Speaking of which, I'm troubled by his Adagio; it's not just Norrington's tempi per se, but also his inclination to press forward with everything. A great performance of this movement requires a kind of unhurried inevitibility, which is clearly not present here. On the other hand, the overall sound of his orchestra—partly due to the lack of vibrato and partly due to the engineering—is both beautiful and seductive. There's a transparency and layered clarity that I've rarely heard in this music, and I like it. It's as if you took a favorite work of sculpture, which you'd only seen in a particular museum under a specific set of tungsten spotlights, and put it outside on the lawn on an overcast day. Not so dramatic, but oh so revealing—and beautiful in its own way.
James brings up very important points.
Since I'm a regular listener of the RSO Stuttgart (season ticket holder), I can attest, that transparency is indeed at a high level even in the concert hall (depending on where you sit, of course).
Norrington's tendency to hurry and speed up things, while sometimes overstated, does indeed bring excitement into some music. We had Dvorak's 7th last Friday, and the first and (especially) the last movement had plenty of excitement, even though I felt sometimes in the first movement, that he was rushing it. There seems to be quite a hard to find balance which he tends to tip over to "rushed".
As for vibratoless playing: the second (slow) movement has indeed lacked espressivo which is simply a *must* in this truly gorgeous music of Dvorak! Surprisingly, my other concern, that he would make an "Andante" from Dvorak's "Poco adagio" didn't happen.
All said, I think conductor
Kenneth Woods described vibratoless playing the best for me (amateur string player), as being a very important tool in shaping the colour of the sound.
And while I wondered if I would ever muster 20 minutes to listen to his Mahler 9th finale, yesterday came the programme for the next season: his last concert as chief conductor will be ...
... Mahler's 9th.
The radio broadcast download from 9/9 that's in general circulation is of very good quality (MP3 at 320 kbps) and—even if it's not the exact same performance found on the commercial CD—should be adequate to satisfy anyone's curiosity as to the merits Norrington's approach.
Some technical points here for those interested.
I recorded the broadcast from satellite radio which is MPEG-1 Layer 2 (MP2) format which is *different* to MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer 2). MP2 compressed music is somewhat less effective, meaning, for the same data rate you'll get lower sound quality. The data rate of the satellite stream was 320 kbit/s MP2 which is very good and, as far as I can tell, CD quality level. This is even less important in live radio broadcasts, since the engineers manipulate the sound quite noticeably. Some are better than other, so I do not fancy radio recordings a lot, since they try having quiet passages louder and loud moments are levelled ("bass drum" moments most often). The German radio engineers are very good, but I heard badly prepared audio broadcasts even from them -- seems like there are technical limitation as to what you can do in a live broadcast.
While most computer audio players can play MP2 files, I thought, many will probably listen to on their digital audio players which usually don't support this format, so I had to recompress it into MP3. Now, each such recompression brings a certain level of loss of quality, which is why you have so many *dreadful* audio broadcasts floating in the internet -- people don't know how they're destroying the quality of the audio! That's why I chose for the recompression the very high bitrate of 320 kbit/s for MP3. I found it was important in this case, since the vibratoless sound of strings has a particular quality which, when rarely heard, could be dismissed as an audio artefact from the compression, a doubt I didn't want to bring up in the listener.
