NZSO Music Director Edo de Waart. Photo / Stephen A'Court
When Pietari Inkinen and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra brought us a complete Beethoven symphonic cycle in 2014, it was coolly packaged as Beethoven: The Symphonies.
Five years on, with Edo de Waart at the helm, it is now an extensively marketed Beethoven Festival, with each instalment allotted a catchy
title — a ploy that has made for healthy houses and a sold-out final night.
First up, the Heroic concert took its name from its closing Eroica Symphony and was a dramatic, if lengthy, journey through Beethoven's first three symphonic ventures, composed between 1795 and 1804.
De Waart's Eroica was appropriately monumental. His pleasure in following through the inexhaustible thematic ingenuity of its first movement was palpable. The funeral march was sonorous on a Mahlerian scale of intensity, the scherzo's horn trio a whooping delight and the finale conquered terrifying storms to end in triumph.
The origins of this ground-breaking score had been laid out before interval; particularly in the sumptuous canvas of the Second Symphony's Adagio molto and the expert navigation of the Larghetto's chameleon-like transformations.
