There are six surviving
Furtwängler performances of the
Great. This wartime traversal is
the earliest followed by the Vienna
1943. Then there are the four post-War
ones; Berlin in 1950, 1951 and 1953
and Vienna in 1953. To the collector
who may have a couple or just one the
thought will doubtless occur that any
more will be an indulgence or else a
sign of incipient Furtwängler worship.
To this one can note that the December
1942 performance is by a very long way
the most wilful, free and dynamic of
the six, a performance in which the
conductor treats his canvas with the
widest – and some may find, wildest
- of brushes.
The expressive means
open to him here are particularly those
of detonative accenting and dynamic
tempo fluctuations, especially pulsatingly
exciting accelerandi. The element of
granitic and implacable enters early.
Those accelerandi sound breathless in
the first movement and the destabilising
effect they have on the structure of
the symphony has also to be acknowledged.
One feels the fissures between local
incident and wider structural goals
to be wider in this performance than
in most other symphonic performances
directed by him. And it is also true
that in his later performances, and
especially the 1951 studio recording,
the classicist spirit and sense of proportion
were very much more observed than in
this teeming example of romanticist
spontaneity.
But it would be wrong
merely to write off a performance of
such passion for this reason alone.
The pastoral of the second movement
is strewn with verdant petals – and
there’s nobility here as well as depth.
The trenchantly emphatic accents of
the third movement are counter pointed
by delicious string portamenti. And
the overwhelming dynamism of the finale
has a fluid dignity that elevates this
performance far above more commonplace
readings.
Earlier in the year
the conductor joined with Peter Anders
in four Strauss songs. Anders sings
these with youthful virility. His fluent
ardour is unstoppable in Liebeshymnos
but he’s at his most perceptive
perhaps in the long Verführung.
Here, without ever breaking the
line or drawing vain attention to himself,
Anders contours the song with diminuendi
and inflexion in an entirely natural-sounding
way.
The series notes are
generic and as I’ve mentioned before
fail to engage properly with the doubtful
attributions in this series. The wartime
recordings have been issued before of
course. DG’s boxes included them but
didn’t include those performances of
doubtful provenance. That’s not a concern
here of course. In this Melodiya series
there are many performances stamped
with greatness and if you lack them
these well transferred reissues – whilst
not especially cheap – may prove attractive.
Jonathan Woolf
Melodiya
Catalogue
for
details
Peter Anders (tenor) 
