Bruckner – Symphony No.9
Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra; Carlos Païta
Le Palais des Degustateurs PDD043 (lepalaisdesdegustateurs.com/store/carlos-paita-anton-bruckner-symphony-ndeg9)
When conductor Carlos Païta died in 2015 in Switzerland he was 83. Born in Argentina, his first professional engagement was at Colón Theater in Buenos Aires. He conducted the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1966 and moved permanently to Europe in 1968. That year Païita was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque for his recording A Wagner Festival on London Records and in 1978 he received this prestigious prize again for Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique with the London Symphony Orchestra. The French label Le Palais des Degustateurs has been issuing some of his previously unreleased recordings from the 1980s and ‘90s, most recently this unusual take on Bruckner’s Symphony No.9 in D Minor.
As a young man Païta got fired up to conduct after hearing Bruckner performed by Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was perhaps the ultimate expert on this composer. Païta’s live take with the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, is impressively coherent proof of his deep understanding of this work, perhaps surprisingly, as his concept is radically untypical of Furtwängler’s epically monumental approach. He keeps the connectedness intact, but here we get an efficient reading that eschews any luftpausen [breath pauses] and bridges the different musical paragraphs with a headlong sense of purpose. The overall concept is almost brisk, but transitions are allowed to just make their point and carry on. There are a few sudden and dramatic slowings at the ends of the big movements, but the Scherzo may be one of the fastest ever attempted.
Païta almost gets away with the headlong speed, while keeping the band together, but the pizzicato figurations ending the opening phrases are barely articulated. A slower tempo might have made it more playable. However, this is a fascinating, radically faster concept of the whole work – which I would never propose as my basic model of this piece – but it is valuable as a quite different, rather streamlined alternative.
