KLEMPERER conducts Beethoven Symphonies Volume 3 (1957/60) - PASC371

REVIEW Beethoven Symphony No. 9

Here is the much anticipated Klemperer Ninth. So many readers will have heard him conduct this in the concert hall or on the radio, or will at any rate know his way with Beethoven from other records, that it seems hardly necessary to describe the result in much detail - it is so obviously going to be a great Beethoven interpretation. And so, indeed, it is, with the Columbia technical staff all out, too, to make the result a success. 

But although we may know conductor and orchestra, there are two less predictable participants in this perfonnance, the soloists and the Philharmonia Chorus (who here make their debut on records). Soloists, bless their hearts (or, curse them, according to your mood) are seldom predictable. The best known of this quartet is Hans Hotter, a fine singer and artist indeed, but singing his opening recitative in a manner that will distress many sensitive ears. I f only, one feels, he had concentrated less on expressing the message of the words and more on singing each note well in tune, for he pushes some very sharp. Later, when he is mainly engaged in quartet work, his contribution is excellent. 

The rest are efficient without being remarkable, good enough, at any rate, not to let things down. The soprano, Aase Nordmo Løvberg, does her difficult job pretty well, though she tends to force the pace a bit at the start and her final top B is precise rather than particularly beautifulnothing like Schwarzkopf's in her performance with Furtwangler. Christa Ludwig fills her less exacting role well and Waldemar Kmentt is perfectly adequate, if not remarkable. Whether he has a ringing top B flat, by the way, one cannot tell, for the chorus covers him when he should come out with it. 

The Philharmonia Chorus is splendid. Bright tone, incisive attack, boundless energy and all the sustained power you could wish for- the sopranos' long f f top A at the end of "der ganzen Welt" section is as thrilling as the subsequent pp chords from the whole chorus ("muss ein lieber Vater wohnen"). 

I said that there was little need to describe Klemperer's interpretation, but that will not prevent me, like Saki's boring Stephen Thorle, from doing so! It is a performance which leaves you at the end with the feeling that every performance of the Ninth should give, that you have been through a spiritual experience of overwhelming greatness. It is of a quality that I think no other living conductor could give. And, different as Klemperer is from Toscanini, the two have certain things in common. The astonishing attention to detail, the gift ofilluminating the significance of some detail of orchestration that had escaped one's attention before: and (which I think Klemperer has in even greater degree) the achievement of an orchestral balance that gives lucidity of a kind rarely heard. (Those close-packed imitative entries in the first movement, bars 427 to 452, have surely never been so clearly heard.) 

The first movement is immensely powerful, but impressed me most of all by the way Klemperer seizes upon and conveys the essential atmosphere of every part of it, especially those pp passages of indescribable mystery. The Scherzo, with the Philharmonia playing the softest sections with astonishing delicacy, may seem a little steady and cautious in comparison with other conductors' performances, but it is, in fact, taken at about Beethoven's metronome mark. (Weingartner's speed was only slightly faster, but Toscanini's a good deal more so and gave, therefore, an entirely different feeling to the whole movement.) But Klemperer is a great respecter of the score and, by the way, is one of the few to observe the repeat of the second section of this movement. The slow movement, with a wonderfully rapt meaa voce from the strings, is surely all that one could wish for and a momentary lapse of ensemble between violas and woodwind at one point is insignificant beside the satisfying beauty of all the playing. 

This, then is a great experience to hear.

TH, The Gramophone, November 1958 (Review of first LP issue)

The Klemperer 9th in stereo at last -months after its scheduled release date and a full year after its mono issue. Readers may speculate as to why those who have been enterprising enough to equip them.selves into a stereo set-up should have been made to wait so long. However, I hope they have not given in and bought the mono records, for the stereo is undoubtedly much superior and it is, in fact, the sort of recording of this work I have been waiting for. 

I put on the finale straightway (on the principle that we all know E.M.I. can record an orchestra well enough) and immediately began to think that this sounded more like a real performance than any record of a choral work I had ever heard. All the adjectives with which everyone describes stereo came to mind (I'm sure you know them by now) and the advantage in the reproduction of this array of soloists, chorus and orchestra is great indeed. 

Direct comparison with the mono sound was difficult because the two are recorded at very different levels (the stereo lower) and one had to keep finding an equal volume before any true judgment of the impact of the chorus or the climaxes was possible. But my main impression was of the way the stereo sound laid out the forces before me in a wide arc, with the orchestra more consistently clear against the chorus than ever before. This spaciousness of the music is the greatest gain. 

Balance is very good, though sometimes different from that of the mono records. For a year I have been going about saying that nobody makes the trumpets ring out in the choral part of the 6/8 section as Klemperer does and how wonderful that is. Well, he doesn't in stereo! And what he really does one could only discover by hearing a live performance. Which just shows how much we are at the mercy of the technicians. 

The performance is as great as anything one is likely to hear in this world. If I criticised any points in my earlier review, they were of little account in relation to the whole---except, perhaps, Hotter's singing of his opening passage. (If only Columbia had D.G.G.'s Fischer-Dieskau). 

Readers should notice that this stereo recording takes four sides and that the Egmont side of the mono has disappeared. When I consider the quality of what we are given and compare it with the lack of quality in D.G.G.'s three-sided version, I can't really regret the Egmont loss. There is absolutely no question of which to choose between the two, for both immensity of performance and fineness of recording.

TH, The Gramophone, December 1959 (Review of first stereo LP issue)