instrument and the modern instrument.

It will be higher and sharper, so don't get irritated.

The same - this is from the first movement.

To me, that's much more vocal.

The first is wonderfully smooth and euphonious,

and homogene, homogeneous.

The second, the historical instrument,

has a much more personal quality to it.

Which is very, very good for darker...

-So you've got a greater colour range, essentially.

-Yes.

David, talk us about this instrument that you're playing.

This is a copy of a Viennese contrabassoon of 1810.

So it's basically very, very similar to that.

The reeds are much, much bigger than the modern contrabassoon,

much bigger than the ordinary bassoon.

They're absolutely huge - take a lot of control.

-Do you want me to play something?

-Yes, please do.

-Show us the range and the colours.

-OK, the range.

Have you had enough?

LAUGHTER

But the amazing thing is the clarity.

I mean, you know, with a modern set-up, you wouldn't get that.

I mean, I've struggled with modern bassoons, contrabassoons,

to get that degree of definition.

And you get it.

How is it with the trumpet, Neil?

I'll just demonstrate quickly that passage from the slow movement.

It's like on the field of battle, isn't it?

That's like a clarion call.

If I were to play the same thing on the modern instrument

at the same volume, that fits with the orchestra,

it's not such an exciting sound.

So to get that exciting sound on the modern trumpet,

you've really got to give it one.

HE PLAYS LOUDLY

Which is goodnight to the rest of the orchestra!

Yeah, it completely wipes the whole orchestra out.

'But the wonderful thing of doing the symphony

'with the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique is

'that they all get excited by the music as much as I do.

'There's nothing routine.

'There's nothing kind of perfunctory about it.

'It's very committed

'and it's hugely exciting, therefore, to conduct this piece.'

C'est beau.

Yum...

Good. That's lovely.

It's the first symphony I ever played,

with the Fife Youth Orchestra when I was 13,

and I can't imagine how terrible it sounded

but the effect it had on me as a kid was just mind-blowing.

The Fifth Symphony is much more about all of us as individuals,

and what contours, what terrible ups and downs our lives take.

This music gives you the space to actually improvise every time

and especially on these instruments that we play, you know,

because you have to reconnect to the present,

you have to reconnect to the state of the wood.

It just gives you the space to just be wild and be who you are.

And with this music, when I start to play it,

I have to make it my life, basically.

I have to talk about my life, and if I'm honest in my playing,

the listener has something to connect to.

How do we overcome the grisly overfamiliarity of the music?

It's a bit like having an old Rembrandt painting or something,

or a wonderful great work.

You keep looking at it,

and there is always something there for you to see.

And I think this Beethoven Fifth Symphony is a classic...

work of art that will never die.

Wonderful though a Rembrandt is, or a Bernini statue,

or a Caravaggio or whatever it is, it stays the same.

You walk round it, you look at it from different angles,

in different lights, but it's the same. You can't alter it.

But we can.

We have this ability as musicians to bring to life in the instant,

in a specific timeframe, in a new context,

music that looks dead and on the page is nothing,

but becomes a living tissue, a series of tissues, and that is...

That is a huge privilege and an enormous challenge that we have.

And... You know...

For me, this music of Beethoven

is as urgent now as it's ever been in my lifetime,

and probably even in his.

It has an outreach, and an applicability, and a relevance,

and an ability to transform life,

if we really, really let rip.