''Die Mauer offnet sich''—''The wall opens up''—announces the Narrator at the start of the ''Melodrama'' in Beethoven's Incidental Music to Goethe's Egmont. It was a shrewd move in the grimmer, more realistic mood that has overtaken Berlin in the wake of the events of 1989 to devote a New Year's Eve concert to a series of Beethoven's more troubled—and yet in the end unwaveringly optimistic—political utterances. After the flamboyance of Bernstein's Christmas 1989 swoop on Berlin with that much-hyped multi-national Beethoven Ninth, this imaginatively devised concert defines a mood that is both thoughtful and realistic. What's more, it is played and directed—despite a slightly bland Egmont Overture—with a mixture of acumen and unaffected directness that is appropriate to the matter in hand.
Ideally, in the Egmont Overture, there should be a sharper sense of discord; most obviously in the slow introduction, which is Beethoven's portrait of the Netherlanders under the heel of Spanish tyranny. Szell on Decca has the VPO bows cutting into the strings; the Vienna oboe, with its keening acidulous tone, grieves more openly; and the perceptibly Spanish rhythm in the bass is more wickedly sprung. Later, before the execution of Egmont, there is a sparer feel to the VPO strings and a vicious rasp to the Viennese horns that we don't entirely have in the Berlin performance.
The New Year's Eve concert took place in Berlin's Schauspielhaus. It seems to have a good acoustic. The cellos and basses occasionally sound plummy but the superb Berlin fiddles sheer through the texture excitingly enough. Only in the coda of Leonore No. 3 are they a shade disappointing; Karajan was usually more brilliant here, and Furtwangler was never less than ecstatic.
For the rest, things go well, with Abbado's keen sense of theatre shining through in the remainder of the Egmont music, in the concert aria (Cheryl Studer again the excellent soloist), and in the Choral Fantasia. The soloist is Evgeni Kissin, who was the soloist at Karajan's last Berlin concert on New Year's Eve 1988. I wondered whether Kissin would have Brendel's or Barenboim's improvisatory way with the music. In the event, he plays the solo part directly and to great effect, and he is vividly supported by Abbado whose earlier DG recording with Pollini is one of the most electrifying versions currently available.
Where competition is concerned, the new disc scores by virtue of the coherence of the programming. True, Karajan's 1969 Egmont recording on DG adds an electrifying account of Beethoven's outrageously tawdry Battle Symphony; and you can get the Szell recording, minus the spoken dialogue, on a bargain-price Decca disc ((CD) 421 024-2DC, 1/89) that also includes Schmidt-Isserstedt and the VPO playing the Eroica Symphony. Szell's complete recording, by contrast, couples another of his specialities, Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony: an odd coupling, though a tempting mid-price compilation. As for the Choral Fantasia, Barenboim's EMI recording is part of a three-CD set of the piano concertos, Brendel's single Philips CD couples the Fifth Piano Concerto, and the Abbado couples a not very recommendable account of the Sixth Symphony.
Vienna's New Year's Day concerts aside, ''special event'' releases like this don't tend to stay very long in the catalogues; but this Abbado concert is sufficiently well planned and played to hold its own for a little while yet.'