(And that's some spiffy clarinet-playing too!)
by Ken
What we just heard -- and I'll sort-of-explain in a moment how we got here -- is the Trio section of the minuet, or I should probably say the Tempo di Menuetto (not quite the same thing; what we have is a tempo marking, not necessarily a simple declaration that what follows is a minuet), of the Beethoven Eighth Symphony. It's nestled inside this performance:
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 8 in F, Op. 93:
iii. Tempo di Menuetto
London Symphony Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded November 1972
What's happened is that, in the course of our pursuit of the "lesson" of Fidelio, following our pursuit of the "lesson" of Don Giovanni, we are finding outselves knocking around Beethoven's workshop. As readers of recent installments may recall, our path to Fidelio is also leading us beyond, to Beethoven's seeming repository of all musical and perhaps human knowledge, his Ninth Symphony. Which has naturally had me scouting assorted musicscapes for the musical signposts we'll want to pass by, one of which is a recording of the Beethoven Ninth that Carlo Maria Giulini made for DG, with the Berlin Philharmonic, in XXXX, which is lodged in my memory as an especially powerful and personal statement. (For some reason I feel a compulsion to mention that I reviewed it in the New York Times, even though this really isn't here or there, except as it underlines the powerful effect the performance had on me.) It occurred to me that I have an earlier Giulini Beethoven Ninth, done with the London Symphony for EMI, and I was pretty sure I even had it on CD, and mightn't it be interesting to rehear both performances?
It turned out that it was interesting, and not in quite the ways I was expecting, which I generally find even more interesting. I think we'll want to talk about the two Giulini Ninths at some point, and probably sample them. For now the point now has to do, not with them, but with the way EMI bundled their Giulini Ninth on CD. On LP it had been spread across three sides, as was frequently done with recordings of the Ninth; for the fourth side the Eighth Symphony had been recorded -- the most common fourth-side fillers for the Ninth having been either the First or the Eighth, the shortest Beethoven Symphonies, and the two that could be counted on to fit comfortably on a single LP side.
WE'RE GETTING CLOSER TO OUR POINT,
BUT WE'RE STILL NOT QUITE THERE
