Piano Forum

Pastoral.

I recently bought the C.F. Peters edition of Beethoven Symphonies 6-9, edited by Otto Singer, largely for the 6th.

I'm not  super familiar with the symphony, but the only movement that really wowed me was the 1st.  The rest of the movements I'd sort of zone out and lose focus when listening (usually in my car).   In fact, that happened to me with the second part of the 1st movement also.  My mind would start to wander, after being enthralled by the first half.  After playing it, I realized why.

The exposition is great.  It works musically, the great theme is there.
The development, though, is surprisingly bland.  It is very repetitious, playing the same motives over and over again.  I was surprised by how repetitious it was.  Now, I know this is supposed to represent Beethoven's unwinding while going into the woods and getting away from the stress of civilization, but that doesn't make it musically interesting, at least to me.   On the plus side, if you need to practice your eighth and sixteenth notes over triplets, this is a great piece for that, because it repeats the same eighth and sixteenth patterns over triplets, using the same notes, over and over and over again.

I could live with the development being repetitious, if the recapitulation was as good as the exposition.  But it too is repetitious, and the main theme makes a disappointingly very brief return; with most of it, like the development, based on endless repetitions of transition material.   So that's when I realized why the 1st movement seemed to jump the shark for me when listening about half way through.  The recapitulation barely brings back the main theme at all, which is what my mind has been subconsciously waiting to hear for several minutes.

Overall, I found myself somewhat disappointed in it.  If I played it in public, I'd be tempted to play the expostiion, and dump the rest, so as not to bore people.

The only other movement I played through was the Scherzo from the 9th, but that was quite a bit more difficult then the 6th, 1st mv, which is fairly easy, and it would take me quite a bit more work to get it to sound right.

The only other Beethoven Symphony I've played through is the first three movements of the Fifth, an edition of which I've had for some years, (the fourth movement I don't particularly care for, so I've never played it much).   Those pieces all work fairly well as piano pieces, and the 1st movement in particular I found surprisingly pianistic and easier to play then it looked, though the 2nd and 3rd movements are  harder.

The only other symphony movements I've played are by Mozart, the 1st and 3rd movements of his 40th, the pieces being in separate compilations.  These both work well and are reasonably playable as piano pieces.