The fortieth anniversary of Furtwangler's death on November 30th, 1954 has brought forth a rich crop of reissues and remasterings, most notably on the French label Tahra, which recently secured the rights to publish limited editions of some of Furtwangler's most important (and, it must be said, most frequently pirated) live recordings. EMI's project of restoring all their Furtwangler releases to their catalogue by 1996 continues apace. Only DG lag behind, most of the excellent work done by them in the 1980s newly undone by a particularly savage set of recent CD deletions.
Tahra's CDs come in single spies and in battalions. Either way, they are generally decently packaged, with some interesting archive photographs. I confess I don't think the bigger sets at all helpful to collectors. In any set of four CDs there is every likelihood of there being one or two discs one already has or doesn't want.
FURT1003. Single CDs first. Some of Furtwangler's finest performances of Beethoven's music were given in the last months of his life, an odd paradox given his failing health and, by November, the apparent extinction of his will to live. Yet the Berlin Fifth of May 23rd (see below) and this Lucerne Ninth are seismic utterances, the final heroic regrouping of musical and psychic powers that in certain works of the repertory have this gangling figure towering over all his rivals.
Setting aside as a special case the blazing but sonically restricted 1942 Berlin Ninth on (CD) FURT1004/07, this Philharmonia Lucerne version is arguably the greatest of all Furtwangler's recordings of the symphony. Walter Legge wanted to acquire the performance as EMI's official replacement for the momentous but slightly foggy-sounding 1951 Bayreuth account (EMI, 2/91—nla), but it wasn't to be. Since then, there have been various 'unofficial' editions. The Tahra differs in being 'official', well transferred, and further enhanced by a few introductory remarks from Furtwangler himself.
Here, the most significant section is that in which Furtwangler sees the problem of interpreting the Ninth as one that effectively post-dates the performing culture into which it was born. It is a view that is argued at greater length by Nicholas Cook in his fine monograph on the Ninth in a Cambridge Music Handbook (CUP: 1993). Furtwangler, I am convinced, understood the Ninth as well as any conductor this century. You can argue this way or that over the pacing of the slow movement (though I defy anyone to say that his performance is anything other than deeply eloquent) or the leisurely speed of the second movement Trio. In the all-important first movement, though, I have no doubt that Beethoven's written tempo markings and frequent subsequent modifications clearly presuppose the kind of uniquely singing, flexible, harmonically searching (but by no means over-slow) reading Furtwangler invariably gave us.
FURT1001. The other single CD from Tahra, the Hamburg Brahms disc, is also very fine—gripping and generally well recorded performances of two works with which Furtwangler specially identified: the tragic First Symphony, here quite exceptionally gaunt and granite-like, and the Variations on a Theme by Haydn which he once described as ''a cross-section of German music''. It is marvellous to have the finale of the Variations as a proper, living climax. All too often it merely looks impassively back at us like a caged gorilla. In May, EMI will be issuing a three-CD box of Furtwangler's Brahms recordings, but this disc—Furtwangler heroically in command of an orchestra other than the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonic—is worth having as a supplement. The playing of Schmidt-Isserstedt's superbly trained Hamburg musicians is even tougher-grained than that of the Vienna Philharmonic in the celebrated live version EMI will be offering us.
FURT1008/11. Tahra's four-CD ''Tribute to Wilhelm Furtwangler'' has in it one very desirable disc—the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies recorded at a concert in Berlin on May 23rd, 1954—and three that are less so. I was particularly disappointed with the CD of previously unpublished recordings. The Till Eulenspiegel (Lugano, 1954) isn't a patch on EMI's studio version with the VPO (10/94), nor is the rehearsal sequence from Brahms's Second Symphony anything other than a play-through. (Cf. the 1948 Stockholm rehearsal of Leonore No. 3 on BIS (CD) CD421/4 which really is a rehearsal.)
I can only hope that Tahra will think again and make the Beethoven Fifth and Sixth Symphonies available separately. The Fifth is an old man's performance, spaciously drawn, wonderfully solid-sounding. It seems as if it has been hewn out of oak; yet it is touched with a fervour that makes even the famous 1943 performance (DG, 9/89—nla) seem a touch sedate. What is more, the Pastoral from the same concert is for me the greatest of all Furtwangler's recordings of the work. Slow it may be, but it is never comatose. The Pastoral is Beethoven's other 'Ode to Joy', and this performance speaks, Wordsworth-like, of ''thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears''. The recording occasionally threatens to overload, but is generally fine.
FURT1004/07. Tahra's four-CD survey ''Enregistrements historiques 1942-1945'' includes the 1942 Berlin Ninth in a marginally better and brighter transfer than the one on Music & Arts (5/94). It also includes Furtwangler's famously inspired account of the Coriolan Overture, complete with the final pizzicato chord. (Dubbed on or newly retrieved? The booklet doesn't say.)
It is a pity that Furtwangler's electrifying version of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony lacks its first movement. (Karajan's 1944 Bruckner Eighth suffered a similar fate on Koch Schwann, 12/94; to lose one first movement may be regarded as a misfortune...) And there are other disappointments. I am afraid I can't really take the overwrought account of the Brahms B flat Concerto recorded with Adrian Aeschenbacher in 1943; RC drew attention to the recording's technical shortcomings in his ''Replay'' column in January. The November 1942 recording of the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde is also technically problematic, this time buzzily overloaded. So much so that it can barely contain the orgasmic star-burst of the final climax, music's answer (in Furtwangler's performance) to Leopold Bloom's experience with Cissy Caffrey and the bazaar fireworks on Sandymount shore in James Joyce's Ulysses.
On the other hand, the March 1944 Pastoral, long admired by Furtwangler specialists for its terrific storm and lava-flow finale, has never sounded better. No longer is it reasonable to mistake the timpani and double-bass entries in the storm for the random acts of disgruntled furniture removers.
CD-824. Sadly, the transfer of the same performance is rather less good in this rather more collectable two-CD set of wartime Beethoven recordings from Music & Arts. Similarly, though my old Unicorn LP of the famous 1943 Beethoven Fifth (10/69—nla) may not have the presence of the new Music & Arts digitally-processed CD, the LP image seemed cleaner, less 'jugged'. Still, the ear adjusts; and, it has to be said, this is an attractive array of performances.
The Fourth Symphony (which DG used to feature in their lists in various live and studio permutations) comes up especially well. And what a wonderful performance it is, a locus classicus of Furtwangler's ability to breathe fresh life into a familiar classic. Like a master horticulturalist tending some rare, exotic plant he persuades the work to germinate, bud and luxuriantly flower as few others have done. The 1943 Seventh, with its extraordinarily rapt slow movement, is also very fine. But the limited dynamic range of the recording rather takes the sheen off the playing.'