Two Eighth Symphonies on a single release — one a monument of Soviet wartime anguish, the other the longest and most cosmically ambitious thing Bruckner ever attempted — and both conducted by a man most record collectors will never have heard of. That is either a recipe for disaster or for the kind of discovery that makes this work worth doing at all.
Carlos Paita was born in Buenos Aires in 1932 and died in Geneva in 2015, having spent the intervening decades in a peculiar self-imposed eclipse. He recorded for his own Swiss label, Lodia, in the 1980s, and then — nothing. The world did not beat a path to his door, and he apparently did not try very hard to hold the door open. His family has now retrieved the masters and issued them on CD, which is the sort of archival act of piety one wants to encourage, and in this case the results are genuinely worth the trouble.
Start with the Bruckner, because that is where Paita is most fully himself.
The Haas edition — as opposed to the Nowak, or the Schalk travesty that Furtwängler used to play — restores passages that Bruckner himself cut under pressure from his well-meaning but occasionally tin-eared advocates, and it gives the symphony a cumulative weight that can feel, in weak hands, merely enormous. Paita’s hands are not weak. His tempo in the first movement is brisk enough to let the architecture breathe — you hear the phrase-shapes rather than just the sustained notes — and the brass playing from the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra is something. I don’t mean polished. I mean elemental. There is a rawness in the attack, a talon-extended ferocity in the climaxes, that reminds you this music was written by a man who heard the organ at St. Florian and wanted an orchestra to shake a building the same way.
The Kingsway Hall recording, made in 1981–82, helps enormously. That space — beloved of Decca engineers for decades, now long gone — gave Paita a stereo spread and a front-to-back depth that few modern halls can match, and the engineering catches both the thunder and the honeyed pianissimos that follow it. The Scherzo — Bruckner’s most physically driven, its rhythmic profile almost brutal — moves with real momentum here, the antiphonal bounce between orchestral choirs rendered with startling vividness. There are a couple of moments in the Scherzo where the pace feels a half-degree too urgent, where the dance tips slightly toward scramble, but these are minor blemishes on a reading of genuine stature. The Adagio sings. The finale accumulates. The whole thing lands.
The Shostakovich is a more complicated case.
The Symphony No. 8 in c minor, op. 65, composed in 1943 — the darkest year of the Soviet war with Germany, after Stalingrad but before anyone could be certain — is one of the most psychologically extreme things in the symphonic literature. Its first movement is a vast, slow lamentation, running nearly half an hour; its third is a mechanical nightmare of a scherzo, a toccata of terror; its finale achieves a peace that feels earned, barely, and not without grief. Mravinsky, who conducted the premiere and remained the work’s greatest advocate, understood that the symphony had to be played with a kind of merciless clarity — the steel-honed edge of a people who had been through something the rest of the world could barely imagine.
Paita’s Shostakovich is strong. Pungent, even. The first movement adagio sears along its considerable length without losing tension, which is not easy — lesser conductors turn it into an endurance test. And the gong stroke in the third movement, at around six minutes in, lands with genuine impact, a cataclysm rather than a special effect. But the reading lacks the very quality Mravinsky brought to it: that sense of absolute necessity, of something being said that could not be said any other way. There are passages where Paita seems to be conducting the notes rather than the meaning behind them.
The provenance of this recording adds another uncertainty. It derives from a live concert, but no venue is given, no date, and — oddly — no audience noise or applause is audible. Whether this is a matter of editing or of some other explanation, one cannot say. The sound is less expansive than the Kingsway Hall Bruckner, which may be a function of the acoustic, the microphone placement, or simply the difference between a studio session and whatever this was.
So: one great rendition and one good one. For the Bruckner alone, this release demands attention from anyone serious about the symphony — it belongs in the conversation with Karajan’s 1988 Vienna disc, Celibidache’s Munich traversal, and Georg Tintner’s quiet, underrated cycle. Paita is not in every respect their equal, but he is in this company, and that is a sentence I did not expect to write when I first picked up this disc.
