Venue(s):
Academy of Music
Conductor(s):
Theodore Eisfeld
Price: $.50
Event Type:
Orchestral
Status:
Published
Last Updated:
10 May 2013
“At Philharmonic Rehearsal 3 p.m. - Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (the Choral) of which I have not heard a note for about five years. A rough performance. Tho. Eisfeld was not extreme to mark what was amiss. The raps of his baton in the repetition of an ill-rendered passage were many. So many that the orchestra spent an hour and fifty minutes on the Symphony, tho they skipped all the long passages of melodic plain sailing that immediately precede the ‘Marcia’ subdivision of the 4th movement. On the whole this great but unequal work gained on use. Its demerits were more distinctly visible but its merits still more. Never before did I fully recognize the vigor and dash of the second movement, or the noble gravity – the serious sweetness of the Third. That movement is unmatched. To use it seems to embody the sentiment of – ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of this past’ etc., etc. Could Milton have heard it when he was writing the Penseroso, he would have made that poem even more precious than it is. But had Mozart been resuscitated and sitting with me this afternoon, I think we would have shuddered and shivered and exhibited severe distress at certain times in the 1st and 2nd movements. The introduction to the 4th would have given him an attack of cholera.”