Valery Gergiev gives the Fifth an admirably direct, clean performance full of excitement and intensity. He builds the first movement’s central climax with unerring skill, makes due allowance for the Scherzo’s ironic humor without overdoing it, and paces the great Largo just about as well as anyone ever has. He treats the finale as an unambiguous triumph, with crushing bass drum and timpani, and throughout the Kirov Orchestra gives a 100 percent effort. In sum, this is a very good rendition of an oft-recorded classic. It doesn’t quite plumb the emotional depths in the way that Rostropovich, Sanderling, or Bernstein have, but I can’t imagine anyone being disappointed.
The performance of the Ninth is more individual, in that Gergiev takes a very laid-back approach to the first movement, giving the woodwinds plenty of room to grunt and squeak, and then considerably picks up the pace in the remainder of the work. The central scherzo has particular brilliance and impetuosity. It seems to me that a touch more precision from the strings would have given the music just that much more character, but as a conception this works quite well. In both cases, Philips provides vivid, up-front sonics that don’t really offer a natural picture of what these players sound like live–but that’s not necessarily a bad thing when the result has such physical impact in all other respects. Good stuff.
