This recording of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony was made in Berlin in June 1989 a few weeks after Karajan's resignation as the orchestra's chief conductor and a little while before Maazel's rift with the orchestra when they failed to elect him in Karajan's place. It is, it must be said straightaway, a consummately played account of the symphony, the Berliners matching at every point the flow and weight of Maazel's wonderfully clear-sighted reading. At the same time, and no doubt helped by both conductor and orchestra, the engineers have managed as satisfyingly transparent a recording as one is likely to get in the Berlin Philharmonie. Indeed, the sound quality suggests Berlin's admired Jesus-Christus Kirche rather more than that of the somewhat recalcitrant Philharmonie. Only occasionally is there a sense of slightly engin- eered brilliance; for reasons which are probably as much to do with the performance, the trumpets' fearful annunciation in the first movement's coda seems a bit too glitzy for comfort.
Maazel conducts Nowak's edition of the symphony which is shorter than the Haas at certain nodal points. By and large, Haas's has been the preferred text of conductors and scholars from Furtwangler, Karajan, Haitink and Wand to Simpson and Cooke; but Nowak has his admirers and there are signs of an impending guerrilla war on his behalf to judge by remarks by the scholar Paul Banks in the September Musical Times (page 489). At present, Giulini (DG) is Nowak's principal standard-hearer in The Classical Catalogue, a predictably broader-based performance than Maazel's—87 minutes to Maazel's 80—with the VPO guttier and grainier in tone than Maazel's cultured Berliners. There are also Jochum's jack-in-a-box readings of the Nowak but they are currently confined to barracks in complete cycles (from DG and EMI).
On balance, the Maazel is better played than the Giulini, and it will certainly be preferred by those who shy away from too much monumentalism in Bruckner interpretation. Maazel's reading owes something to the Rosbaud and Horenstein school of Bruckner conducting and he is certainly a wholly literate Brucknerian, unlike Jarvi whose unfortunate recent Chandos recording of the Haas edition seems to presage an age when great Bruckner conducting will be a thing of the past once we have lost that generation that was both versed in the old traditions and enthused by the great editorial advances of the 1930s and 1940s.
Putting aside the matter of editions, the question remains how Maazel's reading compares with Wand's Cologne recording (currently available only as part of a ten-disc set from RCA), the Haitink (Philips), or the two Karajan recordings (both on DG). When MK reviewed the Giulini discs in 1985 he thought they had the edge over Karajan's Berlin recording in the matter of attack and of recorded sound. But that was before Karajan's third and final recording of the Eighth made with the same orchestra as Giulini, the VPO, in 1989. And it is this recording that perhaps currently surpasses all others. The recording is as good, if not better than the earlier Giulini and the playing is quite as trenchant whilst at the same time being generally much more assured. It is also a version that reveals the only real shortcoming of the new Maazel performance which is a certain degree of emotional distancing from the music. In the symphony's closing pages there are several details in the Karajan which lacerate sense in the midst of this great summarizing peroration, whether it is the wonderfully ruminative playing of the tenor tubas shortly after the start of the coda (Ruhig, fig. Uu) or the moving sense of longing and loss he brings to the violins' fractured three- and seven-note phrases 20 bars later.
The poet Donne once wrote: ''On a huge hill/Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will/Reach her, about must, and about must go''. In the end, and somewhat ironically, Maazel stands here in relation to Karajan as Karajan once stood in relation to Klemperer: urbanity touched with genius confronted by a grimmer truth-teller at the end of a lifetime's voyaging.'