This is Giulini's third recording of the Pastoral Symphony and it is, by some distance, the finest. Indeed, the whole disc is remarkable; an interesting turning-point in a series that has so far met with a broad measure of disappointment, in the press at least.
Giulini's earliest recording of the Pastoral Symphony, made with the New Philharmonia Orchestra for EMI in January and April 1968 (3/70—nla), was unbelievably drab. The 1979 Los Angeles remake for DG (6/80—nla), was sprucer; yet even here there was a degree of remoteness about the Los Angeles playing and the DG recording that seemed to drain colour from the reading. In any case, Giulini has since changed his view of parts of the music. The Peasants' Merrymaking, for instance, is altogether earthier in the new Italian performance. What was agreeable enough in Los Angeles is now like some ancient Barolo wine, stuffed full of tannins and as heavy as dung.
The new performance is, among other things, a triumph for the La Scala orchestra which, inspired by Giulini, clearly aspires to do for Milan what another, rather more famous, band of opera house musicians has done for Vienna. That the Italians can play Beethoven superbly was amply proved many years ago when Victor de Sabata recorded the Pastoral Symphony with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra (formerly the Orchestra dell' Augusteo in which Giulini played the viola). That 1947 HMV set (11/47), sadly no longer available, was a benchmark performance in its day, along with the pre-war Toscanini set (HMV, 11/38—nla). Only with the advent of LP and Karajan's famous 1953 Philharmonia recording (Columbia, 4/54—nla) was it displaced.
Giulini's performance is slower than de Sabata's (the lead to the fermata in the fourth bar has a Furtwangler-like languor) but it is superbly sustained and even more expressively moulded. This is a performance in which every sentence is gloriously phrased, where individual string lines are always richly distinct. ''No sound is dissonant which tells of life'', remarks Coleridge of the cry of a Savana Crane. For Giulini, too, not a note is extraneous to Beethoven's purpose.
Giulini hasn't changed his mind on a couple of details. He continues to omit the first movement repeat—defensible dramatically and psychologically, less so musically—and he again plays the first two movements more or less continuously. What may sound like an editing error, is, to judge by the precedent set with the Los Angeles LP, a conscious decision to exploit the key-relatedness of the two movements and to turn the symphony into a two-part drama. In the second part Beethoven himself provides the linkage. It is an effect you can warm to.
The final movement is, needless to say, the performance's consummation, the La Scala string and horn playing, if anything, even more exalted. The whole performance is, in sum, a rare and treasurable thing, wonderfully at odds with the hell-for-leather spirit of an agnostic age. It is, in the end, a deeply spiritual performance of a work which was conceived by Beethoven, first and last, as an essentially spiritual experience.
The disc begins with as profoundly satisfying a performance of the Coriolan Overture as I remember hearing. The music itself is sublime, a noble fragment hewn from a single block of marble like one of the Prisoners of Michelangelo. Giulini's tempo, memorably sustained across the entire ten-minute span, is neither too quick nor too slow, and the playing of the La Scala orchestra is again superb, richly moulded and powerful without the slightest taint of bombast.
The performance of the Egmont Overture with which the disc begins will excite more controversy. At the climax of the 3/4 Allegro, in the modulatory passage leading to the execution of Egmont, Giulini endows the music with a degree of dramatic pathos it can barely sustain. (Though the two-note dying fall of the death blow itself is infinitely affecting.) I suspect there is a burden of private experience at work here, Giulini, as it were, envisioning the mire of civil war from within. For the rest, the reading is glorious. The dramatically suggestive opening is played with a near-ideal blend of trenchancy and espressivo intensity. As for the coda, the so-called 'Victory Symphony', only Klemperer and Bruno Walter have in my experience brought out as vividly as Giulini the coda's musical and moral sure-footedness. This is no noisy junket; rather, it speaks of a victory over the kind of forces of evil and anarchy that prompted Edgar to say at the end of King Lear: ''The oldest have borne most; we that are young/Shall never see so much nor live so long.'''