When Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony was premiered in Leningrad in 1945, one Russian critic compared it with Walt Disney's Bambi. It would have been interesting to see what he felt after this performance: this is Solti at his most ferocious, with plenty of stiletto accents and pounding fortissimos. The first three movements are driven hard (on good equipment the maestro's occasional bursts of foot-stamping are plainly audible) and while the song-like Moderato inevitably loses something of its familiar pensive quality, the unity and power of the vision is undeniable. Solti's view of the finale strikes me ('strikes' is definitely the word) as uncompromising: the humour is pitch-black, the build-up to the recapitulation unequivocally desperate.
The coupling of Shostakovich's Ninth with Beethoven's Fifth may have been simply a convenience (both were recorded during the 1990 Wiener Festwochen) but it makes an interesting contrast: hollow victory compared with the real thing—or at least that's what I thought when I first looked at the contents. In the event, Solti's account of the Beethoven isn't all that different from what he does with the Shostakovich. The high-voltage, bluntly articulated style makes the first movement very exciting indeed—even if the oboe cadenza in the recapitulation does seem unnaturally protracted in context. The intensity doesn't flag in any of the other movements, but after a while the Andante con moto begins to sound expressively limited, and in the scherzo and finale it is the thunderous tuttis one remembers rather than the contrasting pianissimos. I found this a good deal more compelling than Solti's recent Decca studio recording (reviewed 11/88): the sound may be less sharply defined, but at least one gets the feeling of a real performance. And yet in the end Solti's Beethoven Fifth also has a hollow quality—plenty of power, rather less glory.'