Our ongoing Seiji Ozawa remembrance sidetracked me into some aural ponderingof the symphonic adagio

UPDATE: Now with a better clip of the Adagio of the Furtwängler Beethoven Ninth

Carlo Maria Giulini (1914-2005) conducting the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, c1980 [photo: Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives]

"Adagio A"

Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI-Testament, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, Dec. 8-10, 1974

"Adagio B"

Berlin Philharmonic, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. DG, recorded in the Philharmonie, Feb. 1989 & Feb. 1990

by Ken

I don't expect that everyone will recognize one of these two movements, while I expect that most everyone will recognize the other, which is one of the core chunks of Western music from the 19th century forward. I hope that most listeners will hear in both of the above clips performances of attention-grabbing splendor. This performance of the lesser-known piece, and indeed of the symphony it comes from, made me think about the piece itself.

Later we're going to hear Giulini's performance of this movement alongside two other, really wonderful performances -- so good that it almost pains me to point out that they yield to Giulini's achievement in applying, from the outset, such an irresistible grabbing quality, a personal connection that animates a sense of the vitality and urgency of the piece which makes me hear its direct lineage from our other demonstration Adagio.


FIRST OFF, WHAT IS AN ADAGIO?

It's not easy to pin down, but attempts to do so often offer by way of example --

Adagio in G minor for organ and strings (arr. Giazoto)


David Bell, organ; Léon Spierer, violin; Berlin Philharmonic, Her­bert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded in the Kammer­musik­saal of the Philharmonie, Sept. 30, 1983

Of course from Maestro Karajan we're getting highly romanticized Albinoni (1671 – 1751), but since the adagios we'll be concerned with are of the Romantic -- and especially the High Romantic -- era, that's not a problem for us.

The one obvious thing we can say about "adagio" as a tempo marking is that it's slow, really slow. Slower, certainly, than andante. Slower, however, than, say, largo or lento? Hard to say. I'm going to suggest, though, that "adagio" isn't just a tempo marking but a state of mind, suggesting a vantage point from which the composer looks out and frequently up, ruminating on what it is all of us mortals are doing here, what our place in the universe is.

Beethoven marked the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony, which I'd describe as likely the greatest and almost certainly the most important of all adagios: "Adagio molto e cantabile," telling us that whatever we understand by "adagio" he wants molto, lots of it, and he also wants this adagio to be cantabile, "songlike" or perhaps (as here) "to be sung" -- and I'd like to think this ought to be part of our working definition of adagio. In German parlance, composers like Bruckner and Mahler often specified "feierlich" (solemn) and "langsam" (slow), often adding "sehr" (very) to drive the point home.


"SOLEMN" DOESN'T MEAN "LUGUBRIOUS"; THIS MIGHT
BE A GOOD TIME TO LISTEN TO THOSE PERFORMANCES OF --

"Adagio A," aka --

BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 2 in C minor:
ii. Andante [Adagio?] - Feierlich, etwas bewegt
(Solemn, somewhat agitated)


[ed. Nowak] Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI-Testament, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, Dec. 8-10, 1974

[ed. Nowak] Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz, Munich, Dec. 29, 1966

[ed. Haas] Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, Günter Wand, cond. WDR(West German Radio)-RCA, recorded in Studio Stolberger Strasse, Dec. 1-5, 1981


I'm sure there's a literature on the subject, but the widely performed Nowak editon of the symphony gives the marking as "Andante -- Feierlich, etwas bewegt," notwithstanding which the movement is often listed as Adagio rather than Andante, and the pulsing-with-life Giulini performance seems to me to elevate the movement to legit Adagio status, and a pleasingly un-lugubrious Adagio at that. The movement, after all, is designed to contrast with the symphony's C minor opening movement.

Let me say again how much I admire and enjoy the performances by those eminent, confident Brucknerians Eugen Jochum and Günter Wand. I just get the sense that with their intimate acquaintance with the full span of the composer's creative output, they understand perhaps too well that this is "early" Bruckner. The truth is that by and large conductors who approach Bruckner 1 and 2 (not to mention the still-earlier symphonies, known to us as "0" and "00," that Bruckner himself -- altogether rightly, in my view -- chose not to "count") are doing so as part of a "complete Bruckner symphonies" project.

Giulini, by contrast, was approaching Bruckner 2 on its own terms, and clearly finding deep connections. We may think of him as an unlikely Brucknerian, but it turns out that he had a particular affinity the music's ceaselessly restless and often discouraging search for understanding and meaning. In the late decades of Giulini's career his involvement with Bruckner broadened and deepened into one of his great passions -- as we're going to hear (though I'm afraid not in this post; see below).


OUR "ADAGIO B," THE "MASTER" SYMPHONIC ADAGIO

As I suggested earlier, it's Giulini's performance of the Andante/Adagio of Bruckner 2 that for me makes most unmistakable its line of descent from what we might think of as the "master" symphonic Adagio, aka our "Adagio B";

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125:
iii. Adagio molto e cantabile


Berlin Philharmonic, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. DG, recorded in the Philharmonie, Feb. 1989 & Feb. 1990

As it happens, Giulini had already made a really nice recording of Beethoven 9 -- in 1972, with the London Symphony. Let's listen to the 1967 Adagio.


London Symphony Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded in Kingsway Hall, Nov. 22-25, 1972

Pretty darned nice, no? But by age 75 Giulini had found (or perhaps made peace with?) so much more of his deeper inner musical life that the 1989-90 recording seems to me one of the great Beethoven Ninths. I remember receiving and listening to an early copy, with no particular expectations of significant changes from the 1972 version -- which, as I said, I really did like. On rehearing, I especially enjoyed the involved, creative work of the solo quartet in the Finale (Sheila Armstrong, Anna Reynolds, Robert Tear, and John Shirley-Quirk).

The new recording, though, grabbed and held me from the electric opening notes. I must have mentioned this to Jim Oestreich, then editing the music pages of the Sunday New York Times "Arts & Leisure" section, and with his encouragement I cranked out a brief review. Since then I've occasionally wondered whether the new recording somehow simply hit me from some kind of simply unexpected angle or at a particularly susceptible moment. No, I'm relieved to find, I like it now even better. There are a lot of Beethoven Ninths I return to happily, that I even love, but none more than (or even as much as?) this one.


THREE BEETHOVEN NINTHS ADAGIOS BY SEIJI O.

Since our "conductor of the hour" this past month has been Seiji Ozawa, I made a point of once and for all sorting out his recorded Beethoven 9 situation. I've always known and liked his first go, with the New Philharmonia and a strong-voiced solo quartet (especially Karl Ridderbusch, having a ball with the bass part), now apparently forgotten enough that I could't track down a recording date or venue. But I was dimly aware that Seiji made at least one later Ninth, in Japan. There were, in fact, two, and I thought it might be interesting to hear all three Adagios -- though I'm sorry to say that my source material isn't of the highest quality.


New Philharmonia Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, released 1974

Saito Kinen Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Decca, recorded live at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto, Matsumoto, Nagano pref., Japan, September 2002

Mito Chamber Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Decca, recorded live in Art Tower Mito, Mito City, Ibaraki, Japan, Oct. 15, 2017

Again, the 1973-ish performance seems to me just fine, with Seiji's customary ease and assurance in bringing the most diverse kinds of music to life. The progression from there surprised me, though, going in more or less the opposite direction from Carlo Maria Giulini -- note from the timings how compressed the Adagio has become, though the 2017 performance does pull back from the brink of the 2002 one.

It's not an unreasonable choice; certainly the 2002 and 2017 Adagios flow fluently and songfully, and I'm mystified when I followed a link to Peter Quantrill's March 2019 Gramophone review of the Mito Chamber Orchestra recording, where after voicing approval for the choral work of the Tokyo Opera Singers in the Finale (which I have to say I didn't enjoy nearly so much), he says it "frankly lift[ed] the spirits after a doleful, not to say droopy account of the Adagio." Huh? "Droopy"? Is that what you hear?

I do have a problems with the "chamber" proportions of the performance -- Mito Chamber Orchestra, I've read, had by this time expanded from 24 to 48 players, and I symmpathize with the impulse to restore the Ninth to something more like the orchestral proportions that would have obtained in Beethoven's time. I managed to get some enjoyment from the scaled-down performance of the Adagio we heard from David Zinman's Beethoven symphony cycle, even more wildly compressed, practically breakneck:


Tonhalle Orchestra (Zürich), David Zinman, cond. Arte Nova, recorded in the Tonhalle, Dec. 12 & 14, 1998

Now, as regular readers know, I have high regard for Zinman, and I guess he was trying to prove some kind of point about "tempos then and now," but really, while he attends well enough to Beethoven's "cantabile" request, is this any sort of "adagio molto"?
More like allegretto, no?

When I was thinking about this post, I had the idea going back, by no means exhaustively, but to a few points along the path of the Beethoven 9 discography, and one of the turns I thought worth covering was the assortment of performances we have, all of them live and all but one noncommercial, from Wilhelm Furtwängler. I have four on my CD shelf, unfortunately not including the one commercial recording . . . UPDATE: But, I've upgraded the kind-of-nasty clip I posted originally, and I think this one is better.

Still, the sound is hardly great. Even so, my goodness! There was a time when I listened to the Seraphim LP issue of the Furtwängler-Bayreuth Beethoven Ninth a lot, but it's been a while, and I wasn't expecting, after all this time, to be struck so forcefully. Since we associate Furtwängler with "slow," it's fair to say that his Adagio isn't quick. It sure doesn't sound slow, or any slower than the music asks. A good Furtwängler performance never sounds "slow" there's that sense that it's moving as fast as the music will allow. In this Adagio we hear playing of such intensity and purposeful movement that, for all the originality of the cantata-like Finale, this is the truly revolutionary movement of the Ninth.


Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Wilhelm Furtwängler, cond. EMI, recorded live in the Festspielhaus, July 29, 1951

Yes indeed! My goodness. Furtwängler -- and Giulini too, in his 1989-90 Ninth -- enables us to hear and appreciate the spell this Adagio cast over symphonic creation, laying the ground work for the great Adagios (whatever the composers called them) eventually braved by Bruckner and Mahler.


THE ORIGINAL PLAN FOR THIS POST WAS TO PROCEED
RIGHT INTO A SAMPLING OF THOSE ADAGIO MOVEMENTS

In what I thought would be a simple no-frills, lotsa-listening post. Somehow getting this far proved to be too complicated. So we'll have to leave it to a follow-up post, currently slated to the full expansion of the form Bruckner made his own in the Andante/Adagio of the Second Symphony, in the great Adagios of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth, and then the very different approach(es) to the form imagined by Mahler in the Fourth Symphony (and the emphatically non-adagio slow movements of the Fifth and Sixth), "Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde, and some combination of the framing adagios of the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies.

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