The finest live performance I have yet heard of Beethoven’s exhilarating but cruelly difficult to bring off First Symphony was conducted by Gunter Wand. It was at a BBC SO concert in London in 1986 (the year of Wand’s North German RSO recording of the symphony). Since Wand was not the BBC orchestra’s chief conductor, merely its chief guest conductor, he had spent long hours of rehearsal getting the rhythmic sub-frame of the music right. And how that effort shone through in the event: the entire symphony propelled vividly yet effortlessly forward. As the final chords sounded, Henry James’s phrase ‘the equanimity of a result’ came to mind. Equanimity and (this being Beethoven) ‘inevitability’, too.
Toscanini’s famous recordings nothwithstanding, I never expected to hear the symphony better conducted, something which was borne out when Wand’s 1986 North German Radio recording (listed above, now a budget-price CD that also includes the Pastoral Symphony) was released a couple of years later. The performance of the Second Symphony (coupled with the Seventh) was equally fine, beautifully articulated and thus immensely characterful yet at the same time interpretatively disinterested. In other words, Beethoven and his music were centre stage, not conductor and orchestra. (Like Klemperer, Wand takes the finale at a moderate pace but with tremendous articulacy and relish.)
I noticed only one substantive interpretative change in these new recordings. Wand no longer takes the exposition repeat in the slow movement of the First Symphony. I think this is right. The movement works best (pace Beethoven’s ludicrous metronome mark) at a moderate speed that allows both the con moto and cantabile elements to register. Glibly played, the exposition needs to be heard twice through; expressively played, there is no such need, which is what I imagine Wand has come to believe.
Do we, then, need these new recordings? I would say we do. Collectors who have Wand’s superb five-CD set of the Beethoven symphonies (the 1985-88 North German RSO studio recordings) will probably not wish to reinvest. Yet these new live performances (not to mention the effortlessly agreeable new live recordings) are even finer. Long years of exacting yet musically sympathetic work have brought Wand (89 last January) and his players to a point where the music-making is not only well-nigh flawless in style and execution but also – mirabile dictu – richly alive, inwardly as well as outwardly