Previously unpublished, this recording qualifies under house rules for consideration alongside some selected comparisons. If I append none it is because, so far as the current catalogue is concerned, the performance is incomparable. Such comparisons as can be made concern other Furtwangler recordings of the symphony: the 1947 VPO performance, a rather cool affair by Furtwangler's standards, recorded with no great immediacy, and transferred noisily to LP (EMI Electrola/Conifer mono 1C 149 53420/6, 12/80), and a fine Berlin performance (DG mono 2535 162, 5/76—nla) recorded live in the Titania-Palast on February 10th, 1952. Interestingly, the present recording was made in Vienna just a fortnight before. As a reading it is very similar, contradicting those who would have us believe that mst Furtwangler performances were spur-of-the-moment, random affairs. What is different is the response of the two orchestras, with the VPO, their strings in particular, playing with a singing intensity which rather puts the Berliners in the shade. To some extent, they are helped by the EMI recording which, though rather rusty-sounding in places, does provide a real sense of presence and (an over-prominent flute apart) perspective. But it is the performance as a whole which is the thing, a marvellous example of Furtwangler's combined skills: as a conductor capable of drawing glorious playing from the VPO, as an interpreter capable of understanding the indissoluble links between musical structure and communicable feeling, and as a performer capable of turning a concert into an event.
Take, for instance, the moment of recapitulation in the slow movement. We are already in alien territory. After the exhausted close of the tragic first movement we are shipped into the distant key of E major. The oboe's song, if it is anything at all, is a song of exile and, not surprisingly, it becomes increasingly troubled and yet more tonally bewildered, something stressed by Furtwangler who tends to underwrite the music's daemonic elements in a way which Brahmsians of a settled taste may find disturbing. The recapitulation, Furtwangler already movingly implies, is bound to be a thing of great moment; and, indeed, we know as much since Brahms's preparation for it—the quiet drum roll (the drum's first appearance in the movement), the anticipatory silence and the addition of trumpets to the eventual quiet E major chord—all indicate as much. In Berlin the realization was to be perfunctory, the chording sloppy but in the Vienna performance Furtwangler's recognition and realization of the moment is utterly spell-binding, a superb piece of concert-hall theatre, as well as a moving realization of Brahms's mood.
The reading is full of such insights. Nothing is wasted, not even the Allegretto e grazioso third movement which Furtwangler treats as a microcosm of the symphony, a movement of great equanimity which becomes grand, tense, and troubled before dropping us down into the dark well of the finale's opening phrases. Above all, the difficult first movement is superbly shaped. The opening is magnificent and yet finely proportioned. True, the orchestra is not together at the start but before we begin our niggling we should note that Furtwangler belonged to a school which often liked to build chords strategically. There's nothing very strategic about the opening chord, but there are some strikingly successful examples later on in the movement. What is remarkable about the opneing, apart from the glorious sostenuto sound of the high-lying violin line, the perfect, ominous flow of the rhythm and the judicious regulation of the drum, is that it is all, in retrospect, germane to what is to follow. You need no sleeve or text-book analysis to follow the organic nature of Brahms's arguments as Furtwangler unfolds them for us, whether we are thinking in terms of tonal structures, the canonic treatment of key motifs or, simply, the huge mass and disjunctive force of the development's end. No conductor today, except perhaps Giulini, seems able to exert so much downward pressure on chords, fully, amply sounded and yet sustain a singing line and a forward-moving rhythm. Certainly, it is tempting, faced with a performance like this, to write a jeremiad on the state of conducting in the post-Furtwangler age. To do so would, however, be unproductive. Furtwangler's is not the only way with Brahms's music, as Sir Adrian Boult, among others, has admirably demonstrated. For the moment, though, I confess I know no performance of this symphony which more strikingly illuminates those points where this symphony is palpably at its greatest.'