WILHELM FURTWÄNGLER CONDUCTS BRAHMS' GERMAN REQUIEM: TWO COMPLETE LIVE PERFORMANCES
CD-1085(2)
From THE GUARDIAN TODAY: Classical CD releases,
Tim Ashley. Friday August 3, 2001
Brahms: A German Requiem. Lindberg-Torlind/ Sönnenstedt/Stockholm Philharmonic
Orchestra and Chorus/Furtwängler Schwarzkopf/Hotter/Lucerne Festival
Orchestra and Chorus/Furtwängler (Music and Arts, 2 CDs)
"Wilhelm Furtwängler never made a commercial recording of the Brahms
Requiem, so this set is hugely important. It presents two of his extant
live performances of the work - a reissue of the famous 1948 Swedish
Radio broadcast, together with a version taped at the Lucerne Festival
the previous year. Broadly speaking, the Lucerne performance is the
darker of the two, and boasts the finer choir and soloists (Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf and Hans Hotter). The Stockholm version, however, achieves
such an intense level of spiritual profundity that it ranks among the
most moving Brahms performances preserved on disc. Its flaws - odd moments
of choral muddiness, adequate rather than great solo singing - just
seem irrelevant. Essential listening. "
From Mark Kluge's liner notes:
For many years it was thought that no recorded Furtwängler performances of A German Requiem survived in releasable form. Elisabeth Furtwängler, the conductor's widow, lamented this situation, "for he always did that so beautifully." At the time it was not known that three of Furtwängler's four postwar performances had been preserved, from Lucerne, Stockholm, and Vienna. In 1973, Unicorn Records issued the performance Furtwängler led in Stockholm on November 19, 1948. This performance has been reissued several times, and is easily the best known Furtwängler reading of A German Requiem, and is for many collectors the reference point for Furtwängler's conception of this work.
Of those three surviving Furtwängler performances, the Stockholm account is the broadest and most spiritual. Roger Dettmer points out in the program notes that the Stockholm interpretation is not to be listened to often, for it requires the listener's complete immersion (as well as overlooking some of the executional problems). The Stockholm Requiem has however survived in by far the finest sound of the three, even though the original Radio Stockholm tape was erased following its transfer to discs for archival storage (engineers in the 1940s not yet knowing the long-term survivability of magnetic tape).
The 1947 Lucerne Festival performance, Furtwängler's first of this work after the war, provides the most dramatic reading of the surviving three. It also features the most secure choral work, surprising in light of the fact that the Festival Chorus (175 voices on this occasion) was not a standing ensemble. Furtwängler again had distinguished soloists for the Lucerne concerts, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Hans Hotter. Furtwängler's widow has written of the conductor's irritation with poorly prepared singers, viewing this as an offense against the music: "All the more he loved and appreciated artists who were well prepared, and who-as for example with the Brahms Requiem-sang without a piano score."
This performance was taken down on 78 RPM lacquers cut from a BBC rebroadcast on January 12, 1948. The source for the present issue was a tape in a large private collection of rare performances presented to the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv by one Herr Mueller. It is apparent that the source discs for the Lucerne Requiem do not provide anything like the quality of typical reference lacquers for NBC Symphony or New York Philharmonic broadcasts from around the same time. These discs suffer from wow, considerable surface noise, overload distortion, and even some missing music (e.g., the work's final bars, where Furtwängler stretched the closing beyond the capacity of the 78 disc side). Nevertheless, we are afforded the opportunity to eavesdrop, however remotely, on a monumental musical occasion.
CD-1085(2) WILHELM FURTWÄNGLER CONDUCTS BRAHMS' GERMAN REQUIEM /TWO COMPLETE LIVE PERFORMANCES. Stockholm Konsertförenings Orkester & Musikalista Sällskapet Kör Kerstin Lindberg-Torlind, soprano & Bernhard Sönnerstedt, baritone (Konserthuset, Stockholm, 19 November 1948) and Orchester der Luzerner Festwochen Chor der Luzerner Festwochen Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, soprano, Hans Hotter, baritone (Luzern, 20 August 1947). Disc One: from acetates preserved in Radio Sweden Archives. Disc Two: courtesy of Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, Frankfurt. ADD 79:25 & 70:17 UPC#0-17685-10852-5.
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