To call Ludwig van Beethoven’s celebrated Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, a concert staple is to considerably understate matters. It is, quite simply, one of the most- performed works ever written.
But the Colorado Symphony’s presentation of the piece Friday evening in Boettcher Concert Hall was strikingly different and even a little daring.
Instead of the orchestra just playing the symphony, conductor Jeffrey Kahane preceded it with an hour-long discussion, illustrated with an array of long and short musical excerpts.
It is clear that the idea of just presenting traditional orchestral programs is defunct. As the enthusiastic response to this concert made clear, audiences are hungry not just for music but also for context.
There are plenty of pitfalls in attempting such a program, notably the danger of it devolving into a tedious, arcane musicological tutorial, but Kahane managed to avoid most of them in this largely effective outing.
If he doesn’t have the sense of ease of some commentators, he did bring an assured, genial and generally down-to-earth approach to his presentation – doing it all, impressively enough, without notes.
That said, Kahane did get bogged down at times in too many terms and technical descriptions, and it seemed like he tried to cover too much ground. But such downsides were offset in most cases with other facets, such as playing how the first section of the Fifth Symphony might have sounded if Beethoven had written it in the more upbeat key of E flat major.
“Thank goodness he didn’t do that,” Kahane said.
Also effective was concluding his talk with a passage from the novel “Howard’s End” about the Fifth Symphony and a reading of Beethoven’s famous letter in which he shook off thoughts of suicide and came to terms with the inevitability of his deafness.
After intermission, Kahane and the orchestra delivered a wonderfully incisive, well-disciplined interpretation of the work, in which the delicate moments got just as much attention as its better-known bursts of explosiveness. The suspenseful third movement offered a suitably tantalizing buildup to the work’s thrilling finale.
As should be the case, it was impossible not to get swept up again in the sheer excitement of this unqualified masterpiece.
