Karajan's 1971 EMI recording of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, originally issued as a three-LP set with the Fourth Symphony, is so lucidly shaped and so luminously played that one listens to it as if under some rare form of musical hypnosis. It was one of Karajan's later Berlin recordings in the Jesus-Christus Kirche and it has a proper Brucknerian spaciousness and atmosphere, with considerable depth of field and a pleasing degree of reverberation, yet with plenty of definition where it matters in the swifter parts of the Scherzo and finale. Karajan's 1975 recording (12/86) made as part of the complete DG/Berlin cycle in the Philharmonie, is a tauter performance, more dryly recorded, less lovable than this reading which reflects something of the orchestra's work at the time of the music of Debussy, Sibelius, and Wagner's Ring. In this 1971 recording, Bruckner emerges as a master symphonist with what are possibly pantheistic longings.
Lorin Maazel's recording of the Seventh with the same orchestra, is new. It was made in the Berlin Philharmonie in February 1988 and sounds rather better, sweeter-toned and cleaner than the Muti Bruckner Sixth on EMI which I reviewed last December. It is a performance that reveals Maazel to be absolute master of the orchestra (something essentially different, I need hardly point out, from Karajan's symbiotic relationship with the 1971 ensemble) and of the notes. As a reading it has. some of the mellowness and outward calm of the Karajan but with an inner changeability of pulse that seems like a reversion to the Jochum style of Bruckner conducting without, quite, Jochum's glorious sense of inner organic growth.
In his new performance, Maazel lays out huge blueprints and fills them with a reading that is built on spacious but not unduly lingering tempos that are none the less opened out to a remarkable extent at moments of reflection or transition. It is an odd, almost perversely impressive fact about this performance, that climaxes are compellingly built out of contexts that are far from promising less promising perhaps than even Bruckner occasionally intended.
In overall timing it is one of the slowest Bruckner Sevenths ever recorded, even if it does not necessarily seem all that slow movement by movement. Of course, overall timings can be misleading: Walter on CBS is a par-for-the-course 65 minutes by virtue of a surprisingly swift Adagio. Still, Maazel is nearly ten minutes longer over the work than Wand (EMI—nla), Karajan (DG), or Haitink in the slower of his Philips recordings. He is also some six minutes slower than Karajan (EMI), Blomstedt (Denon) or Giulini (DG). In the end, this is a significant factor and explains why the reading is less cogent than Blomstedt's or the very affecting Karajan/EMI. It would be an exaggeration to say that Maazel diminishes Bruckner's stature as a symphonist but his flexibilities have a feel of early Schoenberg or Zemlinsky about them, a certain fin de siecle indulgent spread that is not quite what I find myself looking for in this radiantly conceived symphony.'