If up to now the reader has enjoyed Beethoven’s folk-song arrangements in small doses but rather fancies that seven CDs might be too many, then please to note the reviewer’s experience these last three days of waking up in the morning with a feeling of uncaused well-being. “Why am I feeling happy? Ah, I’m playing the Beethoven folk-songs!” That may sound grossly like a commercial for television, but no, it is the truth, and none the less of a good advertisement for that.
This is Beethoven at his most genial, most engaging, informal and collaborative. Of all the melodies that come his way (many of them from George Thomson of Edinburgh), not one fails to set him off on a course that is, miraculously, both his own and the song’s. All sorts of off-beat ideas come into his head, melodic or rhythmic figures that nobody else could have thought of, yet which at the same time arise out of the given tune. Or it will be that the melody suggests a mood, and the instrumental parts are written in accordance, perhaps with deep sonorities and an affectionately straight support for the voice, or perhaps with staccato emphasis or a rhythmic lift provided by a deftly placed pizzicato.
Partly of course it is the great musician’s tribute to folk-song itself, melody which has proved its strength and which seems incapable of bad taste. The lyrics may be another matter: many are not ‘folk’ poetry at all, some (with references to “beleaguered Chester”, the Plain of Badajos, Mackenna, O’Donnell and Tyrconnell) need footnotes, a few have a verse or two too many. Most are heartfelt, or witty, or both.
Beethoven himself seems to have had little or nothing to do with the texts, so that a great deal in these verse-songs depends on the performers. Not only the singers but the players need to know, understand and respond, and it is one of the great merits of this edition that they consistently do so. The violin and cello, ideally balanced with the voices and the piano, are never intrusive, and bring a refinement that rarely strikes one as being at odds with the folk-idiom. Similarly, the voices, though they are those of highly cultivated singers, serve well with their natural timbres in this odd kind of crossover: countryside brought to the drawing-room and yet, under Beethoven’s direction, retaining its independence.
In such a large-scale enterprise as this it is well to have a variety of voices. All the singers here do good work. One example of each: Dame Felicity Lott lovely in the cadenzas of “Awake my lyre”, Janice Watson charmingly fresh of voice and manner in “O who, my dear Dermot”, Catrin Wyn-Davies spry and vivid in “The Cottage Maid”, Ann Murray sympathetic when singing gently in “His boat comes on the sunny tide”, Ruth Philogene rich and spirited in “Come, Darby dear”, John Mark Ainsley forthright and stylish in “Sir Johnnie Cope”, Timothy Robinson drawing a clean-cut line in “Red gleams the sun”, Christopher Maltman resonantly good-humoured in “Let brain-spinning swains”. Most enjoyable, I found, were the contributions of Toby Spence and Sarah Walker (one of them young, the other getting on a bit but both on fine form with character in their voices), and, most especially, of Thomas Allen, ever-welcome and, for beauty of tone and evenness of production, in a class of his own.
I should mention the excellent notes by Barry Cooper, telling in a short space just what we need to know. Otherwise, the hero of the set is Malcolm Martineau. Essentially, it is through the piano-part that Beethoven speaks, and the pianist must understand his language. In all these seven discs – 168 tracks, I make it – Martineau uses not only his well-trained fingers but a finely tuned intelligence to catch Beethoven’s delight and hand it on. If he is not already established in the royal line of accompanists – from Moore to Parsons and Johnson – this should ensure that he is.'