Like Clockwork

Beethoven's Symphony No 9 was one of the pieces that I was long aware of before I became interested in classical music, mainly courtesy of Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and a Clockwork Orange. This recording is by the Berlin Philharmonic and Wiener Singverein with Herbert von Karajan. Sounds pretty damn good to me despite the sniffiness I usually read about Karajan. The disk also features the Coriolan overture as a make weight. Such a well known and frequently performed work, the 9th still retains the power to move, even if the fact that it gets appropriated on occasions such as the post 9/11 Last Night of the Proms presents a somewhat simplistic view of it.