Beethoven - Symphonies Nos. 1-9
Bonney; Remmert; Streit; Hampson
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Chorus; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Rattle
EMI 557 4452 (5CD)

Release date March 2003

Unlike many young conductors, Sir Simon Rattle started to confront Beethoven's symphonies from the earliest days of his career. Due to his association with the BBCSSO and the SCO, Scottish audiences were able to hear some of his first encounters with these towering scores. I remember hitch-hiking from Lancaster to Edinburgh (no easy proposition) to hear him conduct a magnificently proportioned Eroica with the SCO in 1981. Quite sensibly, Rattle has resisted his record company's siren calls to commit his interpretations to disc until he was good and ready. In 2001, EMI released a 'taster' for the current set in the form of a Fifth Symphony, notable for its sunny, unforced finale. And now we have The Mighty Nine, caught 'live' in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in appropriately golden sound, sumptuously packaged and annotated, and backed by the sort of marketing campaign that suggests strong belief from Rattle's record company. Rattle's interpretative stance is somewhere between that of Abbado (DG) and Harnoncourt (Teldec), to name two notable 'historically aware' cycles. Some of Rattle's solutions are more radical than Abbado's, although he shares with the great Italian conductor a latinate grace - over the years Rattle has often mentioned Giulini in admiring terms. The rasping, abrasive sounds that are typical of, say, Harnoncourt (with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe) or Mackerras (with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic) are part of Rattle's palette too, but are applied more sparingly. The Vienna Philharmonic is not encouraged to lay down a deep-pile carpet of string tone as in the days of Karl Böhm and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt. On the other hand, it hardly sounds like a period band - although 'period' and 'modern' instruments are not especially useful terms when applied to the VPO, with its egg-laying oboes and weird-looking choir of brass instruments! For example, Rattle's horns squirt out cuivré stopped notes in the slow introduction of the Second Symphony (to great effect); elsewhere, as in the Eroica's Trio, the 'traditional' sound of the Wienerhorn can be heard in all its glory. Like most conductors of the last twenty years or so, Rattle takes Beethoven's metronome marks seriously, but he is prepared to depart from them when so persuaded. His most radical departure occurs in the Ninth Symphony, where the Adagio sets off approximately a third slower than Beethoven's crotchet = 60. When Rattle first performed the Ninth Symphony, with the SCO in 1987, it was evident even then that Furtwängler's example loomed large in his thinking, not so much in his choice of tempi as in his willingness to modify the basic pulse, in some of the same places as his great Berlin predecessor, and very likely for the same reasons. The new Vienna Ninth is the most extreme example of Rattle's attempt to marry current thinking on performance practice with a much older tradition of Beethoven interpretation. On the whole he's convincing, particularly in the first four symphonies, in the Eighth and in the Ninth, in which he is reunited with his beloved CBSO Chorus, one of the greatest legacies of his long Birmingham tenure. His old chorus sings superbly - from memory - for its old maestro, giving a far more detailed reading of Schiller's text than one often hears. Elsewhere there's a glorious Eroica, at the heart of which is a searching reading of the Funeral March, and a lovely, buoyant Pastoral, featuring some bewitching wind playing. As they demonstrate every New Year's Day, these players can charm the birds off the trees - on this occasion, they're actually representing them! EMI's engineers have captured the proceedings in a handsome soundframe; the woodwind solos sing out with no apparent help from the engineers, timps and brass have plenty of definition and throughout the set one is aware of a particularly clear bass. No doubt, Sir Simon will return to this repertoire on record in the future; for now, he has delivered a provocative and thoughtful Beethoven cycle, which I look forward to returning to in the coming years.

Reviewed by Sandy Matheson