How pleasant it is to be able to welcome a new recording of a Brahms symphony with almost total enthusiasm. The sessions took place before the BPO elected Abbado as their Chief Conductor, but the orchestra responds with unmistakable enthusiasm to the Italian conductor, and one hopes for a long and fruitful partnership.
The BPO's sound under Abbado is different from the Karajan sound. It still has a wonderful depth and sonority, but whereas Karajan encouraged a homogeneous, ultra-refined quality Abbado persuades the orchestra to play with more separated, slightly lighter textures, and a greater translucency. In the symphony's first movement Abbado opts for a good, spacious middle-of-the-road tempo, and lets the music unfold easily and lyrically, but with affectionate care. The music-making is quite unidiosyncratic and direct, but develops genuine fire and passion at climaxes. In the second movement the basic tempo is even a little on the slow side, but there is still an appealing lightness and a quiet, glowing quality in the orchestral sound. Abbado gently but firmly persuades the music on, maintaining an adroit balance between warmth of expression and clarity. The third movement has good balance and clarity, too, and if the middle section lacks its customary eager, crisp quality there is still plenty of vitality in the movement overall.
It is only in the last movement that I feel any real reservation about Abbado's performance. The tempo is again a little on the slow side, and although the music is neatly projected and shaped with great skill I somehow feel that Abbado is deliberately holding the movement's impetus back, perhaps in the interests of structure and the balance of the work as a whole. In any event there is just a slightly tame feel to the finale, and the climax doesn't quite have its usual impact. But in general it's a most satisfying performance of the symphony, very well recorded.
I have already in a way pointed the major difference between Abbado and Karajan. The latter's 1987 version for DG, by far the most successful item in his last Brahms symphony cycle, offers rich rewards in its well-recorded, mellow, wise, unhurried response to the score, and Karajan conducts the last movement with surprisingly more pace and fire than Abbado. Karajan's Philharmonia version on a mid-price EMI reissue dates back to 1955, but the early stereo sound is excellent, and the performance has a little more vitality and clearer textures. Klemperer's 1956 EMI sound is a little grainier, to match a performance which, though not lacking in lyricism, has tremendous strength and character. His version is also on a mid-price reissue, and is adorned also by a dramatic, deeply-felt 1962 performance of the Alto Rhapsody with Christa Ludwig. Walter's 1960 version of the symphony on CBS is highly distinguished in a way, but here the conductor's great age is surely the cause of a slight lack of energy and momentum in the playing.
On the new disc Lipovsek's singing in the Alto Rhapsody has good tone and good sense—perhaps a slightly dry-eyed quality too. Abbado's characterful conducting is impressive, but Dame Janet Baker's more expressive EMI version with Boult is more satisfying. Though Clemens Krauss brings a particularly inward quality to the 1947 Decca version, and though Ferrier sings with intensity and insight, this performance is really very slow and becomes somewhat lugubrious.'