Roger Norrington's period instruments Ninth on EMI blazed a trail, exploring possibilities and setting precedents, that Christopher Hogwood drawing on similar research sources and scholarly advice, to some extent mirrors in this new recording. In matters of tempo—decoding movement headings and metronomes—the two conductors are very close, with a swiftish first movement, a lazily expressive reading of the second movement Trio, up-to-the-metronome directness in the slow movement, fourth movement recitatives that note the latter part of Beethoven's marking Selon le caractere d'un recitative, mais in tempo, and a slow Alla marcia and ensuing fugato. Much of this makes sense, particularly in the middle two movements. In the finale, Hogwood is less extreme than Norrington in the recitatives, quick but without hustle, and when the voice enters he has an altogether better bass soloist. The slow Alla marcia remains a possible point of controversy but Hogwood's control of the long crescendo and the articulacy of the wind playing in the fugato help make it the more plausible.
Where the two performances differ is in the scale of the performances and the recordings. Some minor quibbles apart (a rather artificial end to the section before ''Seid umschlungen'', some keying noises in quiet music), L'Oiseau-Lyre's recording, made in Walthamstow Assembly Hall, is superior to the EMI in its reconciliation of spaciousness and clarity, depth of field and sharpness of focus. It is warm, open and very well detailed from Beethoven's hyperactive but often neglected bass line upwards. That said, L'Oiseau-Lyre are dealing with a slightly more familiar sound image since Hogwood uses a bigger band than Norrington with 89 players on call as opposed to Norrington's 63. The reason for this is principally a need to have extra forces available for doubling in tuttis. This is a policy that Norrington set his face against. ''We play the score as it stands'', he states in the EMI booklet ''without any rewriting, additions, or doubling of wind or brass''. A brave stand, radical, and with a hint perhaps of a scorched earth policy about it. But as Dr Clive Brown notes in L'Oiseau-Lyre's booklet, from the first it was clear that wind doublings were necessary in places; the problem for modern scholars being where to indicate them.
In this respect, it is the first movement that is critical, though here it is in the finale that Hogwood's larger forces and rather grand manner will give him the edge over Norrington and the EMI forces in the judgement of many collectors. In the inner movements, it is more or less an honourable draw, though I prefer Norrington's cooler less legato reading of the slow movement which seems to square better with the tempo that has been chosen. But, as I say, Hogwood should have an advantage in the first movement where the tuttis question is an important one and where he stands to benefit from Dr Brown's editorial advice. Not that any of this is very new. Much of the preface to Tovey's famous essay on the Ninth Symphony is given over to the source of the music's scale and originality, and here Tovey identified the result of ''the scale of tone'', eventually calling the movement ''a work for the orchestral tutti''. Unfortunately, though he has the forces at his command selectively arrayed, Hogwood, to my perception at least, remains deaf to the textural and harmonic point of the arguments Beethoven is deploying. Where the music is caught in a passage of terrible stasis—a huge tutti over a pedal as at the point of recapitulation—the effect of the performance is thrilling. But the lead into that recapitulation is made to sound trivial. In practical terms, Hogwood's tempo for the movement is really too brisk for an Allegro, ma non troppo, un poco maestoso; Norrington is shrewder here. But what destroys the performance of the first movement is the typical authenticist way with pulse, the music running, chattering, occasionally barging its way more or less imperviously on, with Beethoven's astonishing harmonic and textural writing treated to an interpretative method that, at a pinch, might work for a piece written a 100 years earlier to a rather different kind of rhythmic and harmonic formulation.
In an essay in DG's 10-CD set of wartime Furtwangler recordings (reviewed in September), Daniel Barenboim writes: ''So far as harmony is concerned, he had both a knowledge of and an instinct for true harmonic tension; it was this that led him sometimes to make imperceptible modifications in the tempo, in no way arbitrary or superficial but responding to a necessity that was essentially harmonic and of course dramatic as well''. It is well put. And unless a conductor is master of this brief, he cannot conduct a satisfactory performance of the first movement of the Ninth. As Tovey argues, this is a radically forward-looking piece, with the tutti style later finding its consummation in the writing of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Elgar (Tovey's examples). Which is why conductors like Furtwangler (here on EMI), Klemperer (also EMI, nla—scheduled for reissue February 1990), Karajan (DG), and others have a head start where this symphony is concerned despite the propaganda that would have us believe that expertise in Wagner is an anachronism where Beethoven is concerned. (It is interesting in this respect that when Masur conducted that astonishing Ninth in the 1989 Prom season, it was prefaced with the Liszt B minor Sonata—an act of programming genius.) In sum, Hogwood conducts a grander Ninth than Norrington, full of novelty and insight and often successful in the later movements. But the first movement is a failure, both alongside the Norrington, which works better in relation to its own radical premises, and against, say, the Furtwangler 1951 Bayreuth performance. By temperament and training, Furtwangler was superbly equipped to conduct the first movement of the Ninth, something that isn't yet so in Hogwood's case.'