Symphony review: In Beethoven vs. AI, the clear winner is the master as original scores capture depth and realness
At his lecture prior to Saturday’s Spokane Symphony performance, Music Director and Conductor James Lowe was joined on the stage of the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox by Grant Erickson, CEO of IntelliTect, a local company providing businesses with software design and consultation in artificial intelligence, and Mateusz Wolski, concertmaster of the orchestra. Erickson, whose company was the principal sponsor of the concert, was there to speak and answer questions about the use of AI in the arts, a topic germane to the upcoming performances thanks to Mr. Lowe’s imaginative and thought-provoking programming.
In fact, two of the works on the program were conventional, as they were both by Beethoven: the Overture to his ballet, “The Creatures of Prometheus” (1801), and his Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major Op. 55, subtitled “Eroica.” What was not conventional was the decision to include two works created by people other than Beethoven, who are not composers and who based their work on sketches found in Beethoven’s papers after his death for an unfinished symphony in E-flat major. Had Beethoven lived to complete the work, it would have been his “Tenth Symphony.” One group engaged in this intriguing, but questionable, undertaking employed Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence in part for IntelliTect’s involvement. The company also created an internet/cellphone system for polling audience reaction during the performances on Saturday and Sunday.
During the preconcert lecture, an audience member asked: “Can you tell us what real music is?”
Without hesitating, Lowe responded that the only means of providing an answer was embedded in the concert to come.
Lowe made a particularly brilliant and successful decision to open the concert with the overture Beethoven wrote for his solitary ballet score, “The Creatures of Prometheus.” The ballet portrays in music and dance the classical myth of the titan Prometheus, who wished to turn lifeless mud into a race of intelligent, benevolent beings by exposing the mud to wisdom and knowledge concerned with matters formerly known only to the gods: civic culture and the arts. Humanity, then, is made up of Prometheus’ “creatures”; that is to say us, and the latter day Prometheus is, of course, Beethoven, who was endowed by supernatural powers with the ability to shine light into our darkness and allow us to rise to a higher level of wisdom and goodness.
The overture itself provides an excellent illustration of Beethoven’s method and style of composition. Apart from a brief lyrical introduction, the piece contains hardly a scrap of material that is memorable in itself, yet it provides its listeners with a tremendously exciting and satisfying experience, thanks to the brilliance and imagination with which Beethoven develops his instrumental writing that is at once often surprising, yet, at the same time, seemingly inevitable.
This is exactly the quality Leonard Bernstein had in mind when he observed that the quality of inevitability defined Beethoven’s music: “Rightness – that’s the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant, in that context, then chances are you’re listening to Beethoven.”
It is precisely this sense of “rightness” that permeates the Prometheus Overture, and is almost wholly missing from the speculative “completions” of the Tenth Symphony, computer-aided or not. As a way to satisfy one’s curiosity, listening to them may provide some pleasure. If one desires more than this, one may seek out even the very slightest of the compositions Beethoven saw through to publication.
Beyond Bernstein’s criterion of “rightness” lies the hotly contended concept of “meaning” in music. Though Beethoven’s music may sometimes be puzzling and complex, it always seems to mean something. We sense a through-line of intentionality that binds one note or one phrase or one movement convincingly to another. The notes, phrases and movements of the “Tenth Symphony,” on the other hand, are uniformly, and sometimes infuriatingly unrelated to one another, producing a pervading sense of meaninglessness.
If the woman in the audience at the preconcert lecture wanted a perfect example of “real” (i.e. meaningful) music, she needed only to wait for the final work on the program: the “Eroica” Symphony, perhaps the most thoroughly coherent and convincingly meaningful item in the canon of Western music. The full extent and detail of its significance is, of course, indefinable and will always be open to controversy. Placed as it was by James Lowe on this program, and performed as it was by him and the Spokane Symphony, it plainly re-enacted the myth of Prometheus (Beethoven) as he struggles to bring light from heaven to benighted humanity .
As he did again in his Fifth and, most obviously, his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven in his Third dramatizes the plight of an artist struggling with musical material that stubbornly refuses to serve his purpose as a vessel for transmitting his message of benevolence and enlightenment. In the final movement of each of these works, Beethoven comes upon – or has delivered into his hands – the musical grail he had been seeking. In the Fifth Symphony, it is a simple C major triad. In the Ninth, of course, it is a melody that suits Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” And in the “Eroica,” it proves to be a melody from his score to “The Creatures of Prometheus,” what else?
One problem that results from the shortcomings of the “Beethoven’s Tenth” completions is that they make it difficult to appreciate fully the skill and quality with which they were performed. It is hard to feel gratified by the excellent rendition of passages as awkward and disappointing as those that litter those scores.
There was no such difficulty with the “Eroica,” conducted by Lowe and performed by the Spokane Symphony with a degree of alertness and commitment, allied with a precise observation of Beethoven’s printed intentions, that could serve as a model of orchestral performance at the highest level. We were treated by Maestro Lowe and company on New Year’s Eve to a thrilling rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in which one’s gratitude and excitement were very slightly tempered by a wish that the conductor had been a little less relentless in observing Beethoven’s very fast, and widely disputed tempo indications. There was no room for such quibbling on Saturday night, when opportunity for expression and nuance was kept in perfect balance with the impulsive forward motion so essential to the piece.
Even to ears acquainted with hundreds of performances of this work, Lowe managed to reveal to a degree formerly unrealized the crucial importance the role played by the woodwinds – flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon – in this monumental work. It was as though Beethoven allowed us to see most deeply into the soul of the work through those parts, and especially through the playing of oboist Keith Thomas and flautist Julia Pyke. Every time, it seemed, the music most wanted to move us, to lift our hearts or dash our hopes, to bring on clouds or clear them, it was their playing we heard. The warmth and pathos conjured by Thomas in his crucial solo passages in the Second Movement, and the jaw-dropping agility exhibited by Pyke throughout the “Prometheus Variations” will live long in memory.