NEW YORK — Compelling Beethoven performances rarely fail to pose the questions: What does this music mean right now? This minute? Answers can surface on their own. And with so many musical and ideological points of possible connection, the Symphony No. 9 became a powerful Rorschach event in the hands of Raphaël Pichon, whose guest appearance with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on Nov. 6 at Carnegie Hall wasn’t always polished but exciting and deeply considered, thanks also to the great Clarion Choir, a fine quartet of soloists, and poetic bonuses in the program built around the symphony.
Before Beethoven’s opening pianissimo made a stealth entrance (dovetailing from the night’s previous works), musicians were stationed in the first tier (one stage right, the other left) to play the composer’s almost-never-heard incidental music for the 1815 play Leonore Prohaska (whose plot echoes the story of Joan of Arc). Soprano Liv Redpath was accompanied by harp in the lyrical, strophic “Romanze.” Ethereal glass harmonica was heard in the “Melodram.” Texts, rather dated, endorsed humanity, nobility, love, and loyalty, often amid floral imagery. Beethoven could indeed be simple and charming. More direct was a recitation of Maya Angelou’s poem “Caged Bird” about how clipped wings and bound feet can’t stop the act of singing.
And we thought we were just getting the Beethoven Ninth…
Such wide-ranging programs full of little-known music can easily unfold with a shrug, Not here. And this is typical of Pichon, the resourceful French countertenor-turned-conductor, now in his early 40s and still looking like a Euro hipster. Best known for his award-winning recordings of Monteverdi and Bach on the harmonia mundi label, he’s emerging into mainstream repertoire, so far with no apparent false steps.
For the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the concert was a remembrance of the late Roger Norrington, who memorably conducted a revisionist Beethoven Ninth with the orchestra before his career was curtailed by illness. Norrington used historical performance stance to clarify what Beethoven said to his own time, creating a clearer mirror of our world. Example: American classrooms taught that the street band in the final movement was Swiss. No, said Norrington, it’s Turkish, in a welcoming, lighthearted act of benevolence.
Pichon presented the Ninth as a current, immediate plea for unity, especially in its final moments: Planted all over the Carnegie main floor were choristers who stood and sang in tandem with the onstage Clarion Choir. The Beethoven Ninth was truly the symphony of “us.” But isn’t it always? In our fractured world, the message was far more insistent than usual and clearer with English words projected on an overhead screen.
The contours of Pichon’s performance were radically different from Norrington’s, whose 1987 recording with the London Classical Players has aged strangely. Though Norrington gave Beethoven a welcome sense of dance, his supposed adherence to the composer’s super-fast metronome markings now sounds slow, much slower than Pichon, who matched the speedy recent Philadelphia Orchestra Beethoven Ninth under Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The St. Luke’s orchestra wasn’t consistently secure with such tempos but was carried by Pichon giving the many two- and three-note motifs extra thrust and more inner urgency to the first two movements. This orchestra doesn’t regularly play Beethoven’s Ninth, but the sense of discovery counted for much — as did the tension of technical struggle.
The final movement was where Pichon’s individuality kicked in. The instrumental recitative was underplayed, almost nonchalantly, making the “Ode to Joy” theme arrive like an entry into another world. Vocally, it was a different world than most Ninths, though the soloists — soprano Redpath, mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor, tenor Laurence Kilsby, and bass Alex Rosen — were unusually well integrated into the overall sound picture and singers you’d want to hear in other repertoire. Clarion’s choral singing was the least labored and most sonorous I’ve ever heard in this piece, allowing Pichon more purposeful word-painting opportunities. The line “above the starry canopy there must dwell a loving Father” had a special warm timbre when traded among the male and female voices, as if to say, “Herein lies the solution.” The concert was a rich musical and philosophical package, and a much-needed one.
