Boston Symphony’s Beethoven festival surges out of the starting gate

It is rare for Beethoven’s Third Symphony to end up overshadowed by any other work programmed with it, let alone the composer’s own first two symphonies, but such was the case Saturday night at Symphony Hall. The First and Second Symphonies, often treated like a throat clearing before the creative outburst of the Eroica, took up the first half and made such an impression that each movement garnered applause.

Nelsons raised his baton and the Boston Symphony snapped to attention. The Adagio introduction to the opening of the First with its harmonic head-fake unfolded like the cadence of some other unheard, dreamy movement, registering more like an end than a beginning until the Allegro con brio crept in then bolted. Nelsons set out the through lines of the evening: exuberance, urgency, brisk yet elastic tempi, rhythmic drive, contrapuntal clarity, foregrounding the call and response between sections, crescendos and diminuendos across a wide dynamic range (Nelsons often subsiding into a crouch, then uncoiling) and the inclusion of repeats. The orchestra responded with complete commitment playing with fire and precision throughout the evening and with some of the most arresting soft playing ever heard. 

The First was Beethoven’s calling card as a symphonist, basically announcing, here I am; let me show you some of what I can do. It is brash and raucous. Nelsons embraced those qualities. As a result, the Menuetto, for example, was a wild affair, the dancing of which would have taxed the lung capacity of an Olympic triathlete..

Having the Second follow demonstrated how much more Beethoven could do and how much further he could go in a short period time towards being himself in the symphonic form, while still nodding toward tradition. Often understood as the bright light coming out of his dark night of the soul at Heiligenstadt, the Second’s high spirits and good humor also have their shadows. Nelsons made a point to color appropriately in the Larghetto, where most of those shadows peek through. The final movement, with the orchestra slipping on a banana peel in a recurring musical pratfall, was infused with infectious high spirits.

Nelsons’s approach paid great dividends in the more concentrated first two symphonies but presented some drawbacks in the Third where slowing and tamping down sometimes slackened the flow and thwarted smooth transitions. Beethoven’s abundance of invention and variety of gesture in this symphony sometimes seemed to mesmerize Nelsons. His relishing and lavishing attention on certain passages, though impressive, tended to dissipate tension, lending an episodic quality to sections of the Funeral March and the variations of the final movement. The music even risked coming to a complete stop before the electrifying shift in dynamics and tempo which brings the coda to a close. Their impact diminished, those final measures seemed tacked on. Agree with some of the choices or not, this was still a daring, risk-taking performance. Worthy of note: Nelsons chose to seat the three horns alone in the stage right back corner and had them begin their trio with a notable ritardando.

Many Beethoven festivals with the symphonies as linchpin have occurred throughout the BSO’s history. Yet this is only the second time in the orchestra’s144-year history that the nine symphonies have been played chronologically; Koussevitzky first did it in 1927. The Covid-cancelled 2020-21 season was to open with this cycle in observance of the composer’s 250th anniversary. Given the success of this first program, the five years have been well worth the wait, more than whetting the appetite for the next three installments to see what lights Nelsons will shed on old, familiar faces.