Halfway through the Phoenix Symphony Beethoven Festival, the marks are looking good.
The first week has given us a genuinely great performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, very good performances of his Eroica and Pastoral symphonies, and a passable First Symphony.
Concertmaster Steven Moeckel performed the violin concerto Thursday night at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts and demonstrated perfect focus: Every note was lovingly cared for - and that's a lot of notes.
His playing showed that he had thought deeply about the music and understood it and felt it. He wasn't just playing because he's a musician and that's what musicians do: He played it like he had something to say.
His tone was beautiful where it needed to be and forceful when that was called for, his tempos infinitely flexible, making his phrasing hit the exact rhetorical tone required.
The concerto is one of the most difficult in the repertoire, not merely because of its technical challenges, but because Beethoven used it to address cosmic issues. The first movement finds the violin as protagonist like a Sufi mystic whirling across the more stable and conventional music of the orchestra, a kind of ecstasy against drumbeats of reality. In the meditative second movement, the violinist brings time to a halt and faces eternity. And in the finale, the violin finally begins to play the tunes itself, and partakes of the dance, like Shiva dancing the world into existence. And dance becomes the metaphor for partaking of the movement of life.
Of course, this is all metaphor: I'm not suggesting that this is what Beethoven meant in a literal sense, but both this description and Beethoven's music serve as metaphor for something large and otherwise inexpressible.
Moeckel played the music as if he understood this metaphor and had completely internalized it. Conductor Michael Christie and the orchestra followed Moeckel with tremendous sensitivity.
He played the concerto again at the matinee the next day, and while the violinist was just as committed, the orchestra sounded a bit more raw in the different acoustic of Symphony Hall.
The Thursday concert concluded with the Pastoral Symphony, which Christie conducted with considerable flexibility and at mainstream tempi. The horns, in particular, showed themselves proud.
At Friday's evening concert, things began with a lackluster First Symphony that was more than a bit string-heavy, obscuring some of the clever little bits of wind writing that give the piece so much of its wit.
But, after the intermission, the orchestra came back with an energetic Eroica that might not have quite found the lofty ideals in the music, but was nevertheless exciting. Again, Christie played with mainstream tempi, abjuring the sometimes irrational speed of the metronome markings Beethoven assigned his symphonies late in his life and after the fact.
His speeds were at the quick end of mainstream, but not nearly so insane as many recent recordings that promise to give us what Beethoven "really meant."
Altogether, this was a wonderful front end to a two-week dive into the music of Saint Ludwig of Bonn.
The festival concludes this week with Symphonies 7 and 8 and several shorter pieces, including an orchestral arrangement of the Grosse Fuge.
Reach the reporter at firstname.lastname@example.org or 602-444-8823.
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