After drought, inundation. Alive, Celibidache recorded virtually nothing; dead, his heirs and their associates in rival companies are tossing boxed sets around like the gods in Homer’s Odyssey, vainly trying to heap Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa. We have already had a 12-CD Munich PO Bruckner set in EMI’s Celibidache Edition (1/99), now DG weighs in with a four-CD set (five-CD, if you count the free rehearsal disc) devoted to earlier performances of the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth symphonies recorded in the 1970s when Celibidache was chief conductor of the Stuttgart RSO. The Stuttgart performances, it has to be conceded, are rather different: sparer, quicker, easier to assimilate. They are also less well played and less well recorded.
Comparative timings are revealing: No 7 – Stuttgart 67’, Munich 79’; No 8 – Stuttgart 84’, Munich 102’; No 9 – Stuttgart 59’ (a terrific performance), Munich 77’. These are astonishing differences. Celibidache first conducted the Stuttgart orchestra in 1958, and it is clear that he remained mindful of the Bruckner style he had inherited from the years of Hans Rosbaud’s conductorship (1948-62), an approach which was altogether sparer-toned than his own, cleaner, quicker, utterly unself-regarding.
When Rosbaud’s 1958 Stuttgart recording of the Seventh Symphony first appeared, Gramophone’s William Mann thought it logically fine but somewhat lacking in ‘grandeur and poetry’. Celibidache, I suspect, felt likewise. In this live 1971 radio performance, he seems intent on fleshing out the Rosbaud approach without undermining its principal tenets. As a ploy, it works pretty well. The orchestral playing is nowhere near as sumptuous-sounding or secure as on Celibidache’s rival Munich set of the Seventh, but the reading itself makes considerably more sense as a musico-dramatic entity.
It is a similar situation with the 1974 Stuttgart Ninth. Celibidache isn’t quite as brisk as Rosbaud used to be in the first-movement exposition, but he isn’t that much slower. There is tension and continuity here in the second subject group, which in the Munich performance is merely a kind of vast, slow-moving lyric parenthesis. Overall, the Stuttgart performance is imbued with a deep sense of spiritual terribilita. The second movement, a somewhat geriatric affair in Munich, is here terrible beyond words, a Mars among Scherzo s. The Stuttgart orchestra both rises to the occasion and is unnerved by it. This is often to the good, though it is a pity that the horns fluff their crucial ascent on the symphony’s final page.
The Stuttgart Bruckner Eighth is quicker than the interminable Munich performance but is less well played and suffers from many of the same dislocations of pulse in lyric counter-subjects. The transition to the first-movement development (5'35'') is spellbindingly wonderful, but Bruckner actually intends this as a moment of stasis, which the finale’s second subject is not. Daniel Barenboim’s remark about Celibidache, ‘a great conductor but in the end (in the Munich years) he conducted everything the way Furtwangler conducted slow movements’ applies almost as well to this Stuttgart Eighth.
No climax sounds especially well in the DG set (the end of the Eighth Symphony is bland and muddled). The combination of boxiness and sonic glare suggests that Bruckner’s music was not uppermost in the mind of whoever it was who designed Stuttgart’s Liederhalle.
The fill-up to the Eighth, a 1979 broadcast of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, is drab beyond belief. At every point, Celibidache seems intent on defying Schubert’s wishes. The opening Allegro is too fast, the Andante con moto (which here takes almost as long as the rest of the symphony put together) is too slow; the Allegro molto is measured, the concluding Allegro vivace hardly vivace. Add in some inexact ensemble and an evidently inattentive audience and it does not amount to the best of adverts for Celibidache’s stewardship of the orchestra.
Like EMI, DG has been persuaded to fill its booklets with high-flown hagiology on Celibidache. The set also includes recordings of rehearsal sequences, though, unlike EMI, whose presentation is exemplary (a full English transcript, numerous cue points), DG’s is casual to the point of being remiss (no English transcript, no internal cue points).
These rehearsals are not for the squeamish. During the 40 or so minutes reproduced here, Celibidache barely stops talking. He talks before the music, during the music, and over the music. Shouting, clapping and a rasping ‘da-da-daing’ are also part of his repertory. At no point is the orchestra allowed to play uninterrupted for more than a few seconds. In this respect, the EMI/ Munich rehearsals are far more revealing. Celibidache still talks a great deal, but he seems older, wiser and more humane. And the orchestra seems at ease in a way in which the Stuttgart players clearly are not.'