Claudio Abbado began his career with Mahler and has been conducting the composer for his entire professional life. The Ninth and, above Orchestral Mahler 704 all, the Seventh, have consistently brought out the best in him.
Abbado's previous recording of No 9, taped live in Vienna, is now only available in his boxed set of the complete symphonies (DG, reviewed on page 625). Much acclaimed as an interpretation, its airless sound wasn't to all tastes. This account is another multi-miked extravaganza with sonic shortcomings that are immediately apparent. The opening bars establish a wide open sound stage (complete with hiss) that implodes with the appearance of the harp. That harp is always on the loud side, trumpets are almost always too reticent, the bass feels synthetic and there are troublesome changes of perspective. None of which is enough to nullify the obvious sincerity and conviction of a performance that simply gets better and better as it proceeds. This really is live music-making (the last big first movement climax at 16'54" isn't together), but the inner movements are beyond reproach, ideally paced and characterised and superbly realised. The finale is content to plumb the depths in its own way – as sensitive as any of its celebrated rivals if without the point-scoring you may be used to.
Where some interpreters feel bound to choose between structural imperatives and subjective emotions, proffering either proto-Schoenbergian edginess or late Romantic excess, Abbado has the confidence to eschew both the heavily saturated textures of his predecessors and the chilly rigidity of some of his own 'modernist' peers. Instead, his unaffected warmth allows everything to come through naturally. There remains something self-effacing about his musical personality. And yet there's sunlight – and a certain tenderness – in this account of the Ninth that you won't find anywhere else, a fluency and ease that's something to marvel at. For those put off even now by the composer's supposed vulgarity, Abbado's readings constitute a convincing demonstration of the music's integrity.
The awed silence that greets the expiration of the Ninth may or may not be stage-managed, but it seems genuine.