MOZART
Symphonies: Nos. 39, 40
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René Jacobs, cond; Freiburg Baroque O
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HARMONIA MUNDI 901959 (65:13)
These are absolutely splendid, lilting, clear performances of these two famed symphonies by an outstanding historically informed orchestra and conductor. Were these your first or only recordings of these works, you will not have chosen badly. But, for me, the question is not how good they are in comparison with all other historically informed recordings, but whether or not they are individual enough as interpretations to warrant recommendation.
And therein lies the rub. By purposely eschewing such “old-fashioned” ideals as, say, dramatic expression, rubato, or even a whiff of vibrato, René Jacobs and his orchestra sound—with very slight differences in phrasing—the same as everyone else. My first paragraph above could just as easily have been written about the recordings of Roger Norrington, Trevor Pinnock, John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood … the list goes on and on. (In fact, I find Norrington’s and Gardiner’s performances a shade more interesting, so there.) Someday, some bulbous-headed future incarnation of a musicologist will play this artifact on a CD player (undoubtedly reconstructed with yet-unknown plastics, but using a Philips or Sony blueprint off the Internet), and say to himself (or another musicologist), “What the flug? Did all these conductors sound like they were playing on a MIDI?”
I suppose it would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Wilhelm Furtwängler’s recordings are sounding more authentically Mozartian to me every day. Nice stuff for your high-toned Sunday brunch, though.
Lynn René Bayley
