Klemperer always declared that the Vienna Philharmonic was his favourite orchestra. On the strength of these performances, most of them recorded on his last visit to the Austrian capital, the feeling seems to have been mutual. Klemperer had first conducted the orchestra in 1933. He then reappeared in 1947 and again in 1958, when he performed the Brahms Requiem, also included on this issue (eight discs for the price of six).

In 1933 he had conducted Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony. If the reading was anything like as concentrated and electrifying as this one, the 1933 audience was as lucky as its 1968 successor. Günter Wand once told me he found it the most perplexing work in the Bruckner canon and it was the last of the symphonies he tackled – after three months’ study and weeks of rehearsal. Lesser conductors find it hard to control its diffuse structure. Klemperer, here caught live, even more than on his EMI recording with the Philharmonia, encompasses every facet of the work and welds them into a totally convincing whole. Its great swathes of heaven-seeking paragraphs, as much as its Ländler-like passages, are all given their due in a superbly balanced and immediate recording. Strings, wind (apart from under-nourished oboes) and brass respond to Klemperer’s unflinching and steady beat with glorious playing, nowhere more so than in the long fugato of the finale. I can’t imagine a more enthralling interpretation, one about which the contemporary press in Vienna wrote ecstatically, as Mike Ashman tells us in his well researched notes.

As with Klemperer’s live Beethoven Ninth from the Festival Hall, also on Testament (1/00), he seems to give tauter performances in the concert hall than in the studio. The Jupiter here shows him very far from a declining force or addicted to slow speeds. This is a reading as fully integrated, alert and sensitively contoured as one could ever want with – as in the Bruckner – control of structure of the essence. The eminent Viennese critic Franz Endler, who also wrote enthusiastically about the Bruckner, commented pertinently: ’Prometheus honours Jupiter.’

The two Beethoven symphonies enjoy the same faithful and open recording and benefit from superb playing. The interpretations disclose the rugged honesty and integrity of purpose for which Klemperer’s Beethoven was always famed and – once more – recorded live they have an added frisson of immediacy, only the Scherzo of the Fourth being a shade leaden. The Fifth is just about the equal of Klemperer’s legendary 1955 mono performance in terms of linear coherence, keen detail and trenchant power, and it is in far better sound. As ever with this conductor the finale’s exposition is repeated, adding stature to this affirmatory movement – and you can really hear the piccolo.

Schubert’s Unfinished receives a measured reading, slower than the conductor’s studio performance but one that more than goes to the heart of the matter in terms of tragic import and tonal depth, given the familiar warmth of the Vienna strings. It is a searing interpretation, as is – in a lighter vein – the fully energised, impassioned Don Juan (amazing from an 83-year-old) in the same programme, again wonderfully recorded.

Not everything in the five concerts finds Klemperer or the players in quite such excellent form. At the opening concert the First Brandenburg is heavy and by today’s revised standards far too slow. On the same programme the Mozart Serenade, which Klemperer insisted on conducting, is a bit quirky. As for the Mahler Ninth, the VPO – before its period of enlightenment with Bernstein – seems unwilling to give of its best and ensemble is sometimes awry. In this instance the performance with the Philharmonia is still the one to have.

Following that experience at the penultimate concert, Klemperer and the orchestra decided to abandon the planned Petrushka and substitute some Wagner, more appropriate as a finale to the series. The account of the Siegfried Idyll, euphonious and intimate, is a delight, not least for Roland Berger’s superb horn-playing, evident elsewhere on these discs. The five concerts concluded with a celebratory and weighty account of the Meistersinger Prelude, fitting for the centenary year of that work. Klemperer departed Vienna for the last time in a blaze of glorious sound.

The 1958 Brahms Requiem is less essential Klemperer. He is as impressive as ever but the chorus isn’t the equal of the Philharmonia on EMI’s Great Recordings of the Century issue, which also has the advantage of stereo sound, a vital component where this score is concerned. Lipp is no match for Schwarzkopf in the soprano solo but I do prefer Waechter’s forthright, unaffected baritone to Fischer-Dieskau’s too forceful delivery on EMI.