In many respects this is an exceptional record from Masur and the New York PO. Well filled and intelligently planned, it has at least one important thing to say about the Fifth Symphony and it gives us a chance (rare on record) to hear all the music Beethoven wrote for Goethe's Egmont.
Lamoral, Count of Egmont, a middle-aged paterfamilias (he sired 11 children), liberal-minded, open-hearted and a brilliant general, was a hero worthy of the oppressed people of The Netherlands. Which explains why the Duke of Alva, the sinister agent of the Spanish imperium, had him executed in Brussels in 1568. In Beethoven's Egmont Overture the execution is grimly delineated with a scything two-note drop on the violins followed by silence. Beethoven wrote: ''Death [can] be indicated musically by a complete silence''. With most conductors the silence is a formality. With Szell it barely registers. Klemperer, Karajan and Masur also offer little more than a respectful nod. The only conductor who regularly left us alone with our thoughts long enough to register the sheer enormity of the thing was Furtwangler. In his famous May 1947 Berlin recording (his return to Berlin after the war) the effect is unbelievably moving.
Rather against the grain where this overture is concerned, Furtwangler's was an intensely theatrical reading. Beethoven's theatre overtures do have a habit of returning like homing pigeons to the concert-hall. Klemperer's is the supremely 'symphonic' account of the Egmont Overture; which isn't to say it is dull. Far from it. He knew his Goethe and he understands the music's theatrical provenance. His EMI disc (a must for any collector since it also includes his famous recording of the Pastoral Symphony) adds three of the best numbers from the Egmont music, trenchantly realized by Klemperer with Birgit Nilsson as his soloist.
Szell and the VPO originally recorded all ten numbers for an elaborately produced Decca LP in 1969. Sadly, the CD reissue (which The Classical Catalogue inaccurately lists as being complete) includes only Nos. 1-5 and 10. The CD coupling is Szell's famously electrifying Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony recorded with the LSO in 1962. This recent truncation is a pity since Szell is superb in Egmont. (I can imagine the composer of ''Der Tamboursg'sell'' raising his hat to Szell after his riveting account of the militaristic ''Die Trommel geruhet!''.)
Still, until Decca reissue the whole of Szell's 1969 recording, Masur's Egmont is clearly the one to have. As a performance of all ten numbers, it is ultimately more incisive than Karajan's. Masur also has a superbly articulate soloist, Sylvia McNair, where Karajan's Gundula Janowitz is physically and emotionally rather more distant. Masur's reading of the Egmont Overture is in the Klemperer/Szell mould with sensible gearing of tempos and a notable absence of sentimentality or rant. Karajan is straightforwardly fine in the central allegro though he favours extremes of pace elsewhere—a very slow introduction (suffering Netherlanders under the Spanish heel) and a dazzling coda (the so-called ''Victory Symphony'') that he must have beaten in two, even though Beethoven's score indicates Allegro con brio 4/4. Masur is exciting here, but more circumspect.
Curiously, though, it is Masur's earlier studio performance of the Overture that has the more sustained sense of drama. In the New York performance there is, for instance, a drop in tension in the penultimate fanfare before the execution. It must also be said that Masur hasn't yet schooled the New York PO to the kind of pedigree playing that is evident in the Leipzig version. The Egmont Overture is one of Beethoven's greatest essays in the strategic use of sforzando, a factor that requires playing of mingled power and restraint. To hear unremitting rant, go to Toscanini's 1953 RCA recording where virtually every downbeat in the allegro is treated as a sledge-hammer sforzando. In Masur's Leipzig performance and in Klemperer's you will hear high drama without a single false accent. Masur's New York account is clearly aiming at this; but there are times when the players get close to treating every downbeat as a hard-edged accent.
That said, Masur's new account of the Fifth Symphony has a degree of gutsiness and electricity you won't find in his civilized but rather sedate 1975 Leipzig performance where Klemperer-like speeds lack the dramatic tension we have on Klemperer's irreplaceable 1955 EMI mono recording. (Like Klemperer on that older recording, Masur now takes one bar of the scherzo to equal half a bar of the finale, a wonderfully simple idea that confers on the finale an instant sense of lofty inevitability.)
On repeats, Masur now joins those who believe, with a good deal of contemporary evidence on their side, that Beethoven wanted the scherzo and Trio to be repeated. What's more, Masur is utterly logical in his view of how the inclusion (or otherwise) of the repeat affects the overall structural balance of the symphony's two final movements. In his earlier recording, he observed neither the putative repeat of the scherzo and Trio, nor the repeat of the finale's exposition. Now he observes both. He isn't the first conductor to do this. James Loughran and the Halle Orchestra in a late 1970s cycle for Enigma (10/78—nla) blazed the trail. But Loughran was never big business; despite conducting Beethoven and Brahms symphony recordings that knock spots off the efforts of many modern (and period-instrument) megabuck maestros, he is now barely half-remembered.
The Teldec recording of the Fifth Symphony, like Masur's performance, is splendidly positive. The recording of Egmont is also pretty good, superior, certainly, to the 1969 DG with its crude end-of-section fades. In the overture there are details that are clearer on the 1970s Philips studio recording. Unlike Karajan or Toscanini, Masur never allows the cellos to slither through their thematic entry four bars into the overture's allegro, where the szp upbeat must on no account wipe out the adjacent higher-lying downbeat. That said, it is all a bit hazy in the New York recording. Szell's Vienna cellos are better focused. Clearest of all—a locus classicus of articulacy in Beethoven performance—is Klemperer.'