little genius -- Beethoven and Forster

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/music/chicago-symphony-introduces-ne.html

INDEED amazing. He dances the music. What I loved was the match of EM Forster underneath: that very passage of Beethoven and what Jonathan might have been feeling. I love the unabashed delight in two places, where he GETS the music — beyond the more classic baton sweeps.


"The goblins really had been there. They might return--and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things."


http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/music/chicago-symphony-introduces-ne.html