As Charles Ives once said, the music is not in the notes. Riccardo Muti finds this music only fleetingly in the slow movement where his first clarinet (a star) is in every sense twilight's last gleaming. Otherwise, it is an oddly detached, cosmetic experience. I hear a noble score unfold, but not a human drama; I hear notes, but not the reasons for them. Whatever happened to the grim determination behind those opening string declamations, or the atmosphere distilled in the violas' rapt second subject? Again, the solo clarinet limpidly gropes for subtext in his fragile solo just prior to the second subject's pre-development reprise. But it's only a moment, a glimpse of the elusive. Beauty and brawn are skin deep. There is no menace in the piano marking time at the outset of the development; horns stopped down in their lowest register are just horns stopped down in their lowest register. Even that electrifying swing into the march is compromised by zero characterization from the trumpets (the sharpness of the articulation, the sneer of the little hairpin crescendos can convey so much). And at the height of the climax (vividly recorded), the momentous largamente in unison strings and horns is hardly a moment of truth. But then intensity comes through motivation and motivation cannot be manufactured. Muti and his orchestra take too much as read, that's the problem. Nor, incidentally, could I live with the solo violin's intonation at the close of this first movement. How did that get by the eagle-eared maestro?
For the rest, more of the same: no fresh insights, no sense of rediscovery. The Scherzo makes all the right noises at precisely the right tempo (nice brassy earth-tones from horns and trumpets) but still manages to retain a degree of misplaced urban chic; the slow movement, as I implied earlier, is coolly beautiful, though instances of pronounced portamento (like the falling G sharp to C sharp in the opening paragraph) strike me as singularly inappropriate in this chill, chastened wasteland. In the finale, the high-velocity string writing is despatched without fear of flying, the climax monumental without telling us anything. I keep returning to Bernstein's first New York Philharmonic recording: there is one place you'll find the music—all of it.'