Andre Cluytens (1905-67) was never an especially individual interpreter of the music he conducted, but he understood how the old masters shaped their performances and he had a particular sympathy for German music of the romantic era, and for German music-making. Belgian-trained, he consolidated his early reputation at the Paris Opera during the war and later worked successsfully in Berlin and Bayreuth, toured with the VPO, and conducted a good deal at the Vienna Opera during the Karajan era.
As a recording artist, Cluytens was managed by provincial outposts of the EMI imperium in Paris (Pathe-Marconi) and Cologne (Electrola). This 1955 Berlin recording of the Pastoral Symphony, released on the HMV label in 1957, was given a surprisingly generous review in The Gramophone. It stayed in the catalogues until it was replaced by Cluytens’s better- played, better-recorded but interpretatively identical 1960 Berlin stereo remake (currently on a two-CD Cluytens Profile disc, listed above).
By contrast, the 1960 Berlin recording of the Unfinished Symphony was only ever released in France, a sad deprivation for the world at large, since it is without question one of the finest of all the early stereo recordings of the Unfinished. Since it still sounds superb, it must be accounted something of a collectors’ item.
However, the real interest here is not so much Cluytens – a sympathetic presence and, as I say, a skilled shaper of a symphony – as the Berlin Philharmonic itself. The 1955 recording shows how down-at-heel the orchestra had become in the post-war years. Celibidache and Furtwangler (who had died the previous year) had been capable of raising the players’ game; but the overall sound of the orchestra, as evidenced by this calm, competent, uncharismatic account of the Pastoral Symphony, is distressingly thin and asthmatic, the strings especially so.
Then, five years on, comes this dark-browed Unfinished with exquisite string sound (the perilous octave lifts breathtakingly beautiful), cellos and basses whose tone is fathoms deep, and new young woodwinds, every player a golden-haired Orpheus. Karajan’s doing, of course (though, as he knew, the horns remained fallible: viz the momentary wobble in the slow movement, bar 141, 5'41''). Ironically, Karajan’s own 1964 DG recording is a bit too suave for comfort. Not until his 1976 EMI remake did he conjure forth the sheer depth of sound Cluytens achieves here.
What was it that Hanslick said about Brahms’s Fourth Symphony: ‘It is like a dark well; the longer we look into it, the more brightly the stars shine back’? Cluytens’s 1960 Berlin performance of the Unfinished has something of that about it.'