''Throw away your first 100 Beethoven Fifths'' was Karajan's advice to Simon Rattle. ''That leaves me 95 still to go,'' he remarked with a rueful smile the other day. The remark wasn't meant personally, of course; it was simply a dramatic way of saying what an an extraordinarily difficult piece it is, the more so in an age when a lot of aspiring young conductors never get to know what the Germans call the Handwerk: the nuts and bolts of conducting.
Franz Welser-Most knows all about Handwerk; clearly, though, his is not the kind of aspiring young talent that is going to allow itself to be circumscribed by grey-bearded advice. Like Karajan himself, he would have conducted Beethoven's Fifth at the age of five if someone had put up an orchestra. One down 99 to go.
Which raises the question, where in the general scheme of things are we expected to place this live, one-off, budget-price, special edition CD single? It begins with a direct and finely-sprung account of the first movement and ends in an accelerating blaze of excitement, topped off with the kind of raucous ovation that accelerating blazes of excitement are generally expected induce. It is a performance that will probably go down a treat with the kids. And if that sounds patronizing, it is not meant to be. Better an adrenalin-pumping Fifth than a dyed-in-the-wool sub-Klempererish one.
Ten years on, Welser-Most will almost certainly have found ways of of playing the Fifth even more powerfully. He will have found ways of concentrating the musical charge so as to make it continuous, rather than—as is occasionally the case here—manufacturing it to the needs of certain critical moments. (At least he knows where they are.) The eerie transition from Scherzo to finale may take on more specific colours; he may find it possible to feel the slow movement in a single pulse.
In brief, this Fifth has the words carpe diem written all over it. It is pretty well played by the LPO, very well recorded; and the audience (until the end) is reasonably unobtrusive. A Fifth to be judged in the spirit in which I suspect it is offered. '