This is a very fine performance with one of the best finales I’ve heard.

To read the complete review, please visit American Record Guide online.

This SACD records a significant event in the history of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra—a performance before a papal audience no less. The Pope is himself Bavarian, so spending state broadcaster’s money on the jolly isn’t quite as profligate as it might first appear. And whatever the politics and logistics behind the event, they treated him to a cracking performance of the Choral Symphony. There are plenty of recordings of the piece on disc, but this one easily holds its own in the face of almost any competition.

Unlike some conductors today, Mariss Jansons goes for steady speeds in most of the music. That can lead to a lack of propulsion, but never to a lack of intensity or involvement. The sheer quality of the playing the emotional engagement of every single player, no doubt sharpened by the occasion, make this a very special performance indeed. So often, the practice of recording concerts live for orchestras’ own labels can seem a mere financial convenience, but this recording demonstrates how it can really work to benefit the result. There is a sense of atmosphere in every single bar that you could only get from a live performance, and a top notch one at that. Mariss Jansons has been doing these live recordings for a few years now, and not just with the BRSO, and he really knows how much he can rely on that atmosphere. So those slower tempos, especially in the first movement, they work because he does not need to relentlessly drive the orchestra on to get the energy he needs. And there is never any suggestion of laziness or letting up of emotional intensity. He even resists racking up the tempo and dynamics in the coda of the first movement, and he gets away with that too. Instead of the usual rush for the double bar, we hear the individual notes of the string scales and the round, almost understated intensity of the woodwind chords. He does go for it in the Coda of the finale, but his restraint up to that point only makes those final bars all the more intense.

The interpretation of the finale here is quite a complex business. Jansons is clearly intent on expressing more with this music than a mere ‘Ode to Joy’. His reading of the finale is filled with darker undertones, which like in the preceding movements often result from the combination of steady tempos and crystal clarity in the orchestral textures. Whatever Jansons adds interpretively to the finale—and ultimately it is up to the listener to find their own interpretations of his revisionist approach—there is a continual sense of furrowed-brow conviction that prevents the listener from taking anything at face value. The liner-note quotes Bekker, Adorno and other 20th century musical luminaries to demonstrate the necessity of this sort of approach in the modern world. And it is hard to question that necessity without resorting to an ontology of music based in pure escapism.

So it is a reading to make you think about, as much as enjoy, the music. Don’t get me wrong though, it is an enjoyable listen too
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A Choral Symphony performed with a sense of joy before a papal audience

A year after Pope Benedict XVI visited his native Bavaria in 2006, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus made their own pilgrimage to Rome to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A DVD was later released (Arthaus Musik 101457) which includes the address on Beethoven and the Ninth Symphony which Pope Benedict gave after the performance. The new CD largely ignores the performance’s context. Oddly so, since the booklet contains a brilliantly succinct essay by Marco Frei on the political history of the symphony and the problem of performing it in the post-war world, a subject touched on by Pope Benedict in his address

Yet context matters. The key to Jansons’s reading is its clarity and understated intensity, the stripping away of all extraneous gesture and, in the finale, of any hint of easy triumphalism. The quality of the musicianship is one factor (Bach, one feels, would have relished Jansons’s treatment of the instrumental movements). Another is Jansons’s own heritage, born in the Jewish quarter of Riga in 1943 and later brought up in Soviet-run Leningrad. As Frei remarks, “Doubt is always part and parcel of [Beethoven’s] equation“.

The finale is indeed impressive. Words are clear and pitches secure in a performance in which a sense of a joy that is at best provisional is strongly etched. The clear acoustic of the Paul VI Audience Hall (shades of Munich’s Herkulessaal) serves the music-making well. The applause is not rowdy but respectful and warm, a note one hears all too rarely these days.