KLEMPERER: WORKS OF AN ICON REVIVED

Conductor Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) was born long enough ago to have heard the music of Brahms, Wagner and Mahler when it was new and those Teutonic Romantic giants still trod the earth, or had so recently departed it that their presences remained palpable.

The label “Teutonic Romantic conductor” suggests an interpretive style congruent with the massiveness of the aforementioned composers. As an interpretive style, it is associated, if not inevitably with slow motion, then with extreme fluctuations of tempo favoring the slow end, and with a free attitude toward rhythm.

And the Teutonic Romantic style connotes above all a subjective approach to the score. Wilhelm Furtwaengler, Willem Mengelberg and Otto Klemperer are the icons of this school, as distinct from those adjudged as comprising the opposing camp, the literalists: Arturo Toscanini, Erich Kleiber, George Szell.

A number of recent releases on the Angel label allow us to re-examine the Klemperer “legend,” or at least part of it since, as with recent Toscanini rereleases, we are presented only material from the conductor’s last years.

Whereas Klemperer was known in the 1920s as a champion of the new and the daring, his recording career, a phenomenon largely of the 1960s, is founded on the Middle European standards. On the basis of what little evidence we have of pre-1960s recorded material, the gap between a Klemperer and a Toscanini interpretation of this repertory isn’t as wide, in matters other than tempo, as reputations would lead one to suppose.

But the two men were coming from opposite directions, so to speak. Just as the young Toscanini was a more expansive interpreter than the man familiar from those 1950s NBC Symphony broadcasts, so the young Klemperer tended to give us music that was quicker, more edgy than what we know from his work as documented in these Angel Eminence re-releases with London’s magnificent Philharmonia Orchestra.

As these generously filled, superbly engineered records--digitally remastered and, in several instances, available on compact disc as well as low-priced standard vinyls--show, the aged Klemperer’s interpretations are not quite the mastodons that memory suggested.

The big Beethoven symphonies are first among the reissues--the “Eroica” (AE-34424, compact disc CDC 47186, both coupled with the “Great Fugue”); the Fifth (with Symphony No. 2 on AE-34425, on compact disc with No. 8, CDC 47187); and the Ninth Symphony (AE-34428, with the “Fidelio” Overture).

They are, to be sure, grandly scaled interpretations: nobly paced, wide in dynamic range, sonorous. Yet they are also rhythmically taut and attentive to detail.

What one does not hear is the woozy pulling about of rhythm, the gear-shifts, the meandering--the improvisatory sound--that characterize many of the celebrated interpretations of Furtwaengler and Mengelberg. There is a linear clarity in the Klemperer-Philharmonia Beethoven performances that mark them as something quite distinct.

Which can be said as well for the coupling of Brahms’ Second and Fourth Symphonies, nearly 80 undistorted minutes of music on a single, silent-surfaced vinyl disc (AE-34413).

Klemperer, like Bruno Walter, actually worked with Gustav Mahler during the composer-conductor’s final years. Walter led the premiere (in 1911) of “Das Lied von der Erde,” and his 1952 recording of that work signaled a turning point in the young life of compact disc when it was issued in that format last year.

Now, the Klemperer view of that same score, which he first conducted only a year after the premiere, appears on Angel/EMT in both CD (CDC 47231) and vinyl formats (S-38234).

This is a more reflective (and better played, by the Philharmonia Orchestra) reading than the 1952 Walter-Vienna Philharmonic, with one of the songs, the tenor’s “Von der Jugend” (Of Youth), much more slowly paced on Angel than one is accustomed to hearing. Again, however, here as everywhere in this interpretation of Mahler’s sunset masterpiece, there is both strength and irresistible flow. The vocal soloists, mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig and tenor Fritz Wunderlich, inhabit the same lofty plane as Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak, their counterparts in the Walter recording.

Where the latter-years Klemperer style fails to convince is in his Mozart symphony recordings, contained in a six-record set (AEW-34470) devoted to the dozen most famous works and a few overtures.

The sheer weight and density of these performances keep them from achieving the requisite mobility.

Among the very few Klemperer interpretations not on Angel/EMI is a 1951 Holland Festival concert performance with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony (Decca D264D2, a British import). It’s fiery stuff, very much what we imagine the Klemperer of the 1920s to have been like and in distinct contrast to his later, characteristically monumental studio recording for Angel. Kathleen Ferrier, who never made a commercial recording of this music, is the incomparably moving contralto soloist on Decca.

And, finally, a souvenir of the conductor’s overdue Covent Garden debut in 1962: a complete performance of Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio,” with a spectacular cast including Sena Jurinac in the title role, Jon Vickers as Florestan, Hans Hotter as Pizarro and Gottlob Frick as Rocco.

It is a remarkably energetic performance, with the then-76-year-old Klemperer masterfully shaping the arias and maintaining rhythmic intensity within the context of a broadly paced production.

The three-disc set can be had on the readily available Italian Melodram label (they don’t bother with fancy catalogue numbers). Sound and surfaces are surprisingly good.