In at least two of his Beethoven cycles, Karajan finished with the Eroica; Abbado, by contrast, has chosen to start with it, and his patient, somewhat circumspect approach to the symphony's first two movements suggests a man at the start of a journey whose course needs to be shrewdly mapped and tenaciously followed.
It is in most respects a meticulously thought-out performance, generally bereft of idiosyncratic (some might say, revealing) point-making. Once, after the dissonant climax of the first movement development, Abbado reins the tempo rhetorically back for a bar or so; otherwise everything is more or less as it should be. In the first movement coda, the trumpets now hang on the theme in bars 658-9, with the real climax (the ff at bar 671) underpointed in a way which I don't recall from Abbado's Edinburgh and London performances with the LSO. As I don't have tapes of those performances I can't verify whether this is a case of 'When in Vienna...''. Abbado's habit of preparing and touring repertoire with one orchestra and recording it with another does, none the less, strike me as odd. It is assumed, I suppose, that the VPO 'knows' the Eroica inside out; but does it 'know' the work as freshly as a rival orchestra, working over a period of time with a great conductor, can come to know the work?
Abbado's basic tempo for the first movement, around 48 bars to the minute, is a steady one, midway between the truculent (De Sabata/Decca—nla, Giulini/DG—nla, Klemperer/EMI) and the urgent (Toscanini/RCA, Erich Kleiber/Decca, the 1977 Karajan/DG). It is certainly an Allegro; whether it is an Allegro con brio must be open to dispute, the more so as the carefully graded articulation of the Vienna Philharmonic strings gives the whole reading that slightly circumspect feel. Occasionally, particularly towards the ends of movements, the pulse seems to tauten and string and brass tone takes on a keener, harder quality. At moments like this, there is an electricity in the playing which, were it present throughout, would turn a respectable performance into a great one. In the more obviously theatrical Coriolan Overture, the reading is consistently tauter; Abbado underplays the tragic pathos of the piece, but the dramatic thrust is impressive.
The recording conveys the orchestra/hall combination very well indeed. Abbado, in his interview on page 1224, is right to enthuse about this. My only query concerns the degree of reverberation at the start of the Coriolan Overture in a hall allegedly full of people.'