It is difficult to think of more opportune beginnings, with a written recommendation from Mahler for “Herr Klemperer as an outstanding musician … predestined for a conductor’s career”. And impossible to forget the final chapter – as one critic put it in the 1960s: “Klemperer makes his way slowly to the podium, dragging his mighty body, cane in hand. On the podium is a large chair on which he sits after a curt nod to the audience… in a way he is a transfigured Kapellmeister, a non-virtuoso conductor whose vision and conception happen to be so big that he and his music emerge monument size.” The late and great horn-player, Alan Civil, remembered one of Klemperer’s Philharmonia concerts where the conductor hobbled in on sticks, but managed to indicate the first beat of Beethoven’s Fifth before he was on his chair: “Goodness knows where the downbeat came from, but we came in perfectly”.
In these Munich concerts, misreadings of the beat are few; the single serious example is in the Bruckner symphony’s first movement where (at 6'02'') a solo clarinet enters early and wrecks the timing of a magical shift of harmony. And it is only in the later concerts – the intermittently titanic and unprecedentedly protracted Mendelssohn and Beethoven symphonies from 1969 – that thoughts occasionally turn to actor Jack Nicholson’s well-chosen words at this year’s Oscar ceremony (“Why do I have this sinking feeling?”); all things considered, one marvels at how well the orchestra, perhaps more often than the music, stay afloat.
Certainly the Mendelssohn and Beethoven can be an engrossing, sometimes enthralling listen. There is even a brief example of Klemperer, the composer, substituting his own coda in the Mendelssohn finale – a grave and beautiful extension of the finale’s second theme. An old man’s folly? Far from it. Klemperer is not alone in viewing Mendelssohn’s own coda as an attached and blatantly roof-raising device.
“Haydn gone mad” was Sir Roger Norrington’s choice phrase for Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. Not that it is remotely apt for Klemperer’s performance of it here. ‘Waggish and slightly deranged Bruckner’ often seems closer to the mark, with the firm and cleanly defined bass-lines almost sounding like organ pedals. And the vibrato-rich cantabile of the Munich strings in its Adagio second movement shows us a different side to Klemperer from the Philharmonia recordings – less of the stoic – as, equally, does the rosy glow of the wonderfully wrought strings’ song in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn. The pacing of these movements, and the Andante con moto of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, can with justification be called a sublimely unhurried progress, and shows Klemperer’s concerns at the time working with the music, allowing a generosity of gesture, and a great range of timbral and harmonic colour, even corners turned with affection and elegance – above all, a depth – that you simply won’t hear nowadays. And their passages of strong rhythmic address (incomparably grand) are enhanced by timpani-playing of greater flair (and prominence) than in the Philharmonia accounts. But in many of the Beethoven and Mendelssohn allegros, the unkind observer would report that Klemperer is simply out of touch with their basic needs. When we arrive at the latter half of the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with its ritardandos and liberal sprinkling of rests, it is probably not fanciful to suggest that the audience (elsewhere in all these concerts, only occasionally intrusive) are stunned into silent disbelief as the full extent of the slowness of the tempo becomes cruelly clear.
In the 1965/6 concerts, we appear to hear a different Klemperer; the only tempo in these Schubert, Mahler and Bruckner symphonies that one might consider measured is the fifth movement ‘march of the dead’ in the Mahler (measured but mighty, and delivered with a degree of black menace from the brass that Klemperer didn’t encourage from his Philharmonia players). In fact, the ‘different Klemperer’ in these mid-1960s concerts is more a question of repertoire than anything else; repertoire in which, as his slightly earlier and similarly paced Philharmonia recordings witness, he wasn’t given to hanging about.
Here again, it is a tale of two different orchestras, a conductor responding to their individual characteristics, and, of course, live versus studio conditions; the Philharmonia playing with a little more precision and point (and, obviously, fewer fluffs), their horns with a fine rasping edge in the Bruckner (where appropriate), and the London balances often closely featuring the fresher and more assertive voices of their woodwinds. Turn to Munich and the reedy sound and variable pitching of the Bavarian clarinets won’t be to everyone’s taste, but their strings are equally at ease with Klemperer’s layout of first violins on the left and seconds on the right (Kubelik’s preferred way, the orchestra’s conductor from 1961), and, as I’ve suggested, are more ready with radiant tone, enhanced by a warm bloom from the Herkulessaal’s acoustics (perhaps too much of it in the 1969 concerts). Klemperer himself is marginally more inclined to yield from tempos and dynamic voicings which some had found a little unswervingly maintained in the Philharmonia recordings, without any damage to symphonic ‘line’, and the benefits can be heard almost everywhere in these Schubert, Mahler (first movement) and Bruckner performances. Tempo relationships in the ‘problem’ finale of the Bruckner are planned and effected with even greater authority, achieving a range of expression together with the necessary ‘carry-through’ only given to a tiny Brucknerian elite (and arriving at the coda with a spellbinding hush from the strings). There are minor textual differences between the London and Munich Bruckner Fourths, but most of us, I imagine, will be pleased that Klemperer continues to use the oboe (with the clarinet) in the third movement Trio, rather than the more usual flute.
In general, the reproduced Munich tone and balances are a tribute to the Bavarian Radio engineers (the 1969 concerts might have been taped yesterday), and, of course, to Klemperer’s own concerns for balance. However, for the last two movements of the Mahler, live conditions have obviously militated against achieving, with the various on- and off-stage forces, as precise a representation of ahler’s imagined sound stage as the celebrated Philharmonia recording; and the chorus here with their magical ppp first entry are too close/loud, as are both soloists, especially Janet Baker, in glorious if rather stentorian voice for “Urlicht” (the cor anglais doubling the mezzo in the finale’s “O glaube”, track 5 from 25'36'' is virtually inaudible). Credit though, where it is due, and the Munich recording doesn’t flinch (as did the London one) at the frenzied mayhem Mahler unleashes in the finale for the despairing cries of the dead (track 5, from 15'42''). And if management of levels and perspectives alters the way the latter half of the symphony should ideally unfold and build, neither does the performance itself – in the last 15 minutes, a rather more impulsive one – give the impression of finding quite the same sublime sense of time and space (there is one very unnerving moment as the chorus join in for the solo alto’s “O Schmerz! Du Alldurchdringer!”, track 5, from 28'39'').
Applause has been carefully removed from all these recordings, aptly enough for the man who, according to Cardus, “appears indifferent to the audience’s reactions”. The key word there is probably ‘appears’, but whatever the case, it continues to be, fortunately for us, impossible to remain indifferent to Klemperer’s music-making.'