Nowadays, I suspect, it would be impossible to revive the debate about the efficacy or otherwise of ‘live recording’. Even when the term still ranked as an oxymoron, the roll-call of famous exceptions – Walter’s 1938 Vienna Mahler Ninth, the 1951 Bayreuth Parsifal under Knappertsbusch – was sufficient to invalidate any blanket objection.
It was an important debate, none the less, and no one made a more cogent contribution to it than Glenn Gould. In an article in High Fidelity in April 1966 (reprinted in that indispensable anthology edited by Tim Page The Glenn Gould Reader; Faber: 1987) Gould quoted Claudio Arrau’s refusal to authorize the release of records derived from live performances since, in Gould’s own elaborated paraphrase, live performances “provoke stratagems which, having been designed to fill the acoustical and psychological requirements of the concert situation, are irritating and anti-architectural when subjected to repeated playbacks”.
Gould himself pooh-poohed the idea, widely held at the time, that edited recordings were themselves ‘anti-architectural’, arguing that in the case of the great majority of performers their much vaunted “unified conceptions” were born of nothing more edifying than the said artists having developed a ‘go-for-broke’ mentality which decades of exposure to the loggione of Parma or their equivalent inevitably induced.
I don’t know whether Giuseppe Sinopoli has ever been exposed to the loggione in Parma or whether latter-day Dresden audiences in any way resemble them, but I sensed in the first movement of this ‘live recording’ that even if Sinopoli was not in, all respects, going for broke, he was certainly adopting stratagems which have forced him and his orchestra into giving us a debilitatingly tense and hard-driven account of the symphony’s all-important first movement.
As gaunt as the Klemperer and as driven as the Toscanini, it is a performance which, oddly for an Italian, denies the Ninth its status as instrumental song. After Wagner heard Habeneck conduct the Ninth in Paris in 1839, he noted “That glorious orchestra really sang the symphony”. And when Dimitri Mitropoulos asked Furtwangler to write down the substance of his wonderfully songful reading, Furtwangler declined, pointing out that Beethoven himself had written down most of what the interpreter needs to know in his own very precise verbal indications on the score.
I may be wrong, but having heard Sinopoli’s performance through on three separate occasions, I cannot help feeling that had it been prepared exclusively for the musee imaginaire of the gramophone, the reading of the first movement would have been a good deal less exigent.
But things improve. In the second movement one senses immediately a mood that is no less purposeful but far less stressful. The Scherzo dances, the Trio (the tempo perfectly judged) sings through the sunshine of its days. And how beautifully Sinopoli shapes the slow movement, the music motioned forward in a way that allows the players to take the melody on the wing without for a moment neglecting the music’s profounder, graver mood.
In the finale, the performance once again puts on its frowning public face, though the Adagio’s mood has not been entirely forgotten. The instrumental statement of the ‘Joy’ theme is a touching quiet birth of sound before the crowds come clumping in with their earnest protestations about the brotherhood of man. Something of an “uphill effort of aspiration” is how George Bernard Shaw used to describe this finale, which is what Sinopoli seems to be thinking too as his massed forces surge and ululate their way towards the millennium.'