Wilhelm Furtwängler, Berliner Philharmoniker - The Radio Recordings 1939-1945 (2018) [SACD]

www.musicweb-international.com
Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings has released, on 22 hybrid SACDs, its Wilhelm Furtwängler edition, the first complete collection of all the surviving radio broadcast recordings of the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Furtwängler during the period 1939 to 1945. From a total of 21 concerts, most complete and some in part, these recordings were originally produced by the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG) and are the first high resolution digital transfers from original monaural analogue sources.
This collection The Radio Recordings 1939–1945 is intended to allow the listener to experience the Berliner Philharmoniker in collaboration with Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor the players revered so much. Owing to the period these were produced they are sometimes described as the “war recordings” and are greatly prized, being regarded as the peak of Furtwängler’s conducting career. In addition, these historical performances were recorded with the added pressure and threat of working in Nazi Germany with great emphasis placed on music performance from the Third Reich leadership. Not surprisingly, the majority of the recordings focus on Austro/German repertoire of the 19th century, with symphonies and solo concertos by Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner and Richard Strauss plus some Handel, Gluck and Mozart. Sibelius and Ravel are also represented, as are a few of then-contemporary composers, Heinz Schumann, Pepping and a work from Furtwängler himself. There is some duplication, notably Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 and Beethoven’s Symphonies no’s. 4 and 5. Given the difficulties of the time the incomplete concerts aren’t too much of a problem; however, a couple of the works are incomplete. When the old Philharmonie was destroyed by bombing on 30th January 1944 the orchestra moved around a number of other Berlin buildings suitable for holding concerts and included here are recordings from Beethoven-Saal, Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Admiralspalast, also Haus des Rundfunks and a workers concert at AEG turbine factory.
At the end of World War 2 the Red Army occupied Berlin, and in the Haus des Rundfunks on Masurenallee a Soviet army officer took from the sound archives around 1,500 classical music tapes that were sent back to Moscow. In 1956 some of these recordings started to appear as LP releases on Melodiya, the Soviet State record label. Klaus Lang, music editor at Sender Freies Berlin (SFB), had talks with the Moscow Radio department about the missing tapes and subsequently some copies of the Furtwängler recordings were returned, a number with reverberation added. Deutsche Grammophon issued some of these recordings on 10 CDs. In 1990, following the fall of communism and German unification, SFB requested the repatriation of the original tapes. As a gesture of goodwill, a considerable number of the RRG tapes were returned up to 1991 but some were absent; this is still the current position.
The majority of the Furtwängler recordings on this edition were produced under sound engineer Dr. Friedrich Schnapp who in October 1939 succeeded Kurt Rasch. Schnapp went on to supervise Furtwängler’s radio broadcasts until the end of the war. Commencing in the 1940/41 season the concerts were no longer transmitted live but recorded earlier, for Sunday radio broadcast. A procedure sometimes followed was to choose the best of the three concerts in the series and also in rehearsal which were chosen for broadcast. Some of the original shellac discs and tapes were probably lost in a fire whilst in storage by the RRG and this is probably the reason why some of the concerts presented here are incomplete. Usually, from the original raw concert recordings, a new tape was made and edited then copied onto transmission tapes which were then used for broadcast. For this edition sound engineer Nikolaus Löwe remastered the original RRG tapes scored at RRB which hadn’t been worked on since 1991. Using a retrofitted Telefunken M19 tape machine Löwe digitized them in high resolution at 24bit/96kHz. A small number of the tapes seem to have lessened in quality since 1991 but the sound engineers have stated that “the vast majority showed a distinct improvement in the direct digital copy”. Additional technical details are contained in the booklet.
Furtwängler (1886–1954) is widely accepted as being one of the greatest conductors of the twentieth century. He left a fascinating and substantial audio legacy including a substantial number of live events that are cherished by a large and enthusiastic group of devotees. Much has been written about the sheer individuality of Furtwängler’s interpretations. There is the beauty of the sound that he demands, his innate sense of the music’s structure, the incredible energy produced and the remarkable emotional intensity generated. Furtwängler’s conducting has a sense of spontaneity and I am often surprised at his fluctuating tempi and bold dynamics. Whether or not his idiosyncrasies are felt to be invasive will be very much down to personal response. Here, the Furtwängler set contains several performances that I believe are some of the finest ever recorded; there are especially successful Beethoven recordings and I have listed my stand out recordings. The performance by concertmaster Erich Röhn of Beethoven Violin Concerto, which contains playing of both distinction and beauty of a level rarely encountered. Furtwängler is captivating in the Beethoven Symphony No. 5 (1943) providing readings of tension and nobility. Bold and infused with incredible foreboding and intensity, Beethoven’s Symphonies No.’s 7 and 9 ‘Choral’ make a quite tremendous impact. Exuberant and uncommonly witty, I greatly admire Furtwängler with Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel.
Furtwängler first conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker in December 1917; however, he also had long associations with several other orchestras that are often forgotten. In 1922 Furtwängler succeeded Artur Nikisch and served as principal conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker during the years 1922–1945 and, following his denazification, again in 1952–1954. The Berliner Philharmoniker was almost certainly the world’s most famous orchestra – it probably still is – and right through the Second World War it served as the cultural flagship of Hitler’s Third Reich. Blacklisted by the Nazis and fearing arrest, Furtwängler fled to Switzerland in February 1945, a few months before the end of the war. During his absence Leo Borchard, who was Moscow-born of German parents, an obvious favourite of the occupying Russian forces, was appointed to the post. After only a few months with the orchestra Borchard was fatally shot by an American sentry after a misunderstanding at a Berlin check-point. Romanian Sergiu Celibidache became an intermediate appointment as principal conductor and was in effect keeping the seat warm until Furtwängler was allowed to return. After his denazification process in December 1946 Furtwängler, who was revered by the majority of the players, was cleared to return. He began conducting his first Berlin concerts in May 1947 at Titania Palast, effectively sharing the conducting duties with Celibidache, returning officially as the orchestra’s principal conductor in 1952 and remaining until his death in 1954.
The majority of works contained on The Radio Recordings 1939–1945 have been released widely over the years, with the Beethoven Symphony No. 9 being the most popular (I’ve counted over 20 releases). There were just two instances where I didn’t notice other alternative recordings, namely Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 from March 1942 and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 1 (incomplete) from March 1944. I have most of these recordings on other labels, mainly Société Wilhelm Furtwängler, Deutsche Grammophon and Pristine Audio, and I have undertaken a number of listening comparisons with this new collection, The Radio Recordings 1939–1945. Although acceptable and the best available for their time, several of the Furtwängler releases, notably on Music & Arts, Tahra and Deutsche Grammophon have been overtaken. For example, in the Beethoven Coriolan overture (1943) the louder passages make for an uncomfortable listen on the Deutsche Grammophon recording, but hold together surprisingly well in this new remastering. On the other hand, despite the new remastering, in the Die Meistersinger: Prelude (1942) the overall orchestral sound still sounds fairly sour. I’ve revisited some of the Beethoven recordings of the Société Wilhelm Furtwängler (SWF), France and I have to say that they have been impressively restored, especially the Beethoven Symphony No. 5 (1943). If all the contents of this new set don’t appeal, I recommend searching out these individual SWF recordings. The four Beethoven performances that Pristine Audio has released have been impressively remastered but in comparison this new set is an improvement, sounding a little recessed and less fiercely bright, albeit we are talking about very small margins. In truth, these recordings will still prove challenging to many listeners, but they are worth the effort owing to the excellence of some of the Furtwängler performances and the historical context of the time. All told, these successful high-resolution digital transfers using original sources make this the best available set. However, I can’t see this set appealing to those whose strong preference is for high-fidelity digital or analog stereo recordings.
This hardcover edition is lavishly presented, including a 184-page book featuring numerous historical photos and several articles on the history behind the recordings. The restoration process is given in detail and there is a Furtwängler essay by the American musicologist Richard Taruskin. For those new to Furtwängler’s “war recordings” I recommend trying to look beyond the sonic limitations as there is so much to discover and bring rewards. Newly remastered with improved sound these historical Furtwängler recordings have never sounded better.

Michael Cookson
=============================================
www.gramophone.co.uk
Do you want this box? Yes, you do. Is it worth it? Again, yes, almost certainly, it is.
Diehard Furtwängler partisans hardly need to know more. But why should anyone else spend over £200 on surviving, already widely available excerpts from 21 broadcast concerts in variably overloaded mono sound?
Because, for one thing, these are the recordings that have come, more than any other, to define this conductor’s identity, and his legacy. As someone never fully at ease working under studio conditions, Furtwängler came to make recordings quite late in his career. In 1926 he was 41 years old, with a professional career of more than two decades’ standing behind him, when he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Fifth (reviewed in March 1927, without once mentioning the conductor by name). Emphatic and rhythmically straightforward, this first of 13 extant accounts neither generates the electricity of earlier recordings by Arthur Nikisch and Landon Ronald, nor yet adequately represents how he made the symphony go when unconfined by conducting it in four-minute chunks. With its much wider dynamic range, the 1937 remake issued by HMV (and faithfully transferred in 1996 by Lowell Cross for Music & Arts) more fully conveys the peculiarly dense BPO sonority and the conductor’s instrumental voicing.
But it’s only with the live broadcast from a Berlin Radio studio in September 1939 that we hear Furtwängler uncaged, if you like: less precise in attack than the NBC recording conducted by Toscanini two months later, but in which the Andante con moto is moulded into a series of waves each more powerful than the last, at once over-riding the underlying march rhythm and yet rooting it in the same metrical scheme as the following Scherzo. Here are the qualities of ‘Urlinie’ (underlying melody) and ‘Fernhören’ (literally, hearing from a distance) that Furtwängler learnt from the theories of Friedrich Schenker and the realisation of which in turn prompted Schenker (and others) to set the conductor apart from his peers as a supreme recreative artist.
The 1939 Fifth was recorded on eight single-sided shellac discs, of which the seventh was lost. The transfer on Tahra fills in the missing side with material from 1937, whereas the team of engineers working for the Berlin Philharmonic on the new box has opted to give us what’s left of the performance, no more, no less.
By then Germany was at war, and the degree to which circumstances influence both performance and each listener’s perception of it is a matter of pure conjecture. The 1937 recording in particular establishes a blueprint for Furtwängler’s vision of the symphony that undergoes no radical transformation in any of the 11 subsequent performances left to us.
And yet: shortly before his retirement in 2014, the late Michael Gielen conducted Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at the Salzburg Festival, with the Baden-Baden radio orchestra that had lately been served with a termination notice. He remarked at the time that ‘Crisis also stimulates. One struggles to sustain what one has created.’ It is this sense of struggle – a word that recurs time and again in Furtwängler’s own writing – which surely lends many of his wartime performances their unnerving intensity.
Presentation and marketing also play their parts in perception, and it would be idle to pretend otherwise. Editorial and design between them paint the most sober yet vivid portrait of Berlin at war, and the orchestra too, from beautifully printed imagery of the bombed-out Philharmonie to concert posters, letters, photographs of musicians and broadcast engineers at work, and reproductions of the tape cases which illustrate the tortuous tale of where these recordings came from.
Advertising
As meticulously outlined by the booklet essays, the first two concerts were preserved on shellac discs, of which original copies have been sourced in Germany and newly remastered. The remaining 19 concerts, or portions of them, were carefully mixed for broadcast by a team of Reichsrundfunk engineers including Friedrich Schnapp, whose recorded recollections – at least most of them – conclude the set: the French Furtwängler Society (SWF) has previously issued a longer version of the interview.
After the war, many of the original tapes ended up in the care of Moscow Radio. This is how some of them were first released in Europe, as more or less decently transferred Melodiya LPs. The generous baritone of Tibor de Machula came over loud and clear as the soloist in Schumann’s Cello Concerto, but the grooves bit and spat at the climaxes of Bruckner’s Fifth from the same concert. Around the same time, DG released LPs of a few tapes left behind in Germany, such as Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Conrad Hansen, but the results were, if anything, even dimmer. With the advent of glasnost the Moscow tapes began to trickle back to Berlin, though some of them arrived as copies.
The difference between copy and original (scrupulously outlined by the tracklisting) is laid bare by perhaps the most renowned single performance in the box, of Beethoven’s Ninth from March 1942. This has been transferred from original tapes except for the Scherzo – from a copy – which duly sounds as though it was recorded in a different and more distant acoustic. In an ever more crowded market, the SWF transfer was until recently regarded as the best yet, but there is a quite startling roundness and richness to the new remastering that handles even the apocalyptic climax of the first movement (where Furtwängler always used two timpanists). Comparable to Andrew Rose’s work on Pristine Classical, there is the uncanny suggestion – illusion would be too strong a word – of a soundstage with a definite centre, a kind of ‘wide mono’, without pulling artefacts into distinct channels in the manner of the ‘fake stereo’ of the 1960s. The level of intervention here isn’t made clear, or not as clear as the ‘Callas Remastered’ transfers undertaken by Abbey Road Studios for Warner Classics in 2014, but it isn’t as radical as some Pristine releases.
The audio restoration does wonders for the piano concertos in particular, filling out piano tone and sharpening up high and low registers. The transfers of Hansen’s Beethoven and Adrian Aeschbacher’s Brahms B flat Concerto are as good as new performances, by no means shallow compared to Edwin Fischer’s performances (of the same Brahms and Furtwängler’s own, prolix Symphonic Concerto). Only Walter Gieseking’s Schumann still disappoints, with the conductor’s contribution equally (and uncharacteristically) disengaged as his soloist’s. Meanwhile the coughing throughout Hansen’s sublime prolongation of the Fourth Concerto slow movement’s coda is still present, and so is an odd clicking at 1'40"-1'50" of the Schumann finale.
From the same concert as the Schumann, however, comes a Beethoven Seventh that burns with the kind of fury so impotently expressed by Furtwängler in his diaries. The speed of the finale is pretty much identical to when the orchestra played it last summer under their new chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, but Dionysiac fury is played out through tragedy, as it is in Schubert’s Great C major. In Strauss’s Don Juan and the Tristan Prelude and Liebestod, Eros is put to the service of the same muse. Even the openers to Der Freischütz and Die Meistersinger contrive, without perversion, to rage with joy. In the unequivocal tragedies of Beethoven’s Coriolan, the Fourth Symphony of Brahms and the Ninth of Bruckner every phrase sounds as if scored into the manuscript paper with the blackest Indian ink.
The tracklisting also lays out, in ghostly, grey type, what we have lost from several of the concerts. Much of it is new music, composed by Philipp Jarnach, Paul Höffer and Gerhard Frommel, of the kind Furtwängler tended to promote as an act of resistance to the new orthodoxies of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. As the examples of Ernst Pepping’s Second Symphony and Heinz Schubert’s Hymnisches Konzert demonstrate at some length, it was a style condemned to obscurity by its own anachronistic worthiness, and Furtwängler entertained similar (justified) fears about his own music.
However, what survives of these concerts comes down more to the hand of fate than the capricious aesthetics of any radio producer. A Mozart Symphony No 40 is missing, a Brahms Second, more Fifths and Sevenths of Beethoven. More grievous is the loss of the first movement to a Bruckner Sixth fired with nervous, Schubertian energy even in the funeral march of its slow movement. One notable act of restoration comes with the penultimate concert, and a now complete (not completed!) Unfinished Symphony.
But inevitably, before the interview with Schnapp, the musical climax of the box arrives with the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony, recorded in the cavernous Admiralspalast on January 23, 1945, before Furtwängler fled to Switzerland. Were I asked for a single recording to show ‘why conducting matters’, I would choose this Brahms performance, a bloody torso as it is. The canard that Furtwängler could not secure an exact, unanimous attack is rendered more baseless than ever by the new remastering.
Another canard is dispatched by archival material that shows how concerned the conductor was with the fidelity of these live recordings, and by their contribution to his legacy. ‘It never comes out on the radio the same way I conduct it,’ he complained to the long-suffering Schnapp, who concludes that ‘he never agreed with the cultural policy of the Nazis … He was human – what can I say?’ Were not idea and execution so perfectly aligned, so often, in the performances so reverently enhanced by this box, there would be no need for anyone to take sides over Furtwängler’s own degree of political alignment. History wouldn’t care. He’d be another Nazi stooge, another useful idiot, or not. But these are the concerts that, so they said later, made life worth living for many Berliners. They matter.
Peter Quantrill