Richard Bratby

Inspired programming and a proper celebration: Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender reviewed

The individual performances were as characterful as their conductors

Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that familiar, scowling face. ‘Genius before Elton. Radical before Prince. Iconic before Bowie’ proclaimed the posters for the Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender, and apparently there’ve been complaints about them, which probably means that they’ve got the tone about right. Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Beethoven still has a way of driving all the right people round the bend. US campus musicologists have called for his music to be suppressed (you’d think that champions of inclusion would support a year-long celebration of a disabled composer, but it seems not. Wrong chromosomes). Last month, EU groupies tried to co-opt him to the Remain cause and ended up putting the permatanned Dutch cheesemonger André Rieu at number one, in a slightly unfortunate self-own.

The brilliant thing about the Beethoven Weekender was that it felt like a proper celebration. Children were running about, musicians wandered round playing scraps of symphonies, and clusters of people formed around the posted schedules of events. What to try next? Simon Callow reading extracts from Beethoven’s letters, accompanied by the Carducci Quartet? Matthew Herbert’s sonic installation playing 30 different recordings of the Ninth Symphony simultaneously, in a weirdly consoling wash of sound? I’m still quietly gutted that I had to choose between an orchestral performance and Ah, Ludwig!: in which the 1970s cartoon, Ludwig, about a sentient, Beethoven-loving egg was accompanied by a live soundtrack from the Guildhall’s electronic music department.

Beethoven still has a way of driving the right people round the bend

But ultimately, there’s no ignoring the man himself, and god, it felt good to hear from him: the genius of geniuses; the definitive, unapologetic Great Composer, roaring back like the apex carnivore he is. The centrepiece of the Barbican Weekender was a two-day cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies performed, in an inspired bit of programming, by a relay of orchestras from around England, each conducted by its own music director.

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