The real revelation here is a rehearsal-performance of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales with the Berlin Philharmonic and dating from April 1953. Roughly half of this 35-minute track has Furtwangler linger over salient details from specific sections of the score, whereas the last 16 minutes or so (from 18'54'') are devoted to an uninterrupted play-through – pitted only occasionally by untidy ensemble or the odd comment from the rostrum. Tempos are, as one might expect, very broad; but the string playing in particular has a vibrant, sensual quality that is frequently more suggestive of Bernstein than of Furtwangler. The most remarkable aspect of the performance, however, mirrors Furtwangler’s mastery of musical transitions, the way he edges from one valse to the next – at 28'29'' and beyond, say, where his sense of timing and acute feeling for colour anticipate the mature Celibidache. This is a significant discographical document, one that presents a great conductor’s art in a totally new light.
In the case of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, the obvious point of comparison is Furtwangler’s 1948-9 studio version for EMI (nla). My initial reaction on hearing this 1944 Vienna recording was to doubt its authenticity, though closer comparisons reveal too many similarities to sustain doubts for very long. Differences between the two – and quite a few parade themselves – are most marked in the first movement. The more relaxed wartime account sports prominent string porta mentos (there are virtually none in the later version) and dispenses with the first movement’s exposition repeat. Generally speaking, the Tahra performance is the more affectionate and EMI’s the more urgent and intense.
The live Beethoven performance is fairly similar to the famous EMI 1937 set that RO recommended in his admirable round-up of the Fifth for BBC Radio 3’s “Record Review”. In fact, a missing chunk of the original broadcast (the ‘seventh side’, apparently – bars 486-668) is replaced by EMI’s studio recording of the same passage, thus underlining the interpretative consistency between the two performances. The live version has more prominent timpani, marginally stronger inflexions and a shot more adrenalin, but is otherwise quite similar to its commercially recorded predecessor.
As to the Handel Concerto grosso, purists be warned: Furtwangler’s ‘edition’ transposes string lines, changes bowed passages to pizzicato (both emendations occur in the second movement), fleshes out textures (as in the Ouverture) and reverses the order of the last two movements (a post-war Berlin broadcast performance once issued on LP by DG took similar liberties). And yet it is a profoundly inspired re-creation, with emotive extremes in tempo (very fast second movement, lovingly indulged Largo) and a typically Furtwanglerian employment of silence between the end of the Largo and the beginning of the Menuet. The performance ends with a rumbustious reading of the jolly Allegro that should rightly have preceded the Minuet.
A gentle exposition of Rosamunde’s Third Entr’acte (similar in outline to Furtwangler’s studio recordings) completes a set that is further enhanced by two interviews, both of them between Furtwangler and the Swiss critic Henry Jaton and both conducted in French (Tahra provide an English translation). Listeners therefore have verbal confirmation of the profound interpretative axis that this greatest of German conductors consistently exhibits throughout what is surely a major historical release – one that Furtwangler’s many admirers should not, indeed must not, allow to pass into obscurity.'