The importance of transcriptions and arrangements as a means of disseminating music in the nineteenth century has been the focus of a number of studies in recent years. Among others, Nancy November, Marie Sumner Lott and Mark Everist have demonstrated how arrangements made the canon accessible to amateurs, while Jonathan Kregor has explored their use as virtuoso showpieces.Footnote 1 Performers have also begun to explore arrangements, sometimes as an exercise in historically informed interpretation, or as a means to expand their repertoire to composers that would otherwise be inaccessible for reasons for genre, instrumentation, or neglect.Footnote 2 The Covid 19 pandemic no doubt encouraged some of these activities, as musicians sought alternative ways to play together. That they have continued in similar vein suggests that playing chamber arrangements of large-scale repertoire fulfils an urge to engage with music differently: from the inside, through playing; or, perhaps, because of the illicit thrill of being unfaithful to the score.
The series of recordings of ‘Beethoven for Three’ recently released by the star ensemble of pianist Emmanuel Ax, violinist Leonidas Kavakos, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, presents a different angle on the status of arrangements of nineteenth-century music in the twenty-first century. These are definitely not amateurs nor are they exploring unknown repertoire but rather the firmly canonical: the three albums released so far comprise symphonies 2, 4, 5, 6, and the Piano Trios Op. 1 no. 3 and Op. 97.Footnote 3 What’s more, they are not using nineteenth-century arrangements exclusively: while the arrangement of the Second Symphony is attributed to Ferdinand Ries, ‘under the supervision of the composer’, the Fifth was commissioned from British composer Colin Matthews in 2021, and the Fourth and Sixth from Israeli pianist Shai Wosner.
Frustratingly little information is provided about the project in the CD booklets.Footnote 4 There are no programme notes or even a statement explaining how the recordings came about, although in an interview with the Washington Post, Ax recalled a conversation with Ma during the pandemic being ‘our chance to play things like the Beethoven symphonies for a small group’ and acknowledged that was how these pieces first became known.Footnote 5 Publicity materials proclaim that the recordings ‘erase the border between orchestral and chamber music’.Footnote 6 Ma subsequently expanded for The Strad magazine:
One of the things that has separated people since recording began is the categories that we put people in, in which chamber musicians, orchestra players, people who play concertos, people who do transcriptions, people who compose, people who conduct, are all viewed as separate categories with no overlap. That siloed thinking discourages actual creativity and collaboration between people.
We feel that one of the things that is really important to do today is to actually go back to the first principles of music, the simple interaction between friends who want to do something together.Footnote 7
Ma’s call to dissolve the silo mentality of the classical music industry perhaps is more unusual than the notion that friendship is fundamental to music-making. Chamber compositions and performance routinely have been discussed in terms of friendship and the socially bonding practice of conversation, especially as a way to interpret the musical discourse of Viennese classicism.Footnote 8 By advocating a returning to ‘first principles’, Ma presents the Beethoven for Three project as a prelapsarian venture in classical music as it used to be, before record company catalogues constrained performers to certain lists and the curricula of educational institutions became increasingly specialist.
Ma’s words also call to mind another of his projects, which might seem far removed from playing Beethoven but may in fact be closer in spirit than at first appears. The Silk Road Ensemble, founded in 2000, brings together musicians from a wide range of global musical traditions for the purpose of ‘cultural exchange, learning and understanding’.Footnote 9 While there is a formality to the Silk Road Ensemble concerts that Tim Rutherford-Johnson ascribes to the Western classical tradition, he observes that:
in other respects it isn’t ‘classical’ at all. There are many differences in the way that the music is created (with a heavy reliance on arrangements of traditional melodies over original compositions) and performed (with the more vernacular ethos of individual performers working together and expressing themselves as such rather than giving themselves over to the autonomous demands of the composer’s intentions).Footnote 10
Of course, as already mentioned, in the nineteenth century there was also a ‘heavy reliance’ on arrangements and performers took far greater liberties with scores than since became customary. The kinds of dialogues opened up by Beethoven for Three might not only be between classical genres but between global music practices. The next generation of historically informed performance is born – mainstream and multi-cultural. Unfortunately, on their recent European tour, the Ax, Kavakos and Ma only programmed the Piano Trios by Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms (an arrangement of John Williams’s Theme from Schindler’s List notwithstanding) rather than the Beethoven symphony arrangements. This ‘simple’ music-making between friends is reserved for the recording studio, to be consumed on domestic and personal sound systems.
How, then, is the listener expected to engage with these recordings? Peter Szendy conceives arrangements as ‘a listening. Their [the arranger’s] hearing of a work’.Footnote 11 On listening to an arrangement, ‘we are hearing double’ (Szendy’s emphasis).Footnote 12 Our original experience of the piece is tested by being heard through the arrangement.Footnote 13 The familiar is made strange, but there can be something wondrous about that fresh encounter. On listening to a recording of an arrangement, or at least of these symphony arrangements, it is possible also to imagine that we are hearing triple, through the performances by Ax, Kavakos and Ma. For a delight of these recordings is the sense of surprise – for the players and their audience – when a theme or texture is rendered differently from the symphonic version.
Despite those differences, these are not radical arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies; they do not tamper with the musical material or, for the most part, use techniques that would have been beyond the ken of players during the composer’s lifetime. Ax, Kavakos and Ma play with the full, technicolour sound of their generation, enabled by the modern set-up of their prestige instruments. While they might be aware that earlier musicians played arrangements, there is nothing ‘period’ about their approach. There are few indications either that Ax, Kavakos and Ma intend to imitate the original instrumentation; there is no evident alteration in timbre or phrasing to evoke an oboe, say. By contrast their recordings of Beethoven’s ‘actual’ Piano Trios is rich with expressive nuances of rubato and variations in vibrato and bow strokes. The design of the music to fit within the confines of the ensemble is thereby revealed. These are not especially polished or careful performances of Op. 1 no. 3 and Op. 97; they emit a feeling of the ensemble comfortable with each other and the repertoire, rather than laying down their definitive take. Surprisingly, there are some issues with balance: Kavakos is especially prominent, both in volume and emphatic interpretation, and in comparison, the cello sits rather in the background. While Ax’s flourishes enliven the piano trios – the finale of Op. 1 no. 3 is thrillingly fast and commanding – the arrangements tend to cast the piano in subsidiary roles, ‘filling in’ brass and tutti sections.
Another aspect the recordings of the symphony arrangements highlight are the interpretative liberties available to chamber rather than orchestral musicians. More time can be taken over prominent melodies when they are played by instruments that, unlike woodwind, do not need to breathe. A soloist can phrase things more freely than the leader of an orchestral section. Textures rendered in single lines suddenly reveal how similar, structurally, a symphony can be to a piano trio. Strikingly, lyricism abounds. For example, there is an added tenderness to the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony, as orchestrated by Matthews;Footnote 14 the single lines of the violin and cello, and their passages doubling each other, are especially affecting. There is a danger that in the loud, tutti sections of the movement the piano’s tremolando chords, or the strings’ split chords, will sound like more hackneyed arrangements. Similar textures are present in the slow movement of the ‘Ghost’ Trio, Op. 70 no. 1, composed the year after the Fifth Symphony, but there they seem like special, spectral effects, rather than substitutes for other, human forces. The generic divide – that border between orchestral and chamber music that Ma decried in interview – is somehow reinforced on listening to the later movements of the Fourth Symphony arrangement. The busy, layered textures, rather than recalling Beethoven’s orchestra, instead seem to forecast the piano and string chamber music of Mendelssohn and Brahms.
Not all aspects of the arrangements are gains. The contrasts between full orchestral chords, woodwinds and strings, that lend excitement to the opening of the Second and Fourth Symphonies, sound sparse, even hollow, when reduced to piano, violin, and cello. There are challenges to playing music that is not idiomatic for the instruments. By the finale of the Fifth Symphony, the warm elegance of the playing in the earlier movements is thrown off: Ax, Kavakos and Ma crash through the Allegro with a terrific sense of enjoyment. A similar situation arises in the rustic and pictorial third and fourth movements of the Sixth Symphony. Beethoven’s music here demands bigger forces and faster-moving fingers than are available – even in the hands of such renowned instrumentalists. That was, as acknowledged earlier, the function of arrangements in the nineteenth century: to access music by alternative means. And there is a generosity of spirit in Ax, Kavakos and Ma, sharing their passion for making music together. Yet it is not those exuberant, bursting-at-the-seams arrangements that I would listen to more than once or twice. Rather, I would return to the moments where I hear in the chamber music version something that makes me hear the original symphony anew, such as Wosner’s arrangement of the finale of the Sixth Symphony. For once, he goes beyond what an early nineteenth-century arranger would imagine, initially presenting the opening theme in harmonics and, as the movement progresses, discovering limpid figurations that allow the joy of playing the music as a piano trio to shine through.
