Haitink's new performances of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies are self-evidently distinguished. Vital and clear-sighted, paying court to no particular fad or tradition except that of a long-standing European regard for the nature and quality of the challenge that Beethoven's symphonies uniquely offer, Haitink's performances take their place at the head of a long line of distinguished Beethoven recordings made by the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Haitink's first Beethoven cycle, completed just over ten years ago with the LPO (Philips 6747 307, 1/77—nla), was worthy but uncompelling, largely because conscientious but dowdy engineering and the LPO's gentlemanly reserve blunted the edge of readings whose very integrity demands the keenest kind of response if it is not to sound lack-lustre beside the orchestral might of Berlin and Vienna or the interpretative insights of men like Toscanini, Furtwangler, and their latter-day mutants.
The engineering on the new record may not please old-fashioned tastes. Nowadays even the Concertgebouw's revered acoustic is subject to electronic processing. The reverberation does not always sound natural, and there's too much of it in one or two places where it is least needed (for example, the final chord of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony or the first tutti of the Vivace of the Seventh). But Beethoven's orchestra is notoriously difficult to record and for the most part the sound is splendidly clean-limbed. In the transition to the finale of the Fifth Symphony we can now hear both basses and drum with absolute clarity, and everything, from the basses to the egregious piccolo, strikingly sounds in the finale itself. both performances have also been carefully edited; some, though by no means all my comparative versions of the Seventh Symphony have the good sense to make a virtual attacca between the third and fourth movements of the Seventh as Haitink does here.
The glory of the new record is in the distinguished partnership of Haitink and the orchestra one still naturally associates with him. In the Fifth Symphony, where Haitink has made fewer explicit changes to his reading since 1977 (a welcome quickening of the Scherzo's principal subject is the only substantial amendment), one notes a greater trenchancy, drive and commitment in the playing than before. The Concertgebouw Orchestra not only boast guttier, grainier strings than the 1970s LPO—the symphony incisively launched, the basses in the Trio of the third movement less lumbering—it also has a certain fieriness of temperament which is crucial to successful Beethoven playing. Typically, Haitink and his players catch the onward surge of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony at bar 423 with genuine urgency; nor is Haitink afraid of a certain agogic freedom in parts of the finale; the horn subject is given a marvellous amplitude in what might be called an understated variant of the Nikisch manner.
Haitink still omits the finale's exposition repeat. The aim, to judge by the performance's general trajectory, is to make the return of the theme after the Scherzo's ghostly reprise the more potent. Similarly, he doesn't repeat the exposition of the finale of the Seventh Symphony as Carlos Kleiber (DG) and Tate (EMI) do; but the performance is so naturally projected at Beethoven's metronome mark—neither too fast (Karajan on DG who omits the repeat, foreshortening the whole experience) nor too slow (Tate's Klemperer-like 66 bars to the minute denying Beethoven his con brio marking)—that the omission is less worrying than it might otherwise be. Carlos Kleiber is glorious in this movement, not least because he divides his fiddles left and right, making for a properly dazzling effect in the coda.
Earlier in the Seventh Symphony, Haitink has made some significant changes to his reading. He now takes the first movement exposition repeat; he has marginally quickened his tempo in the second movement, bringing it nearer to an Allegretto, and in the third movement Trio, previously cumbersome, now given some vestige of carolling joyfulness in the Schubert style. Joy, steadily felt and bereft of all sense of frenzy or emotional display, is the dominant impulse one feels in the beautifully projected Vivace of the first movement and in the scherzo which is both fresher and sturdier thn before. The symphony's introduction is also gloriously realized: measured, eloquent, rhythmically refined.
As to rivals, the Carlos Kleiber performances are superb, but the discs are poor value for money. The 1977 Karajan recordings, now on mid-price CDs from DG, are better value: fine couplings of the Fifth and Eighth Symphonies and the Second and Seventh (CD 419 050-2GGA—to be reviewed later). Tate's Dresden Seventh, newly available on CD, is dark-browed and imposing, but the brooding Allegretto and stately finale will not be to everyone's taste. There is also a rather booming bass line to contend with. As SJ suggested in August, this is a performance notable more for some of its parts than the sum of its parts.
Meanwhile, Haitink makes a distinguished start to his new Concertgebouw cycle; after the facelessness of early issues in the Abbado and Muti cycles it is a great joy to find traditional interpretative values being so strikingly upheld.'