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Three of Beethoven’s seismic symphonies are featured on
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Ravinia residency this
summer, and Alsop heads up the pack on July with the
world-moving Ninth, featuring the Chicago Symphony Chorus
and soloists soprano Tamara Wilson, mezzo-soprano Michelle
DeYoung, tenor Paul Appleby, and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo
Green. Gustavo Dudamel makes his eagerly awaited debut
leading the Seventh on July with an all-Beethoven program
that also features his longtime, equally starry collaborator Yuja
Wang performing the First Piano Concerto. Last, but not least,
of Ravinia’s triptych is the Fifth, fated to be feted in the hands
of Vasily Petrenko on August .
“If you read biographies,” observes Petrenko, “Beethoven
was doing a lot of things which were not conventional at the
time: by rumors, even running down the streets of Bonn na-
ked! But more important, he was always looking for something
new. It was also the time when, for the first time in world histo-
ry, classical music went from being mainly just the business of
the aristocracy and started to become almost for everyone, for
large crowds and large amounts of people.
“This is a man who in many ways we are obliged to for
the modern orchestra—what it is, how it looks, how many
instruments there are—because he was the one who was
constantly bringing new instruments into the orchestra. He
was the one who moved the genre of the symphony so much
forward, probably taking a lot of inspiration and novelty from
late Haydn quartets. He was a very unique composer, a very
unique human.”
than book learning for Alsop and Pet-
renko to develop their ultimate impressions of the composer.
Both can cite early experiences of Beethoven that held lasting
lessons.
“I grew up in a house filled with music,” Alsop recalls. “My
parents were both professional musicians, so Beethoven was
another member of the family. They played in a wonderful
string quartet, and I remember, when I was about 2 years old,
they were rehearsing a piece and I came downstairs and said,
‘Ah! I hate modern music!’ And my Dad said, ‘This is Beetho-
ven!’ I said, ‘Come on. Don’t pull my leg.’ And he said they
were rehearsing the
Grosse Fuge
. I thought it was new music
or Bartók or something. That was so shocking to me that it got
me starting to think about Beethoven in a new way. And of
course, my later experience of playing Beethoven’s late quartets
bore that out. So I think that it gave me a new framing to think
about Beethoven as the avant garde composer that he was.”
“I sang Beethoven as a boy in a choir, the Ninth, of course,”
Petrenko recalls. “Much later, when I had already started
conducting, Sir Georg Solti came to the Saint Petersburg Phil-
harmonic to conduct I think Brahms’s First Piano Concerto
and one of Beethoven’s symphonies—I can’t remember which
one; I think it was either the Fifth or the Seventh. The Saint
Petersburg Phil is an amazing orchestra, one of the greatest in
the world, but I would say that Beethoven and the First Vienna
School at that time wasn’t their strongest spot. They had a lot
of experience in Russian repertoire, and at that time—we’re
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