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The ticket price is not the issue...

Posted by SE on April 21, 2000 at 07:56:38

In Reply to: Re: I'm not even gonna try... posted by Rob on April 21, 2000 at 07:38:50:

it's the airfare that'll kill ya!

Hey Rob,

I'm going to the nearby Tower today to buy some music (my wife tossed me a couple of bucks). I was going to buy 2 new recordings, but I seem to have developed this nasty urge to eat something mono (gotta be on CD, I don't have a turntable). What do you think of this (I've included the whole Gramophone review, I think it adds to our discussion):

Bruckner [Symphony] Symphonies – No. 8 in C minor a ; No. 9 in D minor b. Concertgebouw Orchestra / Eduard van Beinum.

Philips The Early Years mono (Mid price) (CD) 442 730/1-2PM (two discs, oas: 72 and 59 minutes: ADD). Item marked a from ABL3086/7 (3/56), b 6530 058 (12/77), recorded 1956.

"The invention of the long-playing record was a great boon to Bruckner on the gramophone. Eduard van Beinum and the Concertgebouw Orchestra had established themselves as Bruckner interpreters of a high order back in 1947 with a celebrated Decca recording of the Seventh Symphony. This was followed by a second recording for LP in 1953 and in 1955 and 1956 respectively by recordings of the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies.

The Eighth received a guarded welcome in these columns in March 1956. Notwithstanding what many would now regard as the general tautness and discipline of van Beinum’s reading, Malcolm Macdonald clearly viewed the work – as people were wont to do in those days – much as they might have viewed (in Dickens’s graphic image) “a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill”.

To compound the problem, van Beinum used the longer of the two extant editions, the one edited by Haas. When a Horenstein recording turned up later that same year (Vox, 7/56), brisk and to the point and using the slightly foreshortened Nowak text, it was greeted with something close to relief. But the man who wants rapid locomotion in Bruckner, William Mann argued in November 1958, is no true Brucknerite. He was reviewing Karajan’s epic Berlin PO/EMI Bruckner Eighth, a performance that outlasted the van Beinum by a good 15 minutes and which was generally regarded at the time to have swept the field.

So the van Beinum Eighth, which was also said to be in rather boxy sound, was rather forgotten about. To judge by the CD remastering, the ‘boxy sound’ was more a matter of poor LP pressings than inadequate recording. True, one is aware to some extent of the confines of the hall. But what a hall, and what bitingly vivid playing! The rather Frenchified sound of the orchestra’s woodwinds and brass in those days brings Bruckner closer to Berlioz than to Wagner or Brahms. Yet, for all that, there is also a weight and majesty about the playing that is unmistakably Brucknerian.

So how is it that van Beinum dispatches the Eighth Symphony quite so speedily? Well, there is an intensely dramatic first movement that is quick but not overquick; a fast Scherzo, too fast for comfort; a beautifully paced Adagio; and a finale which achieves concision by virtue of inserting a rather scampered development between an exposition that is relatively measured and a coda that is genuinely majestic.

What many collectors will like about this 1955 Eighth is the sense it conveys of live music-making, this astonishing orchestra playing with that mixture of tonal solidity, instrumental articulacy and edge-of-the-seat excitement that is uniquely their own.

The same quality of live music-making is also to be found in the 1956 Ninth, a disc that took rather longer to reach these shores. It is, by any standards, a great account of the Ninth, one that, again, is more dramatic than epic, a performance that anatomizes this great wounded giant of a symphony (the scars more psychological than physical, Bruckner’s spiritual Gotterdammerung in C sharp minor) with a care that mixes pity and awe in almost equal measure.

Throughout the performance the strings and brass play magnificently. (If not quite perfectly; the horns make a slightly insecure ascent to their final high B.) The tone is darkly burnished, the phrasing broad, yet capable of the finest shadings and taperings of sound-tone. As for the woodwinds, the playing of the first oboe has about it a truth and penetrating beauty that would be worth hearing for itself alone were it not so ineluctably part of a greater whole.

The recording has a splendour, a clarity and a sense of rightness about it that makes one wonder why anyone ever bothered to convert to stereo. Since I had a rather crackly LP pressing, I am delighted to have the super-silent digital remastering. It is very fine, though right at the start of the Adagio there is the merest hint of drop-out or loss of signal in the violins’ low B which was not there (or was not audible) on the 1977 Fontana LP."

I can't say whether I'll find it, it may no longer be in print.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc.

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