Vive la Revolution! Beethoven 5

Inverness Cathedral, 16/3/2025.

Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 in C minor, The Mahler Players , conductor, Tomas Leakey

The performance of Beethoven's 5th Symphony by the Mahler Players last Sunday, in Inverness Cathedral, was not just a good performance. It was a great performance. Easily the best of the three live performances I've seen of this symphony, and up there in terms of excitement, energy, dynamics and range of tone, with many of the well-known and varied recordings of this revolutionary work. It is probably the best known symphony in the world. So it seemed either serendipitous or genius programming to me to open this late Sunday afternoon concert with two relatively contemporaneous pieces to the 5th that I did not know at all. The Weber overtures 'Euryanthe' and 'Oberon' were sprightly, rich and tuneful, ranging from lyrical passages that were reminiscent of Wagner, as conductor Tomas Leakey pointed out in his helpful remarks on Weber to the audience, to - for me - climaxes that were reminiscent of late-Schubert or early Brahms. Both were warmly received, and the quality and verve of the playing under the confident baton of Mr. Leakey boded well for the scintillating performance that was to follow. With Beethoven's Fifth you have to get those great opening chords and the first sixteen bars right. They are the musical equivalent of literature's instantly recognisable first lines, “I went to Manderley again last night”, “The clock struck thirteen”, etc. But then you have to maintain that dramatic energy and audience engagement for the next 35 minutes and bring the whole to one of the most uplifting 'multiple ending' climaxes in all of music. The Mahler Players certainly did all of that. The iconic opening movement was thunderous and full of that Beethovenian sense of restless, but purposeful, movement, and made the most of the dialectic between its dark, foreboding C minor tones, and the lighter, hopeful passages of aspiration. Something is coming, indeed. The spirit of revolutionary France is here. To paraphrase Goethe “All the Great Houses are falling”. The second movement is about universal human dignity. It's often played as if its main purpose is as a stately interlude that allows the listener to catch breath between the intensity of the opening movement and the fierce call to the barricades of the finale. But it is much, much more than that, and is as central to Beethoven's revolutionary vision as the other movements. Leakey and his musicians seemed to understand this, intellectually or instinctively, and played it accordingly. The rip-roaring showcase for strings that is the third movement descended slowly into that moment of temporary contemplative darkness, before bursting incandescently into the C major opening of the fourth. And one was simply carried along, by an invisible mass of beings from all of history, including future history, conjured magically into being by an orchestra playing with fire in their bellies, joy in their hearts, and at the height of their powers, towards Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. In a time of troubles, what a wonderful thing to know that this could have emerged from the mind of a man 220 years ago, and be played today by our own superbly talented musicians here in the Highlands, as if it had only been written yesterday, and was now brought forth to life as a call to the world, for the very first time.