The initial point worth making about this instructive release is that the sound quality is extraordinarily good, with clearly ringing trumpets in the Fifth and a sumptuous bass-line in the Pastoral. Both recordings were set down on tape and the improvement over shellac (which was still the principal recording medium beyond German soil) is truly amazing. The Furtwangler performance is already familiar from previous incarnations on, among other labels, Unicorn, Music & Arts and Iron Needle, and conveys an excitable interpretation that differs, in detail if not in overall design, from various predecessors and successors.
Once ‘set’, a Furtwangler interpretation rarely shifted ground, and this particular performance parades the same roster of rests, ritardandos and accelerandos that we already know from the conductor’s other Beethoven Fifths. The shaky opening is not typical, though the growling lower strings that close the second movement and the near-hysterical race home certainly are. Every shift in tempo, every surging crescendo obeys an unmistakable interpretative logic, even when the written score suggests otherwise. Furtwangler’s method was to take his lead, in terms of tempo and texture, from the musical argument – speeding as the excitement mounts, slowing as storm clouds approach, lengthening transitions when momentous harmonic changes are afoot ... the sort of thing that, if you cannot feel the ‘sense’ of it, seems needlessly indulgent.
Hermann Abendroth was a long-term Maestro at the Leipzig Gewandhaus (an orchestra that Furtwangler had himself directed some years earlier) and his approach to the Pastoral is not dissimilar to Furtwangler’s. Or at least that is how it seems at an initial encounter. Closer listening reveals a somewhat less discriminating ear and less intuitive feeling for pulse, with some gratuitous gear-changes (so different from Furtwangler’s masterly transitions) and the odd spot of hazy ensemble. A good point of comparison is in the “Peasants’ Merrymaking” where, under Furtwangler, elastic tempos allow easy passage from one episode to another but where Abendroth’s conducting falls short of that crucial flexibility. Tahra claim that the transition to the fifth movement “reminds strangely of a certain ... Furtwangler”, except that the feelings of joyous release that Furtwangler himself commands are merely hinted at. Still, comparisons such as these are useful for re-establishing differences between the great and the good – and, as I said earlier, Tahra’s sound quality is extremely impressive.'