Zubin Mehta’s Bruckner Ninth surely deserves careful remastering and reissue on Decca’s “Legends” series, but until that unlikely event we must be grateful to Australian Eloquence for making it available at such a good price. Besides, the recording always sounded good, and it still does. Comparing this version to Abbado’s recent digital recording, it’s amazing how much better Mehta remains both sonically and interpretively. First, there’s that wonderful, unblended Viennese brass section, heard perhaps to best effect in the layered textures of the scherzo as horns, trombones, and trumpets successively pile on the sonority. Then there are those richly expressive strings, encouraged by Mehta to sing their hearts out in the very slow (27-minute), superbly sustained Adagio. For most of the late 1960s and early ’70s, this version stood with Hatink I and Karajan I among the great recordings in the active catalog, and its qualities have not diminished a bit. A wonderfully solemn but never immobile Parsifal Prelude opens the disc in similarly memorable fashion.
