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London ffrr, CSA2216,; stereo LP

I have always found the first movement of this symphony to be the most musically satisfying part of it, and nothing in the cited performance has changed this old bias.  I have to give Solti credit here, however, for enough insight and patience to almost pull this thing together for me.

But let's face it, this symphony does not get really "pulled off" very often, for all the obvious reasons.  It is "Big", it's "Complex", and it's barely coherent for long stretches at a time.  Yet everyone concerned has to get it and render his own part well as part of the whole getting it well to really get it right.  It's got to be frustrating for a musician, to try his best and feel he's "done well" only to hear the playback and wonder where the hell that noise came from, that he'd been thinking all along was a symphony.  And I imagine that this happens more often with Bruckner's 7th than it does with, say, Beethoven's 3rd, or Dvorak's 9th.  Although I tend to be tougher on conductors, I would suppose that they are probably at least as likely to wind up wondering what just happened.

This vintage of the Vienna Philharmonic can play pretty much anything, and they can do it pretty much like any conductor would want.  In this performance, Solti needs only a light rein on the very attentive VPO, and he does not torture them.  He is very patient, but I don't sense he's testing the musicians; rather he is giving the very discursive 2nd, 3rd and most of the 4th movements time to "develop".  He does this as well as any version I remember, given the limits of his reading, and it does serve the symphony, well enough.

In audio terms, this recording is one of the better London ffrrs I own.

Paul S

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