Given that Beethoven’s final symphony normally has a playing time of just over an hour, what can you sensibly pair with it in the first half? Something else by Beethoven, perhaps the Choral Fantasy? A concerto even? The Danish National Symphony Orchestra, here under their principal conductor Fabio Luisi, came up with a novel solution: a contemporary piece by one of their home-grown composers, Bent Sørensen, and another contemporary piece with a choral element by the British-born Anna Clyne.
New York is what links these two compositions. In Sørensen’s case it was a commission by the city’s Philharmonic, and in the rattle of muted brass instruments in Evening Land there is a hint of the hustle and bustle of traffic in an urban setting. Clyne is based in New York and drew the inspiration for her The Years from a period of enforced isolation there during the Covid pandemic at the start of the decade.
Most of the music in Sørensen’s piece is cast in a pastoral mood, beginning with a soft solo violin playing a simple melody caught in the wind, and moving like an arc through lots of breathing in and out with shimmering textures before a central section of controlled anguish gives way to more sighing from the strings and a return to silence. Most of the heavy lifting is done by the string sections, with woodwind contributing little of import, save for a valedictory oboe solo towards the close, a tribute to Sørensen’s father-in-law. Without the composer’s programme note I wouldn’t have made the intended connection with his childhood on the Danish island of Zealand.
Clyne’s piece is more substantial. Like Sørensen’s composition it is largely pastoral, owing much to her English origins, often quite hymn-like and consolatory in its recollections of Vaughan Williams. It is helped in this respect by a double chorus, here the Danish National Concert Choir, singing for nearly all of the twenty-minute duration the words of a poem by Stephanie Fleischmann. Essentially, it is a meditation on the mystery of time and the way this constantly expands and contracts, as seen from a purely subjective perspective. The undulating waves of choral and orchestral sound have a quiet beauty of their own, frequently mesmerising in effect, though in the vast performing space of the Royal Albert Hall, and certainly from my seat, the words themselves were largely lost.
This Danish orchestral ensemble, the second-oldest radio symphony orchestra in Europe, is celebrating its centenary year, and Luisi has now been in charge for almost a decade. The Concert Choir is almost as old, founded back in 1932, and has a very wide scope in performance. It is made up of 74 professional singers and though these can accommodate themselves to most acoustic conditions they found themselves at a considerable disadvantage in the main work, Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. This requires a blaze of imposing sound in its Finale for the message of universal brotherhood: little cut through sufficiently, especially for that final moment of ecstasy in “Alle Menschen werden Brüder”.
Luisi certainly knows his way around Beethoven’s last symphonic statement: he conducted it from memory. The idea of setting Schiller’s Ode to Joy had come to Beethoven as early as 1793, and his sketchbooks around 1818 indicate that he was toying with the idea of writing a religious song, a kind of Cantique Ecclésiastique, within a symphony. The Ninth is of course a cornerstone of late Beethoven. It was well over a decade since the composition of his Eighth and reveals important elements in his own development, not least his interest in fugues and the writing of variations, most obviously in the Finale of the Ninth. His deafness led to his making near-impossible demands on his singers: the final fugue culminates in a notorious passage for the chorus sopranos where they are required to hold a top A for twelve bars.
Commanding performances of the Choral demand an awareness of scale, and at least at the start a metaphysical glimpse of the heavens towering above into which all performers will ascend in majestic fashion at the close. Here there were no wisps of cosmic energy visible from afar, no mists of time gradually clearing in the sunlight, no uneasy feeling of a path being carved through harmonic uncertainties. Instead there was a pounding, almost relentless sense of forward momentum, a linearity which had no time for any subtleties. In this conception Luisi was helped by the quality of his strings, lithe and supple at all times, and a grittiness in the lower voices. They predominated in the overall sound, the woodwind though well-blended largely characterless and together with the brass often playing a secondary role. For the opening movement Beethoven’s marking is perfectly clear: Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso. Luisi’s batonless hands told a different story, the arms constantly in motion in an almost mechanistic way, pulling levers, adjusting the dials, pressing down on the bellows, signalling power and control throughout.
This approach worked better in the second movement, where Luisi’s motoric energy adequately conveyed a seething, scalding cauldron. However, I missed contrast in the Trio section, taken at a similar pace, and though the horn solos, here and in the slow movement, were secure the wind detail was largely glossed over. The cantabile quality to the phrasing notwithstanding, the Adagio simply felt too fast, almost as if Luisi was afraid of taking Beethoven’s marking at face value. Even the celestial flute solo was hurried along: no glimpses of other-worldliness on show here.
The soloists were positioned at the back of the orchestra below the organ. Sadly, they were not particularly well-matched. For me, the most pleasing sounds came from the American tenor Issachah Savage, warmly lyrical yet with clarion-clear Heldentenor elements which cut through all the other textures. It was unusual to hear Jasmin White’s real contralto bringing dark colouring to her role, but she often struggled to be heard. In his opening recitatives the Polish bass Adam Pałka projected well, albeit without ideal evenness of tone, again moved along quite quickly by Luisi in the first two stanzas of the Ode. Clara Cecilie Thomsen’s bright and steady soprano completed the quartet.
It is sobering to think that we might never have had those choral elements. Carl Czerny, one of Beethoven’s pupils, reported that the composer later had considerable misgivings and considered the Finale to be a mistake. This last symphonic statement indeed marked a complete revolution in the composer’s thinking, an apotheosis of his genius, so much so that Brahms was intimidated by its achievement when eventually writing his own first symphony. In truly memorable accounts you are made aware of a constant struggle with the material and the absolute exultation expressed in the collective action of human voices stretched to their limits. Sadly, at a swift 64 minutes, this was not one of them.
Alexander Hall
Beethoven’s Choral Symphony (BBC Proms 2025)
Bent Sørensen – Evening Land; Anna Clyne – The Years; Beethoven – Symphony No. 9 in D minor (Choral)
Clara Cecilie Thomsen (soprano); Jasmin White (contralto); Issachah Savage (tenor); Adam Pałka (bass); Danish National Concert Choir; Danish National Symphony Orchestra; Fabio Luisi (conductor)
Royal Albert Hall, London, 21 August 2025
All photos © Chris Christodoulou