Beethoven Reimagined was recorded in 2018, in a three-day set of sessions at Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff, the headquarters of the
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, but it contains works of different kinds under its general rubric. All are novel treatments of
Beethoven's music. The first two are new
Beethoven orchestral compositions, created through free renderings of existing works, made by the present conductor
Yaniv Segal (with Garrett Schumann in the first of the two): the Sonata for Orchestra is an orchestration of
Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor, Op. 30, No. 2, while the Fidelio Symphony assembles small chunks of the opera Fidelio, Op. 72, into a three-movement work that represents the "arc of the opera." Neither of these concepts would have been entirely foreign to a 19th century audience, but the Beethoven9 Symphonic Remix of
Gabriel Prokofiev (grandson of
Sergei) is something else again: a new seven-movement work based on little cells from the finale of
Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125.
Prokofiev is known for combining traditional orchestral music with techniques derived from electronic dance music and hip-hop, and here, on hand in person, he samples an earlier performance of the symphony's choral finale and puts these choral passages together with newly written orchestral material. Even by the standards of pop remixes, it's a fairly thorough reworking, but
Prokofiev does remain true to the variation structure of the original finale. All of these works are fresh, much more than simple transcriptions, and
Segal deserves credit for a genuinely novel program. ~ James Manheim