Beethoven 1st and 9th, LSO, Bernard Haitink

The concert tonight was the LSO playing Beethoven's 1st and 9th at the Barbican, conducted by Bernard Haitink - a programme no less than magnificent and, in a way, for me, weirdly profound.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 in C Major. I remember having a discussion once about keys with M, a wonderful and wonderfully wise friend, many years ago in law school. I announced that my favourite key was E major (!) - absolutely no idea why I said that - and asked him what his favourite key was. And I vividly remember M sitting still on the university steps for a few seconds, before he turned to me and said, "C major". I complained that C major was boring - it's the first scale you learn, turning childish fingers stiffly and painfully on the keyboard; it has no fancy sharps or flats; it's banal and lacklustre. And M smiled.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. What - and I ask this rhetorically - can one say about the Ninth? For a piece that finally articulated itself in words with the human voice, implausibly I find it impossible to write anything about Beethoven's Ninth. This music has accompanied some of the worst years of my life - my desperate, terrified final term in law school; my first year in London, among others. Years in which, even if I didn't know it at that time, my life changed or was changing like leaves in the wind. I used to relish (and M knows this) the loud, angry parts - the terror fanfare, the D minor resolution to the acceleration of the arpeggiation in the 1st movement introduction. Those were my favourite parts. Yet, tonight, I realised that the music which caught me most were not those, but, instead, a series of moments in the third movement: dolce, cantabile sections with pizzicato for the strings while the flutes trill, or the clarinets climb a scale.

The third movement used to bore me silly. It was then that I realised, and realised how much I had to go through to realise. Simplicity. Clarity. Tabula rasa.