I've just had a listen to the Barbirolli 9^th, and right off the bat I thought you were losing your touch (or maybe your marbles) because I found the first movement very "flat" for want of a better description. The recording was also definitely showing its age.

From the 2^nd movement on, though, it was a different story.  A lot of Mahler can be "all about the brass,".  Not always, he wrote some achingly beautiful string parts too, e.g. that 4^th movement/adagietto in the 5^th symphony, but having lived, as a child, near an army barracks, as I remember from when I was deep-diving Mahler, he was used to hearing brass band music at all times of the day and night, and that martial brass seems to have (subliminally?) coloured a lot of his compositions. Anyway, before I veered off on a tangent, what I was doing to say is that in the second movement Barbirolli gives equal weight to the winds and the rest of the orchestra.  The whole thing comes together as the sum of its parts rather than the parts playing alongside one another.

The third movement, the "Rondo Burleske" gets back to brass but, again, married to the whole orchestra rather than as a lead "instrument".  The whole orchestra takes turns to feature with motifs of their own, in what is almost a call-and-response form.  The brass is, to me, the "voice" though, poking fun with its dissonance.  The "burlesque," if you will.   The 3^rd movement is also a (probably deliberate) poke in the eye for Mahler's critics who continually claimed he could not write counterpoint.

The fourth and final movement features those lovely, lush Mahlerian strings again, and Barbirolli manages sugar, not saccharine.  There are echoes of both his 2^nd, and his 5^th to be found, I think. Slowly the rest of the orchestra sneaks in, almost unnoticed until, it's there, with the basses underpinning everything.  Suddenly: Brass - Timps - Cymbals - BOOM.  Then we're back to the gentle, sad, beauty of the strings, until the very end, which is longer than you might think, as the very last note (on violin) is marked ffff or about as quiet as one can get.

Mahler died before he could hear his 9^th symphony performed. He was only 50 years old. At the time he composed his 9^th 1909/1910, he had recently confronted many personal crises: the death of his four-year-old daughter, the loss of his conducting job in Vienna, a failing marriage, and an awareness that his own heart disease might kill him.  It's no wonder it's so cheerful. 

Sorry, this turned into a bit of a Mahler ramble. That's what comes of my nasty habit of taking notes when listening to some pieces of music - especially if they've been recommended - then trying to join the dots and decipher them afterwards.

I'll go back to that first movement at a later date, and see what I make of it again.

I hope this doesn't come across as too pretentious.  I'm no Mahlerian scholar, but I did read a lot about him when I first became hooked.  I don't know much about music, but I know what I like.    Anyway, that's what I got out of Barbirolli's recording of the 9^th

I think we're talking about the same version.



I'm still waiting for my "new" version of the 8th to arrive.

Since Hurwitz mentioned Tan, I tried his Beethoven Piano Concerto 5 with Norrington. Played way too fast and, as described, with virtually no feeling for the music. This is Romantic Period music!

I did just try listening to some Wuorinen