Like Inbal's admirable Denon recording, this Abbado DG issue pairs the Ninth Symphony with the Adagio of the Tenth (not in the Cooke edition, of course). Like Karajan's justly celebrated 1982 Berlin Festival performance of the Ninth (also DG), these are live performances. In neither recording is there any detectable sign of an audience's presence, but the sense that one is there is omnipresent and gives the performances that extra tension and vitality which no studio recording can ever completely capture.
Both symphonies are recorded in DG's favoured close-up style, but without the over-highlighting of solo instruments that one encounters in, for instance, Karajan's recent Don Quixote. The balance favours the strings, and I sometimes felt that the cellos and basses were too prominent, but this bias is not sufficient to detract from one's musical pleasure. The Vienna Philharmonic play magnificently for Abbado. Oboe tone is characteristically vinegary at times, but the solo flautist is an artist par excellence and the horns and trumpets produce a wonderful sound throughout.
I have often held up Karajan's Mahler Ninth as the touchstone by which to judge other interpretations within the past 20 years. It has spiritual depths and insights which this conductor had not previously achieved, as if the illness he had undergone at about that time had brought home to him in a painfully personal way Mahler's own confrontation with the fact of death in this music. Abbado, a much younger man, gives us a performance which emphasizes Mahler's stoicism and courage and is no less moving, no less in total accord with the score, than Karajan's. When it comes to the final Adagio, there is nothing lachrymose, as with Bernstein (also on DG), but dignified control, tenderness and the most careful and sensitive presentation of the strings' sonorities.
Abbado's interpretation of the great first movement is a triumph of architecture and drama, with almost terrifying dynamic contrasts between the ghostly Schattenhaft passage (page 37 of the full score bodeful trombones and horns) and the cataclysmic outbursts for trombones and timpani on either side of fig. 15. A few bars further on, the strings' exemplary observance of the martellato marking sets in motion Mahler's military-cortege episode which Abbado conducts with a quite remarkable sense of inner rhythm—it is at such a moment that one feels the inspiration of live performance.
Both the middle movements, where one has known many performances to sag emotionally and structurally, are brilliantly played and conducted. The opening of the second movement is a piece of classic playing, the clarinets so positive, the accented notes of the violins' rising phrase precisely weighted. Thus Abbado imparts a vitality to the movement that never relaxes, except at the moment of disruption in the middle, and he brings out the humour (albeit grim) of the music in a dozen little touches of imaginative phrasing. Similarly in the Rondo Burleske, I have never before been quite so aware of the effectiveness of Mahler's ironic use of fugue and other contrapuntal devices sarcastically dedicated to ''my brothers in Apollo''. After the unexpected intrusion of the lyrical, yearning grazioso section, the final presto is taken, with absolute security, at a breakneck speed.
Abbado obtains an equally intense performance of the first movement of the Tenth Symphony. The totally different atmosphere of this symphony from its immediate predecessor is proclaimed in every bar. An engulfing warmth displaces the exposed nerve-ends which are the dominant feature of the Ninth, even in the resigned tranquility of its finale. When the Tenth's Adagio explodes into a terrifyingly dissonant chord for the whole orchestra, one knows that the fury will dissolve into a philosophical calm. Abbado and the Vienna orchestra enter into this soundas completely as they do into that of the Ninth. A glorious recording '