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Beethoven!
May. 10th, 2009 05:11 am
The exhibit traipses around the Beethoven Center, and the lobby of Special Collections just outside it, on the fifth (da-da-da-dum) floor of the library. Beethoven's birthday isn't till December, but the exhibit runs through the end of July. Lots of original and enlarged reproduction Peanuts strips featuring Schroeder and his piano, with commentary on the music he's playing. If you get the audio tour headsets, you can press buttons and hear a performance of the very bars of score that Schulz carefully reproduces in each strip. Clearly, having his concentration on Beethoven's beautiful music interrupted by Lucy's chattering is responsible for Schroeder's irascible responses.
There's also a lot incidentally on Beethoven himself, some of it drawn from the strips. In one, Schroeder informs Lucy that Beethoven's favorite dish was macaroni and cheese, a factoid Schulz drew from a Beethoven biography he'd just read. (Schroeder goes on to say that anyone who aims to win his heart had better be able to make good macaroni and cheese, to which a dismayed Lucy replies, "How did Beethoven feel about cold cereal?")
Lucy might not be able to make Beethoven's macaroni and cheese, but I did, for dinner the next evening. There was a flyer with the recipe, adapted from a Viennese cookbook of the time by the curator of the Beethoven Center. You can make your own spaetzle or use dry pasta; I took the easy route. After cooking 10 oz. of pasta, toss it with oil and seasonings, spread it out in a large casserole pan, grate half a pound of Parmesan* over it (and it had better be strong Italian Parmesan, because half a pound turns out not to be very much cheese by mac-and-cheese standards), and bake at 400 for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, caramelize two sweet onions. (Here is the only place the recipe goes wrong, because you can't possibly caramelize onions in 20 minutes; it takes at least 40, and even then mine were underdone.) Spread over the pasta, and it's dinner.
I happened to be at the exhibit on Thursday (Brahms's birthday, not that anyone noted the fact), intending to stay only briefly, but I got waylaid when handed a flyer announcing a Beethoven Marathon at the Center that afternoon. Gwendolyn Mok's SJSU class in Beethoven piano sonatas was putting on a class project: each student would play part or all of one of the sonatas. Of course I stayed for as much as I could. Some of the students were advanced, but most muddled their way through; this was no senior recital. A couple of them did something I'd never heard before even at a student recital: they'd get stuck, and back up a couple bars to make another run at it. However, I got to hear the whole of Op. 10 No. 2, my favorite of the early sonatas, played in a tag-team manner by two of the students.
Then, last night, to Symphony Silicon Valley to hear Gregory Vajda conduct Beethoven's Fourth, the neglected stepchild among Beethoven's mature symphonies. It's not the Eroica or the Pastoral or the Ode to Joy or the apotheosis of the dance or the one that goes da-da-da-dum or the one with the metronome tick-tock in it, it's the other one, the one that's just a Beethoven symphony, nothing more. Or nothing less, either. There is no such thing as a minor Beethoven symphony: this performance amply proved that. Great use of crescendos, absolutely splendid. And pianist Jon Kimura Parker, there to play a Shostakovich concerto, offered as encore the finale of Beethoven's "Appassionata" Sonata. He didn't sound like one of Gwen Mok's students, that's for sure.
The first concert review I ever wrote was of a performance of Beethoven's Fourth; it was a class assignment in Joseph Kerman's Beethoven symphonies course that I took in college way back when. And now I'm reviewing the work again for SFCV.
*The original recipe calls for Gruyere or Swiss Emmenthal, but Beethoven preferred Parmesan, and my goodness, so do I.
