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| Deutsche Harmonia Mundi (Full price) (LP) EL169595-1 (Cassette) EL169595-4 (CD) CDC7 47741-2. (67 minutes). Text and translation included. |
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| Philh, Klemperer (12/59)(5/85R) ED290272-1(9/86) CDC7 47189-2 |
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| BPO, Karajan (10/77)(7/86R) 415 832-1GGA(4/87) 415 832-2GGA |
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Gunter Wand's reading of the Ninth Symphony is fiery and texturally lucid, somewhat in the Toscanini manner. The accuracy, point and urgency of the launching strings' ostinatos establishes at the outset the performance's credentials and Wand's sense of the music's besetting urgency. The first two movements of this Symphony should both exhilarate and disturb the listener, and this is precisely what they do in this performance which is played with impressive skill by the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra.
On matters of tempo, Wand has clearly pondered the metronomes and taken up their challenges. The first movement is quite swift; the Scherzo is taken at 120 bars to the minute with a very quick Trio (the tempo comparable with Weingartner's and Toscanini's). In the slow movement Wand does not draw the opening Adagio interminably out. Crotchet = 38 is a pleasantly forward-moving pace which allows the ear to grasp the music's melodic and harmonic patterning and the transition to the Andante moderato, taken at crotchet = 48, is limpidly done.
Wand confines himself to the minimum forces specified by Beethoven. Textures are not thickend up at any point. His is a Ninth which devolves from the world of Die Zauberflote and the late symphonic and choral works of Haydn rather than one which Wagnerians will recognize. The advantage of this approach is that it allows us to hear so much more of what is going on. The slow movement, which so often ends up as a mausoleum on wheels, is here radiant, openhanded and full of complex and intriguing colours. (It will be interesting to hear what happens when this approach is taken to its logical conclusion in Norrington's recently recorded account of the Ninth, expected from EMI in due course.)
The finale brings fewer insights from Wand, and some rough patches in singing and recording but, as with Klemperer's Ninth (notorious in its original LP pressings), also on EMI, the performance's unique affirmative strength sees the listener through, even if one at times yearns for the greater all-round performing skills of Karajan's Berlin and Vienna forces on the digitally remastered DG Galleria reissue of his 1977 recording.
Wand's engineers allow an initially rather backward image of the choir in finale, but everywhere else the recording is both spacious and very clean in a straightforward, no nonsense way. The LP is almost as good as the CD and with no mid-movement break on the former, it is perhaps preferable to the Karajan which is marginally less incisive and which splits the slow movement across the two sides of the LP. (The Karajan CD is reviewed on page 1401.) Between them I would say that he, Klemperer and Wand lead the field, with Furtwangler (EMI CD CDC7 47081-2, 3/85) on hand for those who want an inspirational nineteenth-century reading that emerges out of the mists in the Bruckner style.
RO