The generally welcome news that we would be having no more new Beethoven cycles this side of the millennium failed to take account of the fact that there already exist a number of unpublished cycles, stacked like holiday jets waiting to land. Michael Gielen’s cycle of the nine symphonies with the South-West German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rosbaud’s old orchestra, dates from the years 1986-94. Produced by South-West German Radio in association with Intercord, the cycle has been licensed on an exclusive basis to EMI Electrola in Cologne.
Technically, the recordings are good without being absolutely first-rate. Though Gielen lays the orchestra out in the classically approved way, the sound – the orchestral texturing – tends to lack transparency. Gielen takes what many will think an appropriately robust view of the music; and the playing itself is similarly robust, more robust than refined in the case of the strings.
Curiously, it is the oldest of the recordings, that of the Pastoral Symphony made in November 1986 only months after Gielen took over the orchestra, that has the airiest textures and the most gracious playing. This is a lovely performance, quick-footed and quick-witted after the manner of conductors like Paray (Mercury – nla), Bernstein (DG, 3/89), and Tennstedt (EMI, 7/91 – nla), but with none of Bernstein’s religiosity in the coda of the shepherd’s song. Six years on, in the recording of the Fifth Symphony, the performance has a similar driving forward motion but the execution has become rather more bullish. Indeed, one of the odder features of the set is the tension that seems to exist between Gielen’s interpretative intentions and the way these are realized – or in some respects, compromised – sonically by the orchestra and the engineers.
Gielen is at his more riveting in the Seventh Symphony where rhythmic drive and a certain eruptive weightiness of orchestral style are powerfully harnessed to one another. Whether the Fourth Symphony can take a similarly robust do-or-die approach, I am not so sure. Vivacity rather than pace is what Beethoven seems to ask for here. Performances that successfully go for quick-fire solutions – Toscanini’s with the BBC SO in 1939 (Dutton, 8/96) or Karajan’s with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1962 (DG, 1/90) – are at once fiery and limpid, the vivacity expressed through an altogether special kind of fine-tempered orchestral virtuosity.
Gielen’s hell-for-leather treatment of the first movement of the Eighth Symphony and the orchestra’s rather sullen sound again make for an odd conjunction. The climax of the first movement development is a good example of a moment when the decibel level is in more or less inverse proportion to the amount of contrapuntal detailing that is aurally available. Add to that, the violins’ sometimes sketchy detailing in higher-lying passages in the Second Symphony, and this is not a disc that can reasonably be preferred to, say, Roger Norrington’s coupling of these two symphonies on EMI.
Gielen’s generally urgent approach to the music is coupled with a straightforwardness that would be welcome were it not for the fact that a handful of the greatest movements – and here I am thinking of the first movements of the Eroica and the Ninth – require an intellectual and imaginative variousness and daring that these performances ultimately don’t provide. Gielen’s reading of the first movement of the Eroica is fast and, it has to be said, extraordinarily bland. Again, the orchestra are allowed to race through the development section, its crisis, and its terrible aftermath (what Bernstein once referred to as “a song of pain after the holocaust”) in a way that is depressingly perfunctory.
In the case of the Ninth, Gielen is rather more careful. (Very careful indeed in a superbly measured account of the Scherzo and its problematic Trio; though he is pretty quick in the slow movement and in the finale’s recitatives.) The failure to realize the music’s inner expressive power is less marked here than in the first movement of the Eroica; yet you need only listen to the horn and oboe dialogue dolce at bar 469 of the first movement of the Ninth to grasp that the performance is working to a more modest agenda than one might at first imagine given the seeming urgency and reach of the whole thing.
There are times when Gielen’s performance of the Ninth fleetingly recalls Toscanini and Klemperer (though never Furtwangler). But it is difficult to recommend it above the obvious competition. (Had it been prefaced by Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, something Gielen has been fond of doing in concert, it would have had a certain novelty.) Elsewhere in the cycle, it is difficult to see any of the discs being preferred ahead even of those rivals thrown up by the specific couplings listed above. That said, anyone interested in sampling the Beethoven conducting of this interesting man will almost certainly find much to admire in the discs that include the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies.
The booklets leave a good deal to be desired. The German editing of the English texts at times defies belief. Of the Fourth Symphony: “The second movement is essentially dominated which the ear perceives a squavers (bar 1) and the broadly sweeping cantilena of the first theme moving in crotchets (from bar 2)”. So now you know.'