Customer Reviews

Mahler: Symphony No. 9

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This live performance from 1966, in very good stereo sound (in particular it captures effectively the concert hall ambience in a way that makes most studio recordings sound antiseptic by comparison), is one of the most powerful I have heard of this music. It achieves its impact through a weight and emphatic intensity of utterance that highlights the dark, fatalistic elements of the music rather than its songful, lyrical qualities, as with Barbirolli-Berlin (or, to a lessor extent, the live Kubelik on Audite, which may be the most balanced interpretation of the 9th), or its volatile, manic changes of mood, as with Bernstein. Although the orchestral execution of the Rondo-Burleske is, admittedly, somewhat disjointed in spots, Horenstein achieves both a seamless flow and unbroken concentration of mood in the sublime concluding adagio movement, surpassing in these aspects most other performances I have heard. Expensive, yes, but an essential purchase for dedicated Mahlerians.

This live stereo recording of a Horenstein Mahler 9 deserves its place in every Mahlerite collection, mainly for the first and last movements - the first in particular. The two other movements are less memorable or even to forget. Moreover, the sound is not great but OK. The audience's behavior is acceptable. An oddity is the applauses between movements.

Pros first:
I am not a fan of Horenstein, but it must be said that his interpretation of the first movement is impressive. Especially the climaxes come off very well. Excellent brass playing! Considering the last movement, it is getting a very slow presentation. Although I prefer the swift takes, such as Kubelik's (Audite, live) and Walter's (EMI, live), Horenstein's sensitive grasp is more convincing, than, say, Karajan's simplified and syrup-sentimental view (DG, live).

Cons:
Here we have the second movement, of which Horenstein doesn't make anything interesting. Compare with Klemperer (EMI)! The third movement, finally, is deeply problematic for other reasons, with playing "out of bounds". How bad is it? It is one thing to be out of key, if we talk about winds and brass. But it is another thing to be out of tune, which is the matter here. At the end of the movement the timpanist is bars ahead of the rest. It sounds very odd if you know the piece.

Who's to blame? Horenstein is the usual suspect, I suppose. All rehearsal concentration put on the first and last movements; the two inner sections performed on routine.

The present recording can be recommended anyway, but certainly not as a first choice. Go for Barenboim (Teldec) or Abbado (DG) you want a great live, and for Ancerl (Supraphon) or Klemperer (EMI) if you want an excellent studio take.

The elusiveness, the slender touch, the precise accent and the absolute domain and total understanding of this work considered as musical testament are some of the fundamental tools to perceive the real intention of Mahler in his Farewell Symphony.

Curiously the Symphony begins with a theme that it might be well considered as a mesmerizing cradle song. More than an Adagio Gustav seems to go to the ancestral matrix , the primary origin or the maternal roots if I may expressing in mythological language: the candid innocence.

And suddenly the happy harmony will be faced to the existential anguish, the hardness of living with his peaks and lows: the first loves, the first depressions, the nature song, those admirable landscapes so well depicted from his native Vienna.

The last movement emerges as the final resolution: the fate of man dissolved in the cosmos infiniteness.

Curiously, the structure of that Symphony goes from the human unity to universe's integration and in this sense goes in opposite direction to Beethoven's Ninth spirit.

Jasha Horenstein was a champion director of Mahler and somehow he explores this far universe with absolute expressiveness keeping in mind every little detail to remark the Mahlerian pathos.

One of the best versions ever recorded. If you add Walter Vienna of the last thirties, Scherchen Vienna Symphony you will obtain the most honest and convincing performings of this supreme work to date.

it's like horenstein's advance from the vox (vienna symphony) version of bruckner's 9th, and his bbc philharmonic offering, decades later. the difference is obvious. this recording shows similar maturity, compared to the vox version of horenstein's 'youth'. relativity aside, as a stand-alone performance it maps out most insightfully what can only be said to be the last work of an era. unlike klemperer, this version doesn't seem to overburden one,(though that may have been mahler's intent...)opting instead for a deeply spiritual, fascinating journey through life and what may lie beyond, tempered by an emerging acceptance of both. the botched parts referred to above seem to be a staple of some of horensteins later conducting, and i dont put it in the realm of impossibility to suggest it intentional, as it would further inform the chaotic ambience of the movement...
rest assured this one is a keeper.

For me, Horenstein's interpretation of the Ninth is the only one that can stand beside Klemperer's more consistent rendering, which it not infrequently surpasses. The BBC recording offers what is surely the most harrowing performance of the first movement on record, compared to which Bernstein's exertions on DGG, for example, seem merely hysterical. Horenstein seems to have tested the darkness of his reading against a wealth of personal and historical experience, so that there is nothing merely rhetorical about it, ever. Much as I love Mahler's Ninth, I don't particularly care about the middle movements, so that I don't have the reservations expressed by other reviewers here. The BBC last movement is fine, but the slower, broader version on Horenstein's mono Music & Arts set is unsurpassably great: Horenstein's magical sense of tempo conforms exactly to Mahler's instruction "slow, while still holding back" and no other conductor has come close to its expressive depths and heights. The mono version of the first movement is better disciplined than the stereo BBC, in which Horenstein and the orchestra were fighting to hear each other in the boomy acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall, but the stereo version elucidates Horenstein's complete command of this extraordinary music's cataclysm of detail. This is a performance no lover of Mahler or his Ninth will want to be without. Alas for the shopper, the same must be said of the mono Music & Arts issue, but once you have those two and the Klemperer you've got it all, just about.

Horenstein recorded Mahler's Ninth several times, and this is the finest performance in stereo of the lot. It is a brilliant interpretation of some of the most beautiful music ever written.