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Two of only three known recordings by Furtwängler
CD1 (Stockholm) rated best Historic Choice by Gramophone, April 2008: "The master of transition surpasses himself on the build-up to the third
Restoration notes for this issue: DISC ONE: I tackled both of these recordings using a triple reference system to help correct some minor tonal imbalances. In the case of the first recording, Stockholm, this served both to bring out more of the upper registers and to relieve some of the straining tone of the midrange. I was also able to tackle a number of instances of drop-out and assorted clunks, clicks and cross-talk using technologies unavailable in 2001. DISC TWO: I had hoped also to bring new light to the second recording, but after several days in the studio wrestling with the severe surface noise which plagues sections of the recording, I elected to leave this for future developments in the tool-kit of the sound restorer - it seemed that in too many places I was merely able to make it sound different, rather than better. Thus the decision was made not to tamper with the original release - the re-equalisation of the XR process was serving only to exacerbate certain noise problems, and the pitch instability of the original proved further detrimental to the technique - and so to release it as Music and Arts' original restorers Maggi Payne and Dr. Dimitrios Antsos intended.
Furtwängler and Ein Deutches Requiem from the sleevenotes provided with the downloadable covers
Furtwängler's identification with the music of ]ohannes Brahms began inauspiciously with a performance of the Hungarian Dance No. 5 in Liibeck on ]anuary 10, 1912. He conducted the Fourth Symphony a month later, and had led all of the symphonies and concerted works by 1921. His debut with the Vienna Philharmonic on March 25,1922 featured an all-Brahms program. On November 9 and 10, 1925, Furtwängler presented A German Requiem for the first time. These performances were with the Vienna Symphony. He introduced the work to his Berlin Philharmonic concerts on]anuary 24 and 25, 1926, and again conducted the BPO in this work at the Heidelberg Brahms Festival in May of that year. Furtwängler also led three performances of the Requiem with the New York Philharmonic in March/April 1927, including his final US appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 3. A German Requiem again figured in his festival appearances at ]ena in May 1929 (with the Berlin Philharmonic) and in Vienna with the Vienna Symphony in May 1933, on the occasion of the composer's centenary. Furtwängler's last prewar performances of the work were again with the Vienna Symphony, on October 22-23, 1935. 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; it 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 elsewhere in this booklet 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). Furtwängler's final performance of this work, given in Vienna on January 25,1951, with the Vienna Philharmonic, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Irmgard Seefried, circulated in the tape underground. However, part of the sixth movement, "Denn wir haben hier keine bleibende Statt," was missing. This section was spliced in from another performance - not conducted by Furtwängler - on the circulating tape, although no one is exactly sure of the identity of the substitute baritone (Hans Hotter and Alfred Poell have both been named as possibilities). The 1951 Vienna performance is the most fluid account of the three, particularly in the first and last movements (although Furtwängler's contemporaries Carl Schuricht and Otto Klemperer were even more urgent in their respective radio performances, Schuricht in Stuttgart in 1959 and Klemperer in Cologne in 1956). The characteristic tremulous Viennese ladies with their scooping attacks will also not be to all tastes, although the solo work by Imgard Seefried and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is distinguished. Watery, distorted sound as well as the substituted section further handicap the performance. 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 78RPM 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. EMI had several sterling opportunities to preserve Furtwängler's reading of A German Requiem on disc. In 1947 at the Lucerne Festival, HMV engineers were present to record Furtwängler and Yehudi Menuhin in Beethoven's Violin Concerto. The public performances of A German Requiem during that year's Festival presented the chance to take advantage of a fully prepared conception. However, Walter Legge instead recorded the Requiem in Vienna in October under Herbert von Karajan's direction, with the same soloists as in the Lucerne performances. This curious decision further cast aside the opportunity to record a Furtwängler Vienna Symphony performance of the work given just weeks later in December 1947. Finally, Furtwängler proposed the work for a Philharmonia Orchestra concert in 1951. Legge reacted unfavorably, calling A German Requiem "a notorious house emptier." Hanni Raillard-Walter, who had the good fortune to attend the dress rehearsal and both performances of A German Requiem in Lucerne, wrote a vivid description of her experience for the Wilhelm Furtwängler Society of America. During the rehearsal of "Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras," Furtwängler asked his timpanist, 'At that fortissimo did you play as loudly as you could?" Upon hearing the affirmative reply Furtwängler insisted, "Then you have to play even louder!" The resulting climax (following the long crescendo after letter B, and again after letter G), as heard in the following evening's performance, provides a vivid example of Furtwängler's own conviction regarding Brahms. He thought the composer's classicism manifested itself both in simplicity of form and in a sparing use of extreme dynamics. Therefore, when Brahms actually wrote a fortissimo, it must be played for all its worth. Raillard-Walter wrote of another passage in the same movement that it was "beyond time and space, like a glimpse into eternity." Despite the obvious technical flaws in its preservation, this Furtwängler recording of A German Requiem from Lucerne still reveals that precious glimpse a half-century later. ©2000 MARK W. KLUGE
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