''Ode To Freedom'' is the headline on the cover of this latest version of the Ninth Symphony from Leonard Bernstein, a live recording of the Christmas morning performance he conducted in East Berlin, setting a seal on the historic happenings of the previous few weeks. As the list above indicates, musicians not just from East and West Germany but from Leningrad, New York, Paris and London were playing in the orchestra, and fairly enough Bernstein made the occasion the more explicitly symbolic by replacing Schiller's word ''Freude'' (''Joy'') in the choral finale with ''Freiheit'' (''Freedom''). When both Schiller and Beethoven were working in a political climate suspicious of anything that even remotely implied revolution, 'Joy' was a much safer word, but in it they plainly had freedom in mind too.
What is fascinating, particularly for those who have followed Bernstein as a Beethoven interpreter, is how different this is from his previous accounts of the Ninth on record. The last one, made with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1979 as part of his Beethoven cycle for DG, was also a live recording, but one edited in Bernstein's usual manner from several performances, and tidied up in the hall at a separate closed session. Inevitably there are flaws of ensemble as well as audience and other noises in the new recording, taken without editing from a single performance, but it is remarkable, particularly in the choral finale, how much more intensely the atmosphere of a live performance is captured. I am rather reminded of Furtwangler's live EMI recording, made at the reopening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1951 and Bernstein, like Furtwangler, seems to have been encouraged by the very weight of the occasion to adopt unusually slow speeds markedly slower in all four movements than those he favoured in 1979, or for that matter in his earlier New York recording for CBS (nla).
In the first movement it was a point I registered from the very opening, even before I checked the overall timings for the movement—17'50'' this time against 15'15''. The discrepancy is far less in the scherzo, and Bernstein compensates by omitting the first repeat, which last time he observed. The differences in the slow movement are more complex. The opening statement of the first theme is even more rapt and hushed than before, and seems slower but in fact is not so. Only later in the movement—after a marked contrast of speed, as before, for the Andante second theme—does the new performance bring an extra expansiveness, so that in this movement too the overall timing is amazingly different, 20'12'' against 17'45''.
Though the first movement this time is less tautly dramatic than in the much faster 1979 performance, the concentration remains keen. In the scherzo the easier tempo makes for extra clarity and lightness, and in the slow movement the more spacious reading brings extra warmth, with Bernstein readier to indulge in affectionate phrasing and expressive tenutos. If the recitatives in the finale are less tense than in 1979 the chaos music is even more vividly dramatic with the horns well caught. All through the symphony the sound has satisfying weight, openness and sense of presence. There are oddities of balance in the choral finale but the wonder is that the engineers have conveyed the feeling of a big choir with its fullness and freshness, so well. The Dutch bass, Jan-Hendrik Rootering, makes a superb impact with his first entry, and the word ''Freiheit'' comes over very clearly. The solo quartet is a strong one, though almost inevitably ensemble and matching are not always good.
What matters is that the excitement of a unique event is vividly caught. On CDV this could be a winner too, an issue to get the adventurous collector investigating the new medium. Vision would also help one to pass over what some may find irritating in this recording—the rather close bumps and bangs which I assume were caused by the conductor himself in his more balletic moments. As it is, Bernstein's Berlin Ninth may not match Furtwangler's as a supreme revelation, but it too is an unusually moving reading, one which fittingly reflects in its depth of emotional conviction the occasion which it crowned.'