When the young Leonard Bernstein was a student at Harvard University he went to Dmitri Mitropoulos's first concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936, which included his own arrangement for string orchestra of Beethoven's longest, most complex and—in the composer's own opinion—finest string quartet: Op. 131 in C sharp minor, whose seven movements are meant to be played consecutively, without pauses in between. ''I went out of my mind and have been ever since,'' Bernstein later recalled. ''It's not a version but exactly the quartet. One buys the four parts in multiple and distributes them to the orchestra, just marking where the basses double with the celli.'' Bernstein borrowed Mitropoulos's copy of the Eulenburg miniature score, made his own adjustments to the latter's editing, and performed the work several times with his first orchestra, the New York City Symphony, and once, later, with the New York Philharmonic.
DG's recording, first issued on LP in 1980 and now most happily reissued on CD, was, it seems, an amalgamation of takes from several live performances with the strings of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (''the perfect people to do this'', Bernstein said) both at the Salzburg Festival and in Vienna, with no 'touch-up' session in the studio afterwards. I still think that some passages in the gigantic variation-form central slow movement and in the recitative-like Allegro moderato which precedes it would have benefited from the use of solo strings, but the virtuosity and unanimity of the VPO strings command the highest respect. The grave opening fugue, the brilliant scherzo and the impassioned finale sound terrific; right or wrong, this is a performance that takes you by the throat.
The CD reissue has the enormous advantage of prefacing Op. 131 with Beethoven's last Quartet, Op. 135 in F, recorded in what were presumably comparable circumstances in the Musikverein in Vienna in September 1989, less than a year before Bernstein's death. Although Toscanini recorded the second and third movements of Op. 135 with the strings of the NBC Symphony in 1938 it could be argued that this in many ways more intimate music responds less well to performance by an orchestral string section; but listen to the VPO playing the scherzo and the Lento which follows it and see if you are not persuaded otherwise. This is a fabulous disc.'