Improbable, But I'm All But Sold

As tempted as I might ordinarily be to out of hand dismiss this sort of thing, Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed writes so passionately and convincingly about it, I'm all but compelled to take him at his word.

[T]his is Beethoven more epic than any ever imagined. As I walk in, the Andante [of the Symphony No. 9] is in progress, and it engulfs me in what feels like the pure, concentrated essence of Beethoven. It is weirdly strange yet eerily familiar at the same time. It is powerfully visceral yet utterly ethereal. It is unbelievably beautiful.

Most important of all, it is very, very, very, very, very, very slow. Every note is literally 20 times longer than Leonard Bernstein's lavishly snail-paced live recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, made a few blocks away in the famed Musikverein.

This is the Vienna premiere of "9 Beet Stretch," by Leif Inge, a 36-year-old Norwegian composer who has taken a recording of the symphony and slowed it down so it lasts 24 hours. Thanks to digital technology, pitch and timbre are not affected. But a listener's perception most surely is.

If your first instinct is to dismiss an outrageously elongated Ninth as a cheap conceptual trick, don't. It is a masterpiece of a masterpiece, and maybe the closest we can ever come to experiencing what the deaf Beethoven heard, or experienced, in his head.

RTW Lovely T here.