Addressing a ‘friendly account’ of the Missa solemnis conducted by Masaaki Suzuki (6/19), Lindsay Kemp found that it left much unsaid: ‘the personal intensity of a bigger picture is lacking’. I share these reservations about the Ninth Symphony under Suzuki. The problem is not one of tempos or even scale, but sound world. There need be nothing wrong with violins playing the slow movement’s hymn theme to avow a closer allegiance with Membra Jesu nostri than with Götterdämmerung. Without a patient and inward address to the spirit of Gesangvoll, mit innigster Empfindung that the movement shares with the late piano sonatas and quartets, however, it becomes little more than an easy-listening Andante.

Some minor fallibilities of intonation (most of them accounted for by the clash of natural horns with even-tempered string tuning) are the only giveaways to the live provenance of the recording, which ends with a full half-minute of ‘live’ but empty space. This is Suzuki’s second recording of the finale, having directed his choir and native soloists 20 years ago in Wagner’s piano arrangement of the symphony as played with tremendous verve by Noriko Ogawa (also on BIS).

Time has not brought depth of insight. Even with the limited apparatus at hand, Ogawa invested more tension, more terror and then elation in the Ninth than Suzuki achieves with a full orchestra. Period-band performances commonly achieve a sophisticated balance between and within choral and instrumental textures, but it can’t be right for the voices to accompany the orchestra in the ‘Freude’ fugue. Whether it’s the work of Suzuki or his engineers, the entire symphony is lit with a brilliant and unrelenting glare, the acoustic equivalent of a 100-watt bulb.

Small imprecisions (from 0'16" onwards) in the context of a concert performance are one thing, but in Ninths of all sorts from Furtwängler to Antonini they are counterbalanced by an urgency of expression that Bernard Haitink does not come near to drawing from his Bavarian forces on his valedictory recording of the symphony. Neither propelled at Beethoven’s intemperate metronome mark nor driven ineluctably forwards by force of conviction, the first movement plots a course as judicious as it is uneventful towards a Scherzo of similarly disconcerting low voltage, slower and grimmer than Haitink’s 2006 LSO Live recording (11/06) but no weightier – and with all repeats observed, one of the longest on record.

Through the course of his six recordings, Haitink has gradually divested the Ninth of Romantic and Wagnerian trappings, and finally arrived at a 13-minute slow movement that flows as smoothly and gently as the waters of Lethe, banishing all memory of past struggles. To return to his underrated first cycle with the LPO (Decca, 1/77 – nla) is to return to an older yet earthier and more present world.

Having crossed the Rubicon of evolving Beethoven traditions, in a reading seemingly conceived to embody Rattle’s theory of the Ninth as journeying from Bruckner’s Ninth to Die Zauberflöte, you might expect Haitink to conduct a springy and uptempo finale in the manner of Suzuki. But no: for all the shaded feminine endings of the BRSO’s playing and the cultured blend of its small and professional chorus, this ‘Ode to Joy’ aspires to grapple with Schiller’s text on a grand and ceremonial scale. That it should fall far from doing so is no reflection on a keenly nuanced, Anglo-centric team of soloists but rather on the overall design of an interpretation still in search of a place to call home.