When Solti conducted Mahler's Ninth Symphony in London in the autumn of 1981 the critic of The Financial Times observed: ''Solti obviously knew how this music should go but not why.'' Such a reading would be an evident act of self-parody, for it is to this very theme—the modern world's nightmarish preoccupation with sensation, spiralling, self-referring and impossible to assuage—that Mahler so fearlessly addresses himself in the symphony's third movement, the Rondo Burleske. It's clear, though, from the present recording, made in Orchestra Hall, Chicago in May 1982, that Solti's sense of the music is a good deal more rooted than it appeared to be amid the unsettling razzmatazz of an end-of-tour London performance.
The new performance has a measure of repose about it as well as much splendour. The second movement is robust and resilient as Mahler directs. There is defiance and obstinacy in the third movement, an awful power which illuminates the music rather than the orchestra's known expertise. Outwardly, the memorable first movement responds as well to Solti's imperial manner as it does to Bruno Walter's complex and persistent nostalgia (CBS), Klemperer's stoicism (HMV), or the formal purity and spiritual repose of Karajan's sparer, rather Cistercian reading on DG. As Edmund Blunden has demonstrated in Undertones of War, a rich, full-bodied style is by no means incompatible with the business of charting landscapes that are death-ridden and war-torn.
Yet Solti's red-blooded, ebullient style does put aspects of the work at arm's length from us. Flooded by images of plenty (not only is the playing sumptuous, the recording is, too) we can all too easily overlook the premonitory death-haunted elements in the highly-wrought, ambiguously argued first movement. In the Adagio the problem is even more acute. Here death is treated by Mahler as a transition from the egocentric to the evanescent and eternal. In Solti's account of the Adagio's C sharp minor theme there is nothing of the extreme quiet (Mahler's marking is pp and ohne Empfindung), the chilly calm and Zen-like immobility, of the Karajan performance; nor does Solti entirely avoid fulsomeness in the tuttis where what is, in Mahler's text, taut and fiery can all too easily become melodramatic.
Too often, Solti personalizes music which itself seeks impersonality. The horn solo at bar 17 of the Adagio, less abrasive here than on his previous LSO recording (Decca SET360, 1/67—nla), is expressively shaded where Mahler's instructions are simpler and plainer and where the conductor's primary task (self-effacingly attended to by Karajan and his musicians) is the dovetailing of the horn's decrescendo with the strings' rising response. By and large, Solti's ear for Mahler's primary orchestral colourings is less accurate than Klemperer's or Karajan's; on the other hand, when self-quotation arises—the Kindertotenlieder reference on the last page—Solti gives us no more than a drift of sound where Klemperer and Karajan are more obviously allusive. Throughout the Adagio Karajan's superiority lies not only in his sense of the music's frequent acts of self-abnegation but in plain musical skills: the simple accuracy of rhythms and intonation and the unaffected justness of the phrasing. Horns and trumpets are not overblown, the strings' tone is firmly-centered or limpidly suspended.
The Decca recording is superior to the DG in weight and detail in parts of the first movement, kin to the Klemperer, though Haitink's Philips recording is equally explicit. Nonetheless, the imagination and integrity of Karajan and the BPO carry the day. His is the definitive Ninth for our time, the one best suited (with Haitink not far behind) to be ranked alongside the historically important versions by Klemperer and Walter.'