Carlos Kleiber, so Lillian Kleiber’s note assures us, has conducted Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony on only one occasion, in Munich’s National Theatre on November 7, 1983. This is that performance, miraculously preserved on a 21-year-old C90 cassette made for Kleiber’s son – the Bavarian State Orchestra’s own carefully stored reel-to-reel stereo mastertape having done what such tapes occasionally do: quietly disintegrated. The sound is perfectly good. The higher-lying string lines are a bit dusty-sounding but the bass lines, all those rustic ostinati, have real presence and weight. Internal balances are perfect. With Kleiber in charge, every note of this astonishing score is alive and well and finely attuned to its neighbour’s needs.

Hearing the performance for the first time, I thought of Toscanini’s 1937 BBC SO recording, recently reissued on Naxos, and of Erich Kleiber’s 1953 Amsterdam Concertgebouw account (Decca, 2/54 – nla). Both are glorious though both are slower than I had recalled; a trick of memory I attribute to the fact that nowadays we live our lives (or have our lives lived for us) at a far more unforgiving pace.

This 1983 Munich performance is very much of its time in that it regards as entirely plausible the very fast minim=66 which Beethoven supplied for the opening Allegro ma non troppo in 1817, nine years after the first performance. (Peter Stadlen, in his 1982 essay ‘Beethoven and the Metronome’, in which he explores the likely visual and mechanical errors in Beethoven’s 1817 calculations, thinks 56-58 nearer to what Beethoven probably intended. This, as it happens, is the tempo adopted by both Toscanini and Kleiber père.) A handful of conductors had previously come close to adopting Beethoven’s metronome marks: Weingartner, Paul Paray on a 1954 Mercury LP with the Detroit SO, and Leonard Bernstein in his joyous New York Philharmonic recording (CBS, 12/74 – nla). Like Bernstein, Kleiber manages to make the quick tempo seem entirely right and natural.

The reasons for this are not hard to divine. In the first place, Kleiber is able to secure within the space of a single phrase a cantabile that Mengelberg or Furtwangler would have wondered at, alongside a staccato (attacca, marcato or what you will) that a convention of authenticists would instantly covet. Secondly, here and throughout the performance (but most especially in the ‘Scene by the Brook’), he is able to conjure forth numerous magical shifts, not of pulse but of pace and perspective.

All the repeats in the first movement and ‘Peasants’ Merrymaking’ are ignored. It is, in sum, a headlong and vibrant but in no way driven or inhuman reading of the symphony. Only at the start of the first-movement development does one briefly have the sense of the conductor swapping Shanks’s pony for a motorbike that has been concealed in the bushes.

At the end, after the muted horn has sounded its chilly valediction, the audience sits in stunned silence, giving one ample time to delete the applause and subsequent baying of the fans in the gallery. Since the performance pre-dates the discovery that Beethoven wanted the violins, as well as the cellos, to have their mutes on in the slow movement, we get sweet-singing unmuted fiddles instead. As Shakespeare’s Duke of Albany would have put it, ‘That’s but a trifle here’.