Symphonie Nr. 9 d-Moll op. 125 – 2. Teil

lifetime, in February 1824, while he was living at Ungargasse 5. It is famous for incorporating lyrics and a chorus into its final movement – but this is not its only unusual feature. The musical violence of the opening movement, produced by an extremely dense treatment of the material making up the main theme and the use of a huge dynamic range, becomes particularly obvious in the sudden reprise at the end of the various developments. As the music writer Nicholas Cook put it, “The effect is not so much of returning home as of running into a brick wall at speed.”

This recording, believed to date from 1928, comes from the first movement of a performance by the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera under German conductor Oskar Fried (1871–1941). Here Fried tackles the first movement at a brisk, tightly-controlled tempo. Fried’s career path was extremely unusual. After a number of years struggling to keep his head above water playing the horn and by acting as an occasional assistant to Engelbert Humperdinck, he shot to fame in 1904 with the first performance of his “Trunkenes Lied (Drunken Song).” He went on to work first as conductor of the Sternscher Gesangsverein in Berlin and then as a freelancer, before emigrating to the Soviet Union in 1934. Fried was a personal friend of Gustav Mahler, and became the first conductor to record a complete Mahler symphony in 1924.
(Constanze Köhn)