Premier concert w/Beethoven on keyboard...

I wasn't going to post this until after the concert, since you never know what's going to happen. This is a snip from the New Mexico Symphony program notes page for the Beethoven Piano Concerto, which they are doing in March. Now that our performance has past, I thought you might get a kick out of reading their write-up on the premier concert:

"What a shambles it must have been that December night in Vienna. 1808, if memory served. Bloody hopeless patrons, under-rehearsed players, a dim and shivering audience. And which bright spark imagined it a good idea to premiere the Fifth and the mighty Pastoral on the same night? Plus the Fourth Concerto? Plus the Choral Fantasia. Four hours in an unheated hall. No wonder it was a disaster. Nowadays, with a decent agent, a diligent manager--or better still, with an enlightened patron who might dispel the need for these grubbing ten-per-centers... Sir Jack felt for the mighty Ludwig, he truly did."

- from England, England by Julian Barnes

Such were the conditions at the first performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto, during a massive concert devoted to Beethoven's music at Vienna's Theater an der Wein. The concert was marred by a tragi-comic series of accidents. Beethoven was performing the piano solo part but as Louis Spohr recalled: "at the first tutti, forgetting that he was the soloist, he jumped up and began to conduct in his own peculiar fashion. At the first sforzando he threw out his arms so wide that he knocked over both the lamps from the music stand of the piano. The audience laughed, and Beethoven was so beside himself over this that he stopped the orchestra and made them start over again. Ignaz von Seyfried, worried for fear this would happen again in the same place, took the precaution of ordering two boys from the chorus to stand next to Beethoven and hold the lamps in their hands. One of them innocently stepped closer to follow the music from the piano part, but when the fatal sforzando burst forth, the poor boy received such a sharp slap in the face from Beethoven's right hand that he dropped the lamp on the floor. The other boy, more wary, succeeded in avoiding the blow by ducking in time. If the audience had laughed the first time, they now indulged in a bacchanalian riot. Beethoven was in such a fury that when he struck the first chord of the solo entrance he broke six strings. After this incident, Beethoven wanted to give no more concerts."

Sometimes our perceptions of an 'icon' keeps us from remembering that they are simply... human... Here's the full program notes page.

Good job, everyone! R