Richard Tognetti and his troops play happy birthday to Beethoven

Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra launched its season with a fitting tribute to birthday boy Beethoven.

Richard Tognetti and the ACO played the first three symphonies of Beethoven. Picture: Julian Kingma.

There will be no getting away from the music of Beethoven throughout this year when the world celebrates the 250th anniversary of his birth.

As a composer he is a Colossus bestriding the Classical and Romantic schools, turning music on its head and making it hard for anyone coming after him, but also opening up artistic avenues for a whole new generation of musicians.

As a man he was problematical, sometimes mistaken for a tramp, eccentric, cranky and deaf, but capable of immense understanding of the human spirit. As he said himself, “There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven”.

For the Australian Chamber Orchestra it’s a double celebration, marking the 30th anniversary since artistic director Richard Tognetti took over the helm and cemented its reputation as the finest band of its kind in the world.

To mark the double event the ACO is opening its seasons with the first three symphonies played back to back, enabling audiences to chart Beethoven’s development as an innovator and revolutionary over three short years.

The orchestra’s numbers are augmented for the tour by students from Melbourne’s Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) alongside some guest principals from European orchestras.

FAVOURITE

Beethoven’s teacher Joseph Haydn may well have been in the audience for the 1801 premiere of his pupil’s first symphony and he would have been impressed. But from the opening chord in the “wrong” key, it’s clear that the young man is prepared to stretch, if not break, the boundaries of the classical symphony templates of Haydn and Mozart.

Tognetti says, perhaps surprisingly, that this is his favourite of the nine symphonies. Beethoven, on the other hand, was most taken with his Eroica symphony, the mighty third, until he wrote his even mightier ninth.

Dedicated to Napoleon before the composer furiously scratched out “Bonaparte” on the title page when he declared himself emperor, this 44-minute masterpiece left the music world changed forever. It made a fitting end to a concert in which Tognetti paid heed to Beethoven’s metronome markings in the score but managed to stamp his own mark on each work, aided by some magnificent musicmaking from the upsized ACO.

The concert is repeated at City Recital Hall on Friday, February 14, at 1.30pm; Saturday, February 15, at 7pm and Sunday, February 16, at 2pm.

DETAILS

● CONCERT Australian Chamber Orchestra Beethoven 1, 2 & 3

● WHERE City Recital Hall Angel Place

● WHEN Wednesday, February 12