The separate release last October of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies revealed Beethoven playing of greater clarity, finish, and authority than we have previously had from Haitink on record. It provided distinguished readings of both symphonies, though anyone who went out and bought the record might now feel aggrieved that they will have to duplicate the purchase if they now elect to acquire the completed cycle.
Technically, this is by some distance the most distinguished Beethoven cycle now before the public. Whatever minor quibbles I had about the ambient sound on last October's release, there is no doubting the general distinction of Philips's Concertgebouw recordings. They have all the necessary width and depth of field required by Beethoven's music, with a firm bass line, beautifully clear and properly perspectived timpani, brass playing that has plenty of power in reserve, and perfectly focused woodwinds and strings. The Concertgebouw Orchestra's wind section may be less distinctively itself than it once was but it retains an elegance and clarity of utterance that is very much to English taste. As for the string playing, the violins in particular, it matches that of the Berliners in surety and sheen but surpasses them here in acuteness of phrasing and crispness of rhythmic attack. (Haitink's Concertgebouw, with its drier tone, sounds more like Karajan's Philharmonia than Karajan's Berlin Philharmonic for DG.)
As an interpreter of this fearfully taxing music, Haitink becomes surer by the year. His highly developed sense of the music's motivating rhythmic life is reflected in playing which is always keenly projected and finely sprung. Flexible pacing and other agogic adjustments are confined to moments of evident melodic and harmonic re-orientation and to the tail-ends of paragraphs where sensitive timing can gently illumine the contours of a transition.
Nothing on these records seriously disappointed me apart from a curiously lack-lustre account of the Second Symphony, the tempos often rather broad, the dramatic temperature rather low. The Egmont Overture also somewhat egregiously appears in a rather dowdy performance in the wake of a buoyant and intensely agreeable reading of the Pastoral Symphony.
Any suggestion that Haitink is at his most persuasive in the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Symphonies is bound to open up the old and not very sensible debate about the odd and even numbered symphonies. It is not that Haitink is less compelling in the Eroica and the Ninth, merely that his natural conservatism and temperamental restraint can make this revolutionary music sound, to modern ears, strangely traditional. His account of the Eroica takes fire in the trumpet summons midway through the Marche funebre and in the symphony's coda; but the first movement emerges in rather stately fashion and is decked out in all manner of traditional touches: no exposition repeat, a conventionalized coda (spurious trumpets at bar 658, nor real climax 13 bars later). Go back to the Concertgebouw recordings under Erich Kleiber and Pierre Monteux (the latter reviewed above) and you will hear something altogether more fiery and radical. Haitink's accounts of the first and third movements of the Ninth are similarly traditional in style, though the scherzo nicely offset by a rather relaxed Trio has quite a fierce rhythmic trajectory. Schreier and Popp contribute well in the finale, but the bass is unsteady and the choral singing robust rather than refined. This is not a Ninth to displace the Toscanini or the Klemperer accounts and, by and large, I would put it a little way behind the Masur which brings his fine Philips cycle to a most satisfactory conclusion.
The performances of the Eroica and the Ninth are cultured and musicianly up to a point, but they do not excite the attention in the way that Haitink's new accounts of the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth do. If his reading of the Pastoral lacks anything it is a sense of dizzying spiritual uplift at climax points in the outer movements and a really good storm. In all other respects the pacing, even a slowish scherzo, is a delight, and the playing, too; here comparisons with Erich Kleiber's Concertgebouw Pastoral (Decca 417 637-2DH, 9/87) are certainly in order.
In the First Symphony Haitink sails past every rock and whirlpool with what seems like insolent ease. The awkward little introduction is wonderfully neat, the ensuing Allegro is deft and forward moving, the slow movement does not hang fire, indeed one almost welcomes the exposition repeat, and the scherzo races by with youthful panache. I find the finale a shade decorous, but here I am disqualified from all objective judgement since for a quarter of a century I have not been able to get Toscanini's NBC recording out of my mind (RCA RD87197, 2/87). In the Fourth Symphony, by some extraordinary sleight of hand, Haitink contrives to sound both fiery and relaxed in the outer movements, and relaxed but never for a moment comatose in the Adagio. Here the Concertgebouw playing and the Philips recording (the drum before the first movement recapitulation perfectly placed) are a joy from beginning to end. And how well the Eighth Symphony goes. The inner movements are evidently enjoyable, the playing very quick-witted; as for the outer movements, here the contours of the argument are shrewdly followed by Haitink who thus puts symphonic logic at the disposal of an orchestra that already has a lot else in view too.
I would have thought the two Philips cycles, Masur's and Haitink's, are too close to one another in character for commercial comfort. Better pit Bohm against Karajan or Klemperer against Norrington if you are going to try your hand at internecine in-house rivalry. But the Haitink cycle has abundant virtues, not least the very fine engineering. As for the orchestra, well, even if by some quirk of fate Haitink did acquire Berlin, I doubt whether he would have a better Beethoven ensemble than the one we hear on these records; which makes his and the orchestra's recent parting of the ways all the more regrettable.'