Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Symphony No 7 in D minor, Op. 70 (1885)
Scherzo Capriccioso, Op. 66 (1883)
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Bernard Haitink
rec. 1981 (symphony, live), Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich, Germany
BR Klassik 900223 [50]
Was it ever thus ? As soon as I publish an article The Top Twenty Symphonies You Should Have in Your Library that included Antonín Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony with top nominated recordings, another version almost immediately appears which quite simply sweeps the board.
The surprise is that it has come from the most unlikely of sources, with a conductor who is not remembered for being a Dvořák interpreter of particular note: Bernard Haitink. Readers will know that his career spanned most of an era when conductors were allowed to record all the major symphonies, often many times – one only needs to consider Dvořák’s New World Symphony with recordings by Haitink’s long-time contemporaries such as Karajan, Solti, Bernstein, Giulini, Maazel, Abbado, Previn, Kubelík, amongst many others including such ‘outliers’ such as Mstislav Rostropovich (epic and overblown with the London PO on EMI/Warner), Otto Klemperer (also epic and also on EMI/Warner, but serious and symphonic), as well as Karl Böhm (with the Vienna PO on Deutsche Grammophon – surprisingly very good, a real dark horse). Interestingly, the one major name missing on this list is Bernard Haitink. That said, he was allowed to record Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony with the Concertgebouw in 1959, which was followed-up a few years later with another of the Eighth Symphony with the same orchestra (both for Philips). That eventually ended up being coupled with a New World Symphony on vinyl with the Concertgebouw, albeit one conducted by Antal Doráti – but that was it. All of this, then, is a rather lengthy preamble to my saying that I was not really expecting much when this disc – a live recording taking from the archives of Bavarian radio from as long ago as 1981 – arrived for me to review.
At this point, most readers will now be pointing out that if Haitink had chosen this symphony to record as early as 1959, right at the start of his career, then it must have meant something to him. They would also, quite rightly, point to the fact that Rafael Kubelík – arguably one of the greatest Dvořák conductors of the second half of the twentieth century – had just stepped down before this recording was made as the Principal Conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, after having led them with much distinction for the previous eighteen years, so this music would have been well within this orchestra’s collective conscience. Happily, all of this is true and everything comes together to produce a performance of this magnificent symphony for the ages. Somebody at BR Klassik must have a very good memory and, as a result, we are all the beneficiaries of that with this release.
It took a little while for me to put my finger on exactly what makes this performance and recording so special, but in the first instance it needs to be noted just how good the sound is, rich and full with a depth that puts to shame those ‘official’ commercial recordings of Dvořák’s symphonies released from around the same time by Decca for Solti in Chicago and Deutsche Grammophon for both Maazel and Karajan in Vienna, all of which suffered from ‘digital glare’. It is a ‘live’ performance too, apparently – although you would need the ears of a bat to hear anything other than the orchestra playing and there is no applause. The orchestral playing too, is flawless, absolutely glowing in the full tuttis, while the front desk players perform their solos with genuine flair. As for the interpretation, Haitink plots a steady course through the first movement, is gloriously expansive in the second movement poco adagio, the scherzo has all the panache and sparkle that it needs and the finale has real fire in its belly from the outset. However, what really marks this performance out as special is the way Haitink somehow balances all the disparate elements of Dvořák’s score to perfection, with the darkness inherent in the symphony always lingering on the horizon, but never at the expense of the soaring lyricism within the music either. So the eleven-minute-long first movement may well be nearly a full minute slower than the classic account by Václav Talich with the Czech Philharmonic in 1938, for example, but Haitink uses that extra time to not just fully capture the grandeur of the music, but also its poetry; rarely have I heard the close of this movement, nor the end of the following adagio, performed with such tenderness and poetic warmth as in this performance, despatched in a such way that you, the listener, just do not want either movement to ever end. Haitink is also superb in the scherzo, where he avoids falling into the trap of many other conductors of making it sound overly aggressive, by instead expertly balancing the exact amounts of fire, excitement and sparkle required with all the skill of an orchestral-alchemist at the top of their game, to make this movement really shine. As for the finale, it is shot through with adrenaline from the very first bar which, under Haitink’s watchful baton, never threatens to boil over, but instead is allowed to build up its cumulative excitement to ultimately deliver a coda of genuine magnificence. As I came to the end of auditioning this performance, I was fast forming the opinion that this was as perfect a rendition of this symphony as could be; I have nothing but praise for it and absolutely nothing to criticise.
Well, almost. In fact, the only criticism I can think of for this release concerns the coupling. Nobody will ever claim that the Scherzo Capriccioso of 1883 is one of Dvořák’s greatest works, nor that at thirteen minutes is it a particularly generous coupling to a recording of the Seventh Symphony, even if there is a certain aptness, as they were composed around the same time. However, since the same magic that informs the live performance of the symphony was also in the air a couple of days earlier for the studio taping of the Scherzo Capriccioso, on this occasion such parsimony can be overlooked.
In that aforementioned survey, I nominated two recordings as the best available of the Seventh Symphony: the London Symphony Orchestra under Witold Rowicki, recorded for Philips Classics in 1971, and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra with Vaclav Neumann in 1972 for Supraphon. Albeit now alongside this new Haitink disc, I stand by those recommendations, with the Rowicki being an electrifying performance from a vastly underestimated cycle, whereas the Neumann also comes from a complete cycle that is distinguished by a sound-world that sadly seems long gone. Although I have a soft spot for Dvořák’s Third Symphony, I have not always felt inclined to pay an awful lot of attention to his other earlier symphonies – that is until I heard the Czech Philharmonic perform them for Neumann in this, their first complete Dvořák symphony cycle, where the orchestra’s velvety, colourful strings, bucolic woodwinds and fairy-bright, translucent brass was a revelation, almost turning those earlier works into long-lost masterpieces for me and proving to be equally revelatory in the Seventh Symphony. However, to access those two performances now, you would almost certainly need to do so by acquiring the whole cycles particularly if your chosen medium is compact disc, whereas this new Haitink has the advantage of being available on a standalone disc, as well as all the usual download formats. In any case, for me, this new Haitink release is indisputably the finest account of what is generally regarded as Dvořák’s greatest symphony in modern sound and if fifty minutes is still rather short-measure for a full-priced release these days, when the music-making is as good as it is on this occasion then its value is truly priceless.
Lee Denham
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