In 21 April 1983, nearly twenty years ago to the day, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra performed their first all-Beethoven concert. This was, if anyone still remembers, the first of a three-night Beethoven piano concerto cycle with Anton Kuerti. Lan Shui's inaugural concert as Music Director of the SSO, in 10 January 1997, was an all-Beethoven affair, as was also the SSO's first concert of the millennium in January 2000, which also kicked off the Beethoven symphonic cycle that season.

One could say that Beethoven has a strong historical resonance with the orchestra - and this night turned out to be no different. If nothing else, putting up a programme of Beethovenian potboilers never fails to bring in a respectably-sized audience, notwithstanding the cancellation of the featured guest artist nor the threat of viral infection. This evening's items were all unpretentious efforts from Beethoven's "middle" period - just look at their opus numbers - attractive to a fault, and one might reasonably assume the musicians to have the Beethovenian psyche completely surrounded.

Take the Fourth Symphony, for instance. Commissioned and paid for by an envious nobleman who wanted something by Beethoven to call his own for an outrageous amount of money (350 florins, although the programme book puts 500), this is the genial and often-unregarded eye-of-the-storm between the tempests of the Third and Fifth Symphonies. Yet even so, the orchestra's performance managed to generate some heavy weather of its own.

Hu Yong-yan, who has worked with the SSO previously, is the type of conductor which doesn't conduct the music as much as he allows it to conduct him, delving only into the music for its insights and letting it surface. But an inspired conductor needs a band of adept and responsive musicians, inasmuch as an inspired dramaturg needs good directors and actors to realize the conception of a play onstage.

The musicians executed the music, if a pun may be permitted, with some discomfiture. Articulation of rhythm was soapy, marred by the customary lacksadaisical approach to orchestral ensemble and sound balance. This would have been less an issue in the former Victoria Concert Hall, whose generous acoustic would cover a multitude of sins, but Esplanade is another matter altogether. The full panoply of sound, the corpulent eighty-instrument orchestral tutti, was a general-purpose peroration which no half-decent conductor would have countenanced. Look upon my works ye Mighty, wrote Shelley, and despair. Well, exactly.

In the balance between Classical poise and Romantic aspiration, Hu clearly leaned towards the latter. There was a strong sense of onward flow and thrust of the conductor's rendition in the opening movement, with (giving credit where it's due) the orchestra responding appositely to his directions. The central movements were more trite and prosaic, with Hu's musical ideas not much different from what we've heard in the past: dotted i's and crossed t's in all the right spots. Yawn.

The pressing tempo of the finale could have been a tad faster to fully nail the drama of Beethoven's orchestral tour de force writing, but the conductor missed the opportunity here to unfurl the sails and throw caution to the wind when he could have. The music-making would have fizzled with more effervescence, and sallied with more wit in the enforced fermata in the closing moments - but unfortunately, no. At best, this was a predictable, conscientious effort, albeit one shorn of distinction. To hear what crisp articulation and sheer drive can do for Beethoven, vintage Beethoven, cutting-edge Urtext Beethoven, you'll need to travel northwards at least another 330 km.

This concert didn't start with good auguries, in any case. When your original top-billed, audience-pulling guest soloist/conductor cancels out because of a mutant flu virus, to be replaced by two relatively unknowns, it's like climbing uphill with a huge Sisyphean boulder on your back from the word Go. We have to applaud the audience for not chickening out, and turning up in droves to give the replacements a chance.

Generally, I'm not superstitious, but Beethoven's red-blooded melodrama, the Overture to Coriolan, began with a blatant (if unsurprising) mistimed entry in the brass right from the very first measure. Stranger still, the horns sounded atypically astringent, with a braying timbre not unlike those heard in period instrument bands. There is a vogue for modern-instrument orchestras to adopt period performing practices (vis-a-vis Zinman on Beethoven's Nine), even mixed modern and natural instrument groups (such as the Schlierbacher Kammerorchestra and Heidelberg Symphoniker), but surely not the SSO ? The uncharacteristic timbre proved to be unconducive for the concerto to follow.

But at least the playing in the Overture did not slack off into some meek, frigid "still warming up" syndrome. In point of fact, there was some enthusiastic (if imprecise) bravura from the orchestra, and they generated good rapport with their conductor. Hu had the music so much under his skin that he chose to direct this, as well as the symphony, without score, and he dispatched the music with ease.

The Violin Concerto is not a new work to the orchestra. Indeed, former composer-in-residence Er Yenn Chwen once soloed with the orchestra in the same work in 1990. In another performance of this work with Anne-Sophie Mutter, it was noted that (t)he orchestra did not respond fully to her, I feel, and ensemble was positively ragged in places, with a terrible horn flub in one particular entry on Friday. Prophetic words, one might say, because this, word for word, almost exactly what happened with Denis Goldfeld, the eleventh-hour soloist (although the flub had already occured in Coriolan.)

Goldfeld played with a youthful ardour and charismatic vitality which was refreshing, and the bold, rich sonority of his tone was something to be savoured. He strolled through the first movement with purpose and poise, generally powering his way through the occasional blooper (such as flubbed portamentos) and electing for a dilatory, contemplative speed which gave the music time to breathe. If anything, his approach was too self-conscious, lacking that final stamp of personal authority on a piece of music which has been heard and played far too, too many times already.

The second movement was better, with the opening theme poetically stated by the muted violins under Hu's baton, and limned with great articulation by Goldfeld in his subsequent entry. This for me is the fulcrum of the work, the tempering point at which the soloist shows his or her mettle on the instrument. Despite the jarring brass timbre, Goldfeld was sublime in his garnishment of each of the variations which followed, especially with the intonation and purity of the high notes of the third iteration. This was basically as good as it got on the evening.

The soloist launched into the final movement with a buoyancy that seemed to throw a challenge to Hu and the orchestra: catch me if you can ! And for a while, that was what happened, with the soloist and orchestra trading nattily passages, pretty much what one might expect in a classical Rondo. Then came the jaw-dropping moment when a potentially passable performance went totally off the rails, the one thing most people have never seen in entire lives of concert-going, the absolute mother of all faux pas.

The soloist came off a rodomontade of notes, skipped a beat; the conductor raised his baton to cue the orchestra in; the musicians hesitated, then stopped totally as the music-making came to total and sudden ruin. For the space of three heartbeats, there was dead silence from the stage as soloist, musicians and conductor looked at each other in bewilderment. Did somebody miss a cue somewhere ? Only the musicians themselves really know what happened. You'd have missed it if you'd blinked, or weren't quite familiar with the music.

All Denis Goldfeld took was half a second more to realize what had happened, and in the span of time faster than it takes to describe here, he repeated the few solo measures leading up to the point of disjunction, whereupon Hu Yong-yan was able to cue the orchestra in successfully at the second time of asking. The remainder of the work managed to stagger across the finish line with no further incident.

There are memorable moments, and there are memorable moments. And then there are moments so memorable, epiphanies even, that they provide some sort of perverse standard against which to measure other memorable moments. Audiences may remember the recent time where the conductor fell off the platform, or the occasion on which a handphone went off on stage in mid-performance. An orchestral engine flameout - culpably abetted by an unsteady soloist gone awry - is undoubtedly a new benchmark.

As a writer, the easiest reviews to write about are always the ones at the extremes. Extraordinarily good or bad performances dictate their own reviews; those which go down the middle are more of a challenge. In writing sharply negative reviews, sometimes we are tempted to take cheap shots, and we end up sounding like we're gnawing on our livers in public. When a protest falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound ?