Klemperer's 1961 stereo recording of the Eroica is a big, stolid performance, immensely imposing at its start and finish, and in the commanding heights of the Marcia funebre, where the horns in the double fugue speak proudly out and where the subsequent uproar grimly exemplifies Tovey's notion of this as ''an upheaval fit for a setting of the Dies irae''. In the first movement exposition, which disappointingly is not repeated, we meet a hero of epic demeanour; a Classical hero such as Beethoven must have dreamt as he perused the pages of Plutarch. Yet such is the relative slowness lacks fire: the simple blaze which Toscanini used to bring to the piece or the properly Promethean fire of Furtwangler's great reading, best preserved for us in his live 1944 Vienna recording, best preserved for us in his live 1944 Vienna recording (Unicorn mono UNI104, 5/70—nla). Though Klemperer's account of the finale is undeniably Herculean in spirit (Hercules, the deliverer of the rock-bound Prometheus), the heart of the drama, the expository first movement, is not fully revealed in Klemperer's account. The difference between Klemperer and Furtwangler can be heard in the approach to the recapitulation: in Klemperer's altogether more literal treatment of the stalking bass figure and his more prosaic response to the tonic-dominant clash of horn and violins. Nor, at his trudging pace, do we catch our breath as horn and flute steal mysterously across the scene in F and D flat before the recapitulation's final onrush. We know from study of the sketchbooks that such moments had a symbolic as well as a purely musical importance for Beethoven. There is a numinous quality about them which Klemperer, to my ears, partly misses.
The recording catches well the darker sounds of violas, cellos, basses and brass. Strings, by contrast, are a little lacking in body and bloom and CD does not disguise the residual tape background of the original. What it does do is give us continuous playing and silent surfaces: the equivalent of a pristine LP pressing. Klemperer's 1957 recording of the Grosse Fuge is not without its problems. The sound is clean and full in the tuttis but there are audible blemishes in the tape quality in the quieter music. The performance is a mighty one though not unyielding in the lyrical sections. '