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| Philips (Full price) (CD) 438 158-2PH (64 minutes: DDD). Text and translation included. Recorded at performances in Vredenburg, Utrecht during November 1992, in association with Deloitte & Touche. |
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| Norrington (10/87) (EMI) CDC7 49221-2 |
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| Reiner (11/87) (RCA) GD86532 |
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| Hogwood (11/89) (L'OI) 425 517-2OH |
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| Bernstein (11/92) (SONY) CD47518 |
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| Toscanini (5/90) (RCA) GD60256 |
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| Klemperer (8/90) (EMI) CDM7 63359-2 |
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| Furtwangler (2/91) (EMI) CDH7 69801-2 |
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At the end of a chapter entitled "Performance and tradition" in a superb new Cambridge Music Handbook on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (CUP: 1993), Professor Nicholas Cook takes issue with Roger Norrington's desire to "restore this Ninth Symphony to the humane, quicksilver thought-world of the Classical period". Professor Cook concludes his chapter: "The Ninth Symphony achieved lasting success in performance only after the dual leadership system had been swept away and the modern conductor had taken over. It is, in this sense, a work of the Romantic repertory. The attempt to restore it to the Classical Period is in reality an attempt to appropriate it for the late twentieth century, in disguise."
Perhaps so, but Norrington's recording was an important milestone in the history of the Ninth on record. Whatever one's view of some of his premises and assumptions, Norrington stimulated fresh thinking about the piece whilst at the same time securing a musically vivid performance with deliberately slimline forces.
Norrington's orchestra for the Ninth numbered 63, with no doublings of wind or brass. Hogwood, by contrast, used a much bigger band (89 players) with some historically plausible reinforcement of woodwind and brass in key tuttis. Bruggen, on his new recording, is different again, with an unreinforced wind band pitted against an unusually large body of occasionally frail-sounding and physically rather recessed period strings (30 violins, nine violas, eight cellos and six basses). In theory, Hogwood's bigger-bodied Ninth should have given him an advantage over Norrington's scorched-earth classicism, and over Bruggen. But Hogwood's inability to make the first movement sound barely more momentous than 15 minutes of eighteenth-century Tafelmusik rather encouraged one to bale out and get back to Furtwangler.
The first movement is a problem, of course. And the finale, though it is here that period performance has tended to come into its own. Getting huge municipal choirs to sing the finale with the kind of verve, textural clarity, and sensitivity the music invites (yet also threatens cruelly to subvert) has often proved difficult. Certainly, Bruggen's account of the finale puts that kind of thing well into the past. The choral singing may not have the cumulative might and vibrancy of Wilhelm Pitz's Philharmonia Chorus singing under Klemperer, a superbly vital version that stands among its rivals like an oak in an orchard. But the singing of Bruggen's Lisbon Gulbenkian Choir is fresh and purposeful, as is the singing of the four distinguished soloists with their expert word-pointing and seemingly effortless technical control.
The inner movements have their famous cruxes but have never been overwhelmingly a problem. Like Norrington and Hogwood, Bruggen takes the slow movement quite swiftly, but, then, so do Toscanini and Klemperer. In the Trio of Scherzo, Bruggen takes what is best described as a traditionalist compromise—a quick tempo that is not too quick. I must say I prefer something more radical either pastoral leisure (Klemperer, Norrington) or breathtaking virtuosity (Reiner on RCA or Bernstein with the NYPO on Sony Classical).
In the end, though, it is the first movement that causes the most problems. Bruggen, it has to be said, generates a greater head of steam in the long term than Hogwood. But the start is badly flawed. Not only do the first violins seem unduly remote they also seem incapable of sustaining either a full crotchet or a true sotto voce in the all-important two-note trigger that flickers through the before-dawn dark. (Furtwangler does both, whilst at the same time suggesting the birth of an Aeschylean drama.) There is also the problem of tempo. No one apart from Toscanini has ever really got away with treating this movement at speed. Yet a fairly quick allegro is nowadays the norm. That, and an apparent unwillingness to think about tempo, and modifications of tempo, within the larger context of what the music actually means.
Which brings us back to Professor Cook and the appropriation of the Ninth by an age that believes in nothing much beyond the notes on the printed page. Set any of the moderns alongside Furtwangler in this first movement and none of them is worth a row of beans.
RO