Brahms’s First Symphony: Vladimir Ashkenazy Conducts the Sydney Symphony, by Andrew Miller


This concert began with a complimentary morning tea with chocolate biscuits. Photo: Alan Miller.

Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House: 23 September 2011

Ludwig van Beethoven
Overture to the Creatures of Prometheus, opus 43

Johannes Brahms
Symphony no. 1 in C minor, opus 68

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Conductor - Vladimir Ashkenazy

The Creatures of Prometheus marked a happy intersection of artists in the history of ballet, being the only piece Beethoven composed specifically for the ballet, for Salvatore Viganò's 'dance-drama' which premièred in Vienna in 1801, near the peak of ballet's (neo)classical movement. Romanticism would not catch up and overthrow ballet for another generation or so, and many artists like Viganò still blew a fresh breeze of reform. He was the pupil of Jean Dauberval (known for choreographing the original version of La Fille Mal Gardée) who in turn had been the pupil of Jean-Georges Noverre, who is famous for his theoretical treatise on dance, Lettres sur la Danse which called for reform by advocating the ballet d'action: a return to a more natural kind of drama from the decorative, almost ceremonial sort of theatre of strung-together divertissements which could be very light on story and humanity. Viganò's practice of the ballet d'action, though none of his choreography survives, was said to manifest itself in a close cooperation of mime acting, dancing and music, and he did have high musical taste (later he created a larger and deeper Prometheus ballet to existing music by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Weigl). Unlike Mozart, we don't have very much music of Beethoven's that was written for the theatre, but from his Prometheus score one can sense how exciting it would have been to see the curtain go up on that night of 28 March 1801. In fact it was a little cruel to play just the overture (the full piece consists of 18 scenes) and then leave listeners hanging. 

Read the full review
 on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








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