Beethoven: Christus am Ölberge

Beethoven
Christus am Ölberge, Op. 85
Collegium Vocale Gent; Orchestre des Champs-Élysées/Philippe Herreweghe
Phi LPH039   47:35 mins

This is one of Beethoven’s least-performed works, and listening to it again after many years I’m not surprised. Indeed, checking out the rivals to this recording I was amazed to find that there are at least a dozen others, some of them with distinguished soloists.

It was written in the middle of Beethoven’s career, when he realised that his hearing was irremediably deteriorating, and much of the music is anguished and even desperate. However, like some of Beethoven’s other anguished and despairing music, it has an element of contrivance. Listen to Florestan’s great aria in Fidelio and you hear how convincingly Beethoven could convey hopelessness, but in this work there is a kind of imitation of that. Everything about this piece suggests smoothness and contrivance, and it is hardly a critique of the performance to say that the three quarters of an hour it lasts – at reasonable tempos – seem much longer than that, because there is a uniformity to the texture which fails to distinguish among hope, anguish, despair and aggression. But evidently, from the list of recordings, plenty of people feel differently.

Michael Tanner