Reflecting Beethoven BY AL AN SWAIN
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hat a strange and unsettling 18 months it has been for everybody. At last concerts are happening with live audiences again. I reflect on the events of recent times as I begin the long drive from my house in Gloucestershire all the way down the M4, tracing the South coast of Wales to Pembrokeshire. 2020 was to be a big year for Beethoven, being 250 years since his birth. I wonder just how many concerts were cancelled last year? How have musicians around the world been coping with no income? Will we ever ‘get back to normal?’ Was the rupture so big that live music has changed forever? It’s 27 August 2021 and I’m driving to do a concert in St Davids Cathedral which features us playing two trombone quartets. Back in February, Welsh National Opera (WNO) broadcast a concert on Radio 3 from the excellent Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff. It was a Beethoven programme – a hangover from the previous year’s programming. The trombones played the Beethoven Drei Equali for four trombones. Roger Cutts, WNO principal trombone, had an idea of how we could use this broadcast to create a competition and increase the trombone quartet repertoire at the same time. He suggested to the student composers at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama that they compose a companion piece for the Beethoven Equali. We had six very different entries and the winner was chosen. Congratulations to Tomos Owen Jones for the winning
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entry, Three Equals for Trombone Quartet. And now I was on my way to St David’s, at the end of August, to perform the world première as part of a concert in the Fishguard Festival given by the Orchestra of WNO. Driving along I remember thinking about poor Beethoven. He wrote the trombone quartets in 1812. This means that if he wasn’t completely deaf by this point his hearing was certainly impaired. This must have been awful for him! Nowadays, especially with the help of things like the Paralympics, we have a deeper understanding of what it’s like being disabled. For Beethoven? Being a famous composer losing his hearing? And all at the beginning of the 19th century. No hearing aids, no occupational health, no insurance. It’s all a great contrast to today. As I continued past Cardiff on the M4 I started to think about other contrasts between then and now. We had been rehearsing Tomos’ piece that week and I started to compare his use of harmony with Beethoven’s. The modern one, as you might expect, was using much more dissonance. In addition, Tomos used a much wider dynamic range. There was a lovely fruity low B natural for me on the bass trombone. This note wasn’t even possible to reach on the trombones around in Beethoven’s time. I was looking forward to hearing that ringing around the cathedral. There were similarities too. Tomos carefully used similar voicing to the
