(orchestral music) - This is a production of WEDU PBS.

Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Funding for Inside the Music Beethoven Symphony Number 7, with the Florida Orchestra is provided by William and Suzanne Garth, Charlene and Mardy Gordon, Barry and Judith Albert and Family, Hough Family Foundation and by contributions to this PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Hello, I'm Paul Grove, president and CEO of WEDU PBS.

- And I'm Mark Cantrell, president and CEO of the Florida Orchestra.

- And joining us from his home studio is Florida Orchestra Music Director, Michael Francis.

- Welcome to this special presentation of Inside the Music with the Florida Orchestra.

- WEDU is committed to the arts and we're proud to partner with one of the most vibrant orchestras in the country and the largest performing arts organization in Tampa Bay.

We share the same goal of enriching the lives of all the people in the West Central Florida community.

We are delighted to bring you this presentation of the Florida Orchestra's inspiring performance of Beethoven Symphony Number 7.

- This performance of Beethoven was chosen to open the orchestra's re-imagined 2021 season in response to COVID-19.

Filmed live at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg, you'll notice a different layout onstage.

Our musicians use of social distancing does not detract from their brilliant performance.

Against all odds, we were able to bring live symphonic music to our community because music always finds a way.

- The Florida Orchestra exists to meet the ever-changing needs of our community and become a therapeutic safe haven where people find connection, comfort, meaning, hope and inspiration through music.

The healing power of music has the ability to soothe the mind, stir the soul and celebrate the human spirit.

This concert is a celebration of Beethoven's 250th birthday and it reminds us of what unites us all as human beings.

I invite you to listen deeper as we explore what's inside the music.

(orchestral music) Welcome to this Inside the Music look at Beethoven Symphony Number 7.

This symphony as a result of the great romantic composer, Richard Wagner calling it the apotheosis of the dance has been regarded as a rather lighthearted, a brilliant joyous affair but actually there's a great deal more going on.

And I would like to take you on this narrative journey through this epic and majestic symphony.

Beethoven wrote this piece in 1811, 1812, by which point he was 41 turning 42 and already profoundly deaf.

Vienna, where he lived at the time had been invaded by Napoleon numerous times.

Indeed, Beethoven wrote of often carrying in the corner feeling the drums and the guns and the battle moving towards him in his being as 'cause of course he couldn't hear things in a way that normal people are able to.

The symphony was actually dedicated in memory of soldiers who died at the regional battle of Hanau and those soldiers who'd been wounded and injured to help raise money for those.

And so the symphony begins with these huge architectural plints, these epic huge chords that come down and around it we hear this songbird singing a beautiful line in the oboe joined by the clarinets.

But with these huge chords, it almost feels as if these woodwinds are imprisoned or caged almost like a cathedral with stain glass window giving us glimpses of beauty but within this huge architecture.

The music then dissipates down and we hear these unusual scales, very unmusical rather mechanical reminding us that around this time, industrialization was really taking off a man's capacity to turn technology into military.

Terrifying instruments of destruction was of course, unparalleled in its development at that time.

And as the music then contrasts in this big, long slow introduction, this military iron reverted music alongside his beautiful natural nature song, we feel this juxtaposition of the human spirit.

(slow orchestral music) So Beethoven then continues this long, epic slow introduction to this symphony where there's battle that I've just mentioned.

So how do you then transition from this?

Well, the depth of psychology that he's already shown here into the far section which will be the main body of the first movement, what Beethoven does separates him from the main mortals.

It shows his genius and his courage.

He distills the music down to a single note, to 1-e which has just given back and forth between flute, oboe and the violins as if a microscope zooms right in to the DNA of something and then it comes back out.

And when we start the Allegro, we find it's rather tentative as the flute takes us on this rhythm, bump ba da, bump ba da bump, military but also dancing into the next passage of music.

A brilliant example of Beethoven's extraordinary courage and ingenuity with composition.

(slow orchestral music) So Beethoven then continues to take this tiny sound bump ba da, bump ba da bumb, this little rhythm and he extrapolates it into the most extraordinary psychological depth moments of utter joy in a brilliance, followed by this deep cathartic grief and pain and darkness.

How he uses one little idea for all of this is utterly genius.

And when we come to the end of the first movement, this is usually the passage of music that the composer would just, it's called the coder would just finished with a little flourish and off it go to the next movements.

But Beethoven has saved the best for last.

It was once described, this music was, as if it was for the asylum.

Somebody wrote about the premiere.

And here he takes the basses on this almost psychotic, vice-like grip of his circling idea going back and forth a little bit OCD underneath and everyone else is desperately trying to move towards the climax, but the basses hold him in this grip until the very very end and you think, come on, let us go, let us into the climax, and the horns erupt and we finished with this outrageous joy at the end of it.

But it's precisely that moment of darkness holding us back is what makes the ending so powerful.

(bright orchestral music) What a finish to the first movement.

There's a great quote by George Bernard Shaw, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Beethoven has shown how unreasonable he can be.

The second movement was one of the greatest successes of Beethoven's career.

In fact, at the premiere people loved it so much they asked for it to be performed again immediately.

And it has been beloved by so many people ever since.

The recent film "The King's Speech" has of course, that famous speech at the end of it accompanied by the second movement.

And in the first movement, Beethoven took us through this bump ba da, bump ba ba bump, this little rhythm and here he does the same thing with a rhythmic sound, long, short, short, long, long which permeates all the way through, beginning divided in the low strings, a dark ominous color to it.

There's an inexorable sense of fate pulling us along with this trudging, almost funeral cortege.

(slow somber orchestral music) So after this beginning, a beautiful cantor lane in a melody appears in the violas and divided cellos which is then passed to the second violins and we head up to our first climax of the second movement.

Listen carefully to this passage of music because what Beethoven's does is extraordinary.

We have the first violins with his wonderful melody now desperately crying out, the only melodic voice in this the winds and the horns are with the same long, short, short, long, long.

The trumpets and the tympanies are trying to find their way with is unusual and out of place cadences.

The second violins in twos, but yet the violas, cellos, basses are in threes.

So we have this jump, jikadumb, jump, jikadumb like a giant machine, almost like a tank moving forward, crushing everything in its wake and the first violin is crying out desperately seeking for some sort of sense of hope.

To me, it almost feels like dusty husky being led to the gulag with this huge industrial machine crushing all in its wake 'cause this melody desperately tries to be heard.

Music of the unimaginable power that we're about to hear.

(bright orchestral music) So after that devastating climax, the music heads into the major key before it goes back to this bizarre requiem, another foray into the major key.

And at the end of the second movement, it's as if the emotion that we're trying to hold is too powerful.

And the music fractures and disintegrates and it gets passed in between voices that if, as if not one person can carry the whole thing on their own anymore.

An extraordinary psychological use of instrumentation to show the emotion Beethoven wanted to master.

So then in the third movement, at this point, this should be lighthearted victorious affair it's called a scherzo.

Scherzo was the Italian word for joke, a very fast minuet.

One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, perhaps a victory, perhaps a drinking song.

But what happens is interesting because Beethoven shows us this incredibly fast variety between loud and soft dynamics.

And also there's a sense of kind of almost post-traumatic stuff going on with the woodwinds and strings where it goes very quiet out of the blue before this dance kicks up.

Really dramatic, powerful music, it's a joke, but it's not a funny one, it's a slightly awkward dare I say, uncomfortable joke.

(lively orchestral music) So after that music in the scherzo, Beethoven takes us into the trio.

And the trio, it's almost as if we've arrived in a beautiful ideal in arcadia, all is well with the world, or is it?

For in the second half of this stunningly and peaceful ideal, the second horn takes us into this rather threatening little world.

If this was indeed a water scene what you would hear in the second horn is a John Williams, as depiction of the shark.

When you hear it, you'll know what I mean.

The structure of this movement is as follows, scherzo, trio, scherzo.

But when he brings it back, it's much quieter.

Beethoven varies the dynamics.

Most composers wouldn't do that.

His genius means he would.

Then trio, then scherzo, and you think, we're stuck in this cycle we're never gonna get out but at the very end, he pays a wonderful joke and we find ourselves thrust into the beginning of the fourth movement.

And here this helter skelter kaleidoscope of bustling energy, swirling, dancing, incredible pace jumps out from us, extreme effervescence from the string players, very very tiring to play but vigorous and energetic apparently, is based upon an Irish folklore called Nora Crane that Beethoven found in a folk song book.

I'm not entirely convinced but here's Jeffrey multi-concertmaster, demonstrating it for you just in case you'd like to know.

(lively orchestral music) Thank you Jeffrey.

Now let's see what Beethoven does with this.

As after these little opening fanfares, he swirls us around like a whirling dervish until we feel dizzy and out of kilter, such exciting exhilarating music.

(lively orchestral music) So after that incredibly exciting beginning to the fourth movement, we are lulled into a false sense of security that all is well with the world.

And Beethoven takes this incredibly fast music but yet thrust us almost brutally into times of strength and discomfort and argument before always coming back to that opening fast dance.

But at the very end of the symphony, the end of this movement, Beethoven saves the greatest aspect of his compositional genius.

The denudement of the piece of music.

At this point, you'll hear the winds tossing this Nora Crane Irish dance melody around fast paced between each other, rather cruelly.

The winds in this corral trying to find their way out almost ecclesiastically searching an answer.

The horns, trumpets and trumpet and tympani stuck out of kilter not sure where they were and the cellos and basses taking us down like the end of the first movement to the very bottom holding us again in the wrong place.

And as we find our way up towards a climax we think we arrived with the horns but the basses have not let us go yet.

But eventually, Beethoven brings everything together.

He is the master of the delay climax.

And all that we're been through in this symphony, just comes together in one perfect moment of utter joy.

This is that great goosebumps moment that only classical music can give you.

It is extraordinary finish to this wonderful exciting symphony.

We have found something hopeful, but why?

Because we persevered through the difficult times.

(bright orchestral music) So we didn't give you the entire climax that time, you're gonna have to hear the whole performance to really get that wonderful moment.

But this piece, as I tried to explain it the very beginning is so much more than just being about a dance.

Beethoven had the great courage to see the world as it was.

Then he had the unreasonable strength of character to bend it to what he thought it should be.

And as we play under COVID conditions, social distance, CDC guidelines as an orchestra with masks on, we recognize that this has been a year of tremendous trial and tribulation.

And like all great pieces of art, Beethoven gives us hope, gives us perseverance, guides us to face those difficulties head on and never give up.

Thank you very much.

Please enjoy the concert.

♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ ♪ (orchestral music) ♪ - Funding for Inside the Music, Beethoven Symphony with the Florida orchestra was provided by William and Suzanne Garth, Charlene and Mardy Gordon, Barry and Judith Alpert and Family Hough Family Foundation, and by contributions to this PBS station from viewers like you, thank you.

(bright orchestral music)