Mahler Symphony No 9

Berlin Philharmonic/ Herbert von Karajan

Deutsche Grammophon

Gramophone winner 1984

When Mahler started writing his Ninth Symphony in 1909, Herbert von Karajan was just a year old and living at the opposite end of Austria, in Salzburg. In this, Karajan's centenary year, it's good to be remembering his interpretative art in a recording that has attained legendary status in the 25 years since its release.

Karajan came late to Mahler's symphonies - he conducted the Fifth Symphony for the first time in 1973, when he was 65 - but it was with the Ninth, which he rehearsed on and off for more than a year with his orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, that he enjoyed one of his greatest triumphs. To people obsessed with Karajan's Nazi party membership, the coming together of an Austrian Roman Catholic of Buddhist leanings and the Jewish-born Catholic convert Gustav Mahler might seem a strange union but musically it produced some great music-making, none more astounding than this Ninth.

Mahler wrote his Ninth Symphony after a painful departure from the New York Met and after learning of his wife Alma's infidelity. His own death was just a couple of years off, and the First World War would follow soon after. All this seems to infuse this epic symphony. It stands at the crossroads between the romanticism of one century and the modernism of the next. Karajan was drawn to works that seemed to reflect the troubled century into which he was born. And in his hands Mahler's Ninth sounds astoundingly modern. The sound is not bloated but lean and sinuous, promising colossal reserves of power when playing quietly that it delivers with shattering weight. Karajan's rhythmic grasp never fails him, and whether in the stuttering heartbeats of the opening bars or the crazy Rondo- Burleske neither he nor his players put a foot wrong.

Karajan's great Berlin orchestra plays with an intensity that is almost too much to bear. And the luminosity he draws from these remarkable musicians is one of the wonders of this performance. This is a huge symphony and in this performance it unfolds in a single, unbroken arc. I defy you to listen and not be moved, shaken and yes, changed, by the extraordinary work of a true visionary.

James Jolly is Editor in Chief of Gramophone magazine

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