The wonders of modern technology! I don’t know the Beethovensaal of the Stuttgart Liederhalle, but can it really have imparted the light- and air-filled cathedral-like ambience that gratefully meets our ears here? And how do they persuade audiences to remain totally silent in recordings advertised as live?
Those are matters on which it is probably inadvisable to speculate. On safer ground, musically, here we have Mendelssohn’s once popular, then maligned, but now, it would seem, royally pardoned Hymn of Praise delivered in the enlightened modern manner, that is to say, with lively tempos (as apparently were Mendelssohn’s own) and no false reverence, all freshly, confidently and expertly sung and played, with the size of forces well chosen for the most effective compromise between weight and clarity. Rilling’s orchestra uses modern instruments; so, after the excellent Spering with period instruments, one might possibly welcome back the familiar warm radiance of vibrato in the voicing of the orchestral Adagio religioso, or be relieved that there are no stopped horn notes adding astringency to the angelic soprano duet ‘Ich harrete des Herrn’. That said, one will listen in vain for the rather more epic splendours and weight (including organ pedals felt through the floorboards) of Abbado and his London forces.
Maybe a little reverence might not occasionally be a bad thing, for at a swift tempo (faster than Spering), the two sopranos in the above-mentioned duet sound almost boastful that the Lord has heard their plea (you can almost imagine one turning to the other and singing ‘He heard me first’). Suffice it to say, the duet is more sensitively done by Abbado and Spering and their sopranos. Also, at the end of the next number (the anxious night-bound tenor), Rilling’s soprano delivers day (‘Die Nacht ist vergangen’) in full-voiced, large-scale close-up (as recorded, for this moment, she is quite as loud as the ensuing entire orchestra and chorus), whereas both Abbado and Spering have her distantly placed, leaving the full chorus and orchestra to blaze forth with the daylight (much more dramatically effective).
That said, there is far more here to admire than to criticize, not least the superb choral singing in the work’s final stages, and a properly splendid final return of the opening trombone motif (where Spering is disappointingly fast and under-powered). Apart from some rather insistent sibilance from the soloists, the balance, as I’ve suggested, is a modern engineer/producer’s ideal ‘vision’ of how a work like this should come across. If you are more aware of the walls of a real hall from Abbado’s set, you are equally aware of a higher degree of aural fog.'