Sinopoli’s live Dresden performance of the Ninth Symphony is long-drawn, intent, severely controlled. That was my first, not entirely favourable, impression, though I was prepared to modify it after spending time with the Horenstein recordings of the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies on BBC Legends.
The question I found myself asking after hearing the Horenstein recordings was, is it possible to relish a reading without entirely enjoying the performance? From his earliest years, Horenstein was a compelling Bruckner conductor: witness his superb 1928 Berlin Philharmonic recording of the Seventh Symphony (Koch, 7/91). Sadly, politics, war and illness meant that he spent much of the rest of his life scratching around looking for a suitable base from which to make music. When he recorded the Ninth Symphony for Vox in 1954 (3/55 – now on Tuxedo, 7/91), Trevor Harvey wrote in these columns that he felt as if had been through ‘a deep and great experience’. Even there, though, the performance itself was flawed, the Vox producer unwilling or unable to correct the fluffed final ascent of the Vienna Symphony horns.
It is much the same here. In his 72nd year, and much frailer than of old, Horenstein takes a far broader view of both works than he was wont to (his account of the Ninth is nearly as slow as Sinopoli’s) though the readings remain wonderfully alive, with sudden surges of energy and moments of quiet indwelling which communicate a true sense of imaginative wonder.
In the end, though, it doesn’t quite add up. The playing is good, often (in the case of the LSO in the Eighth Symphony) exceptional. Yet it is never consistently concentrated and fine in the way that live performances of Bruckner by the great Austrian, German and Dutch Bruckner ensembles invariably were under conductors such as Giulini, Haitink, Jochum, Karajan, Knappertsbusch (on his day) and van Beinum. Like Horenstein’s post-war Vox recordings, these BBC recordings leave me invigorated, uplifted, enlightened and, in the last analysis, disappointed.
Which is why returning to the Dresden Staatskapelle playing the Ninth Symphony live under Sinopoli’s direction seemed so extraordinary an experience. Here the level of concentration in the playing is almost more palpable than the music itself. The recording, too, is intensely concentrated: not cold as such, but fiercely analytical. In the end, it is difficult to argue with this, when so much is audible yet finely balanced. That said, Sinopoli’s glorious studio account of the Eighth Symphony, recorded in Dresden’s Lukaskirche, has about it a greater sense of temporal and imaginative freedom than this obsessively intense Ninth.'