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After their often stunning Beethoven cycle (11/91) Harnoncourt and the COE now give us Mozart's final symphonic triptych, recorded, like the Beethoven, at a series of live concerts. These new performances are hardly less challenging than the Beethoven symphonies. As always, the COE play superlatively for Harnoncourt, the strings lean, supple and astonishingly agile, the woodwind more tangily individual, less smoothly blended than in most modern performances, the brass with an authentically rasping edge (Harnoncourt's long, valveless trumpets are his one concession to period instruments). And as ever Harnoncourt's direction is dynamic and sharply profiled, with a minute attention to details of articulation and phrasing and an exceptional feeling for instrumental colour. Time and again his ear for inner detail and his rethinking of textural balance in favour of the wind and brass bring revealing new shapes and emphases to the music. Nothing could be further from the sleek, first violin-dominated sonorities of, say, Karajan and Bohm.
As so often with Harnoncourt's Mozart, though, exhilaration can be tempered with exasperation. In No. 39 the outer movements strike me as outstandingly successful: the first is quite measured, the lyrical melodies expressively moulded (with beautifully judged touches of portamento in the main theme), the tuttis strongly accented but never aggressive; and the finale, again a touch slower than usual, is notable both for much graceful, articulate detail and for Harnoncourt's sensitivity to the music's moments of mystery and introspection. About the slow movement I'm not so sure. The tempo, already on the leisurely side for an Andante con moto, sags repeatedly from the third bar onwards; and for all the delicacy of the string playing and the disturbing, raw-edged tutti sonorities, parts of the performance come dangerously close to sentimentality. As for the minuet, I guessed what was coming, but still experienced severe shock: a fast and furious main section that relaxes indulgently in the lyrical phrases, a lengthy pause and then a much slower trio that sounds as if it had drifted in from another work.
There's an even more extreme tempo contrast in the minuet and trio in No. 40—as if Mozart had not already ensured the maximum of contrasts, on every level, between the two sections. I have doubts, in fact, about Harnoncourt's tempo relations in this symphony: the first movement is done at an urgent, Furtwangler-ish pace (minim=around 112), with a powerful control of the music's long, tragic paragraphs and a clarity of wind detail that even eclipses most period performances. The finale, though, is distinctly steady, barely faster than the first movement (minim=120), and for all its incidental felicities (the second theme phrased with a Beechamesque sensuousness) seems low in adrenalin for Mozart's most violent orchestral utterance, even more so as it follows probably the fastest minuet on record. And Harnoncourt's gradual rallentando in the famous passage of tonal and rhythmic dislocation at the start of the development seems downright perverse. The slow movement is rapid (definitely two-in-a-bar), light and graceful, at least until the disquieting rising sequences of the development. Harnoncourt seems to view this movement as a harbinger of the Andante in Beethoven's First Symphony—an intriguing reading, but one that underplays the music's tragic implications. Incidentally, the symphony is given here in its second version, with clarinets.
As for the Jupiter, I found the last three movements compelling and often revelatory. The Andante is done with warmth, a touch of flexibility that never (as sometimes in the slow movement of No. 39) becomes indulgent, and an acute awareness of the movement's precarious serenity (accents and cross-rhythms pointed with disturbing precision in the minor-keyed music). In the minuet the melancholy inherent in Mozart's drooping chromatic lines is realized more potently than usual (this must be the most subversively anti-C major piece in all eighteenth-century orchestral music); and in the trio, for once taken only marginally slower than the main section, Harnoncourt's care for internal balance really allows you to hear the contrasting rhythmic patterns Mozart sets up between lowpitched brass and lower strings (bar 68ff). The finale is swift, taut, lucid and brilliantly executed; Harnoncourt brings out to the full the rebarbative quality of the development's close imitations (bar 172ff), and shapes the movement with a thrilling cumulative intensity. But for all the fine martial ring to the tuttis, the first movement is, for me, hampered by its stately tempo (minim=66, definitely maestoso rather than the requested vivace; Hummel, some years after Mozart's death, suggests a metronome mark of minim=96!); and I'm not sure I could ever be reconciled to Harnoncourt's affected treatment of the opening phrases, with the rest in bar two elongated by a beat and the piano reply preciously protracted.
Harnoncourt's customary observance of every single marked repeat (which means, for instance, both repeats in the Andante of No. 40 and all the finales) pushes the timing of the last two symphonies well above half an hour and that of the Jupiter to around 40 minutes. All the same, I think Teldec should have given us another work. As I've suggested, there are things here that are likely to frustrate and irritate, with Harnoncourt the fiery polemicist and Harnoncourt the man of sentiment sharing an intermittently uneasy co-existence. But at their best—and it's a not infrequent best— these vividly recorded readings (audience fidgeting and throat-clearing is minimal) attain an uncommon musical and intellectual penetration, challenging us to rethink our responses to music that can too easily be performed—and listened to—on automatic pilot.
RW