Teodor Currentzis stalks on to the Albert Hall stage, kisses MusicAeterna’s leader, raises his arms, and … what do we hear? Beethoven. If you believed everything you read about Currentzis, the fact that we can instantly recognise the composer may come as a surprise. So much is made of his maverick nature, not to mention his fondness for making grand, mysterious statements (“I am a poet,” he declared in a recent interview), that it is almost a surprise to find him, in his first Prom, conducting something that comes out sounding familiar.
Yet it is not the comfortable familiarity that breeds contempt. Throughout this all-Beethoven Prom – the Second and Fifth Symphonies, with the finale of the Seventh as encore – we get playing of an intensity that makes the music seem somehow Beethoven-plus; more Beethoven than ever before.
Currentzis is far from the only conductor to try to recapture what made great works shocking when they were new. Later this year, he takes on Stuttgart’s SWR Symphonieorchester, where he’ll work with musicians who grew up under Roger Norrington’s brand of quirky iconoclasm. But Currentzis is perhaps currently the most cannily charismatic. Not many could have persuaded an entire young orchestra to relocate 1,000 miles west from Novosibirsk to Perm, as Currentzis did with MusicAeterna in 2011, when his appointment as Artistic Director of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre was part of a cultural push in this former Soviet closed city. Nor could they have inspired such generosity from a record company as Currentzis has from Sony, which bankrolled extraordinarily long recording sessions for their three Mozart opera discs.
He is also one of the most thorough. The relative isolation of Perm, hundreds of miles from any of the world’s major classical music centres, means the musicians who choose to be there are fully invested in the orchestra. Currentzis demands their loyalty and their time, and gets both.
He conducts the first minutes of the Symphony No 2 with a care that almost amounts to micromanagement of his players, but once the movement begins in earnest, the music takes flight. He sets a hurtling speed for all the fast movements, making no concession to the Albert Hall acoustic, but drawing out playing so crisply dynamic that it doesn’t seem to matter if some notes get lost in the space. The cellos introduce their first main theme almost under their breath, daring us to listen harder.
Making the Symphony No 5 sound new is even more of a challenge but, again, while the shape of the work may be familiar, there are details that seize the attention: the way the descending sequence of longer notes near the end of the first movement seem to be trying to smooth out all those spiky figures that had gone before; the proud rasp of the contrabassoon throughout the finale.
The Seventh Symphony’s finale finds Currentzis with head down, fist pumping, as the chords thud past. But in a long, calmer passage he stops conducting and lets his musicians just play. There is no loss of momentum from the players, who are all, except the cellists, performing standing up, with a soloist’s flair.
Currentzis, of course, oozes flair – he’s a showman on and off the podium. But even if he is its captain, MusicAeterna is still essentially a team – and the real radicalism here was all Beethoven’s.
•Available on BBC iPlayer.
•The BBC Proms continue until 8 September.
