Last weekend my iPad sucked me deeper into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony than I thought possible. Deutsche Grammophon and Touch Press have released an app devoted to the work that rendered me slack-jawed with wonder, like a Victorian on his first visit to a cinema.
The app gives you four complete performances of the Ninth: by Ferenc Fricsay with the Berlin Philharmonic (1958); Herbert von Karajan with the same orchestra (1962); Leonard Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic (1978); and Sir John Eliot Gardiner with his preposterously named Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1992). Icons for the performances are next to each other, and the gentlest touch will transport you to and fro.
The technology is a marvel. Bernstein’s performance lasts 71 minutes; Gardiner’s just 59 — ‘a Ninth you can listen to in your lunch hour’, as one critic put it; and, of course, each conductor uses rubato to stretch and compress the internal dimensions of the work.
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