Benjamin Zander will present a new version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

Benjamin zander is convinced that the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven it should be very different from what people are used to, and the conductor, soon to be 84, will present it in nearly an hour at performances in Boston and New York this week.

Nearly two centuries after the premiere of the German composer’s most famous work, on May 7, 1824, in Vienna, Austria, there is disagreement over the rhythm at which the masterpiece’s four movements should be performed.

“There is so much information about Beethoven and so little information on how to interpret it,” said Zander during an interview in full rehearsal.

Zander who received two Grammys, will lead the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in concert on Friday and at bostonian symphony Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall from New York. Both presentations were planned for the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven which was held in 2020, but was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Zander he said the second performance required raising $650,000 to mount.

The accompanying musicians are ready to speed up the performance.

“The most difficult thing is to keep an open mind. Fortunately, at my advanced age of 60, I’m not dogmatic enough to insist on a precise tempo,” said oboist Andrew Price. “Everything I learned as a 20-year-old student, I I had to go back and relearn, just have a completely different approach.”

Zander studied cello and is music director of the Boston Philharmonic, which he founded in 1979. He consulted violinist and scholar Rudoph Kolisch, who wrote an influential article published posthumously in the Spring 1993 issue of The Musical Quarterly on notations by Beethoven, who used a metronome by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel.

“I have long thought of abandoning those meaningless terms, allegro, andante, adagio, presto”, wrote Beethoven in an 1817 letter to Hofrat von Mosel, “and Mälzel’s metronome gives us the best chance of doing so.”

Zander’s 1992 recording with the Boston Philharmonic released on the Pickwick International label was 57 minutes and 51 seconds long. His 2018 recording is 58:39 and is part of a three-CD set that contains two discs in which the bandleader explains his tempo decisions.

“For the record, I really decided to be a dedicated servant,” Zander said. “He had a little statue of Beethoven on his balcony and he looked every now and then to see if he was smiling.”

“Ben (Zander) is hyper-vigilant to the wishes of the composer,” said timpanist Ed Melzter. “A lot of other conductors decide what they like is how it’s going to sound, so they choose to play it that way.”

Among the most renowned performances are Arturo Toscanini who took 65 minutes for RCA Victor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1952; Wilhelm Furtwängler needed 74 minutes during the post-war reopening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, the recording of which was released by EMI; and Leonard Bernstein continued for 78 minutes during his 1989 concert with the members of six orchestras at Berlin’s Konzerthaus to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, a recording released by Deutsche Grammophon.

Zander’s performance at Carnegie Hall on October 10, 1983 was considered groundbreaking.

“If Mr. Zander is right,” wrote Andrew Porter in the October 24 issue of The New Yorker, “we have been listening to the greatest composer’s music the wrong way.”

Beethoven he had been deaf for nearly a decade at the time of his death in 1827, which is argued by some to be unaware of the metronome marks.

“This controversy resists any dogmatic response,” said the director James Conlonmusical director of LA Opera and senior director of RAI Orchestra Of Italy. “There are powerful arguments on both sides. I’m not against touching Beethoven at the speed suggested by the metronome. But I would say categorically: if the resulting interpretation lacks expression, emotional weight and nuances of phrasing and dynamics, the search for virtue or presumed ‘correct’ speed is negated.

Zander who was born in Great Britain and will be 84 on March 9, evokes his first memory of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven as a teenager in a performance of Otto Klemperer in the room Royal Hall of Festivals London in the 1950s. For his concerts, Zander he’ll use a new score full of colorful post-its because the one he’s been using for decades is so full of notations it’s “virtually unreadable.”

Place a blank sheet of paper on each easel to take notes after each rehearsal. Before the introductions, he seemed a little slower than on the recording.

“I dropped my rather military view of metronome notations and said, the notations are there, they are there, but I’m not looking for them in every bar,” he said. Zander. “And that’s a relief.”

His approach to tempo has been adopted over the past three decades by John Eliot Gardinerwho in front of Revolutionary and Romantic Orchestra executed in an hour and a few seconds, and Roger Norrington who led Classic London Players in 62 and a half minutes.

“A lot of people say it’s a thing of the past,” he said. Zander. “It wasn’t when I started. When I started, it was hard to get people to listen.”