Klemperer's 1963 version of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony is one of his very finest recordings, a wonderful late example of the work of the Klemperer / Philharmonia / Legge / Larter team at its exceptional best. When Klemperer hit on precisely the right tempos for a symphony, it was as if the work was being enunciated in a single breath. Thrilling and far-flung as the Fourth Symphony sounds here, it is also given out with an almost eplgrammatic terseness. Rarely, if ever, has Bruckner sounded less prolix than he does here.
In Bruckner, and in Brahms, Klemperer was never the slow-coach he could be in some other music. Indeed, his old Vox recording of the Bruckner Fourth (nla) was brisk to the point of insensitivity, missing by severals hairs' breadths the glorious inevitability of this later Philharmonia performance. Nor was Klemperer a man to oversaturate the textures of Bruckner or Brahms; his performances relied in no whit on body or beauty of sound as an end in itself. Which partly explains why the CD transfer sounds as though it derives from a recording that is more or less new-minted. Throughout the performance everything is lucidly and expressively voiced. The violins, divided left and right, speak with the same clear accents as woodwinds, trumpets, and the horns which add their own special tinta to the work's rustic, alfresco mood. The substitution of oboe for flute in the third movement Trio, a detail Klemperer adopts from Haas's 1944 printing of the score, isn't just a whim; it is an intrinsic part of a performance in which the special articulacy of the oboe, most eloquent of instruments, necessarily displaces the flute's blander musings.
This, then, is an account of the Fourth which collectors need to have as well as the equally inspired Bohm on Decca. In both musical authority and spontaneity of utterance they are incomparable readings.
The 1965 Haitink recording is also very fine, a touch more spacious in tempos than the Klemperer, with much of the ease and eloquence of the Concertgebouw Bruckner style at its best. But in spite of the fine Concertgebouw acoustic and good engineering, the recording does sound more its age, largely because Haitink conducts a stringbased performance that has little of the spare articulacy of the Klemperer. The CD transfer makes it easier to hear certain important details (what the third and fourth horns are doing on the final page, for example, on LP it wasn't clear whether they were playing or having a drink in the bar) but the reissue can't quite match the electricity of the Klemperer.
That Giuseppe Sinopoli is not in London with his own orchestra for his DG recording of the Fourth is clear at the outset where the horns have a slight but none the less unmistakable Eastern European feel to them. It is also clear that in terms both of pacing and recorded quality, the performance has a good deal of space around it. I thought the orchestra distant almost to a fault, as though one has crept uninvited into the rear gallery of the empty Lukaskirche.
Sinopoli's reading is the very opposite of Klemperer's. It marks a return to a conducting style that out-Nowaks Nowak in suggesting that tuttis can be forcefully up to tempo but that the music can dawdle and dream, often at barely half the tempo primo, in the hushed aftermaths. As Sinopoli conducts it, the slow movement is an act of somnambulism. The finale is much more dramatically done but as it is the conclusion to nothing in particular it often sounds hustled, almost gratuitously violent.'