Reviewing Beethoven symphonies on record these days can be a dismal business. There are some fine reissues but many of the new versions are musically disappointing with few to gainsay the prevailing mediocrity apart from Norrington and his guerrilla band of period instrument radicals. Which is why one is increasingly grateful that Gunter Wand, 77 last January, survives to play Beethoven with that judicious good sense that once upon a time we took for granted when new releases came along from a dozen or more front-line conductors.
Wand's new record of the Second and Fourth Symphonies, always an agreeable coupling, is a great joy in much the same way that the best Beethoven recordings of Weingartner, Klemperer, and Wand's predecessor in Hamburg, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, always were. Like those distinguished predecessors, Wand does not so much 'interpret' Beethoven as release his music to us on the orchestra, itself a difficult enough task in all conscience. Unlike many conductors nowadays, Wand can set a tempo wisely and well and then maintain it unerringly through an entire movement. What is more, his carefully schooled players know how to time and phrase each note's release generously but cleanly within that prevailing pulse. One of the iniquities of modern Beethoven playing is sloppy phrasing and articulation or, on the other hand, a certain amount of spurious gingering up of the music. Wand's players have the singular merit of being able, among other things, to articulate a staccato without shortening the note and a legato without lengthing it.
Throughout these two performances the playing of the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra is cogent and clean. In as much as Wand 'interprets' the music, he favours steady allegros in the Klemperer or Schmidt-Isserstedt manner, vital within themselves and vividly sustained but spacious enough to allow clear and sometimes interesting voicings. In particular, Wand and his players point up a lot of very droll woodwind voicings. The result is a humorous element in the playing that is identifiably German, something very much to be treasured in this age of Euro-Beethoven. And because Wand knows these scores inside out, he can follow the contours of something like the Larghetto of the Second Symphony with a remarkable feel for the allure and drama of the musical line. Far from being a dozy interlude, the movement becomes an unmissable event for the attentive listener. Equally, Wand knows how to characterize accompanying voices. Even though he has his first and second violins bunched together on the left, there is still a clear sense of the second violins at the start of the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony both underpinning the drama and commenting on it, like a classical chorus reflecting on an event of great pathos.
The recordings were made in Hamburg's Ebertshalle and are beautifully rounded and clear. Perhaps the drum is reather soft-grained and distant, but as always Wand has done his homework and balances within the orchestra seem judged to perfection. The sound is obviously more up to date than on the musically not dissimilar Klemperer EMI disc. As for the Bernstein performances on DG, they are of rather a different order. As SJ suggested, Bernstein's readings of these symphonies tell us as much about the conductor as the composer. With Wand nothing is centrestage except Beethoven and his music.'