Neeme Järvi’s quick speeds in this music can be interesting, provocative, and exciting. Not here. The outer movements go well enough, their swiftness never getting in the way of Järvi’s ability to inflect a phrase in the more lyrical passages, and if some of his initial tempo choices in the finale sound a touch random, they are relatively consistent section by section (and the joyous din of bells at the end counts for a lot). But his tempos for the inner movements are just plain ridiculous. The first Nachtmusik loses any vestige of spooky atmosphere at this speed; the central waltz sounds merely breathless, and the second Nachtmusik comes across as desperate, humorless, and just plain silly. Given the crazy tempos, the orchestra plays very well, and is quite well recorded, but sometimes there’s a fine line between provocation and perversion, and Järvi steps over it here.
