The Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg does not have a particularly good track record as a recording venue; there is a kind of incipient deadness about the acoustic that can easily take the shine off a performance. This latest account of the Ninth Symphony was recorded during the 1996 Salzburg Easter Festival and, simply as a recording, it is a good deal less consistent than the 1976 Karajan recording (Berlin, Philharmonie) whose performance it quite closely resembles, in the outer movements at least.
Initially there is a somewhat recessed feel to the orchestral sound in the Salzburg performance. Later, in the big tuttis, the sound seems closer and better focused, blazing nicely. Similarly, in the finale, the choir seem distant at first, but ten minutes on, in the great chorale swathe beginning at “Seid umschlungen”, everything is strong and immediate. (And the choral work excellent, it should be said.)
As I say, Abbado’s conducting of the first movement is similar to Karajan’s: dramatic, very concentrated and quite quick. Orchestrally, Karajan’s ability to conjure weight and then refine it, making it seem lean-toned and spare of utterance, is not evident to the same degree in the Abbado performance, but this may partly be a result of the recorded sound. Both conductors lead magnificent accounts of the finale. Karajan has a superb quartet, the internal balances even better than on the Abbado version, but in Bryn Terfel Abbado has as eloquent a bass soloist as any there has been on record. (The singing teeters on the verge of sentimentality but never quite crosses that verge.)
Unaccountably, Abbado takes the Scherzo rather slowly. It is not slow in a gaunt, Klemperer-like way; merely slow enough to have one wondering why Beethoven’s (perfectly good) metronome mark is not being observed. (Karajan is excellent here, despite his driving on through both repeats.) Abbado’s account of the Trio, by contrast, is rather brisk, the solo oboe and horn playing mousier and less eloquent than that on the Karajan. In the slow movement, Abbado takes reasonably swift tempos. This makes for a satisfying kind of stylishness of utterance but does not leave one with any particularly strongly defined sense of what the music is about.
It is certainly all a long way from Furtwangler’s view of the Ninth; and yet in a foreword to the CD booklet there is a page of high-flown pseudo-philosophical gobbledygook-cum-puffery that speaks of the “transcendence” of the present performance, of its being “a collaboration of greatness that reaches high”, before going on to quote Furtwangler, “To appreciate the greatness of the Masters is to keep faith with the greatness of humanity”. At least this is an improvement on Harnoncourt’s absurd remark, plastered all over a recent Teldec CD, that “without music no beeing [sic] is fully human”. But what purpose, one wonders, is served by parading Furtwangler’s name over a CD where the performance – Toscanini out of post-1950s Karajan – speaks a language Furtwangler never deigned to learn?'