Wolfgang Sawallisch carries a heavy burden of responsibility these days as an ageing generation of music-loving oldies looks around, with increasing desperation, for surviving members of a school of conductors who learned their trade the old-fashioned way. An early progress through Augsburg, Aachen, Wiesbaden and Cologne was enough to establish Sawallisch as just such a conductor. In the late 1950s there was a successful Bayreuth debut and the official laying on of hands by Walter Legge. Thereafter there was (and remains) a distinguished reign at the Munich Opera. For sure, Sawallisch is one of the last surviving members of the Old School.
Alas, that does not, of itself, ensure greatness in the way that the Kleibers and Klemperers were great. Over the years, Sawallisch has made some fine records, most notably, perhaps, his 1973 Dresden cycle of the Schumann symphonies. (It is not his fault that praise for this set has become one of the great critical cliches of our time, inhibiting fresh thinking about how these amazing but difficult works should be played.) The new Ninth, though, is nothing special. It is a very 'safe' performance—careful and conscientious, a consensus view of a work which (its slow movement apart) challenges consensus in almost every bar. The level-headedness of Sawallisch's reading of the opening movement may come as a relief after the brazen superficiality of some other recent recordings but it would be idle to pretend that this is a reading in, say, the Klemperer class.
Nor is the recording particularly good. Instrumental detailing in the first movement needs a keener focus than we have here, as does the choir in the finale. When Karajan recorded the Ninth in Berlin in 1961, William Mann remarked that it seemed a pity to bring the choir all the way from Vienna only to leave them at the railway station. There were times on the new recording when I felt the same about the Dusseldorf Choir that EMI have no doubt expensively bussed into Amsterdam. The soloists do little more than pass muster. As a performance, this new Ninth might make a passable conclusion to the cycle as a whole, but as a free-standing release in its own right it doesn't have a lot going for it.'