THE BRUNO WALTER BRAND

The German-born conductor Bruno Walter (1876-1962) knew nothing of the rocky road to success. He was a hit almost from the start, at the turn of the century: articulate, handsome, gifted (as pianist as well), a disciple of and assistant to the most celebrated conductor of the time, Gustav Mahler.

Walter’s work was thoroughly appreciated throughout his long career. Yet he was never the object of universal veneration. No one then or now is inclined to recite “The Legend of Bruno Walter” by the hearthside, as one does the adventures--musical and otherwise--of his celebrated colleagues and near-contemporaries, Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwaengler.

Walter lacked Toscanini’s fiery temperament and acid tongue as well as his crusading zeal. He didn’t share Furtwaengler’s mystical bent or probing intellectualism. Walter was a less complex personality and musician. Yet, to many older listeners, above all to those who made the transition with Walter from Mitteleuropa to the United States before World War II, he was one of the century’s finest conductors, equally adept in the symphonic and operatic repertories.

These thoughts are prompted by a massive compact-disc release--some 30 records at this writing--of Walter interpretations on the CBS label. It should be noted, however, that like the currently available compact disc “legacies” of Toscanini and Otto Klemperer, Walter on CBS hardly constitutes an overview of a career. All three conductors are memorialized only with material recorded in extreme old age.

At age 80-plus, conductors are unlikely to experiment. They will have settled into an interpretive groove, applying their “style” across the board, regardless of when the music in question was written.

With the octogenarian Walter, whose repertory spanned the central European classics from Haydn and Mozart through Mahler, this meant a certain denseness of texture, slowed-down (not necessarily slow) tempos, with heavy emphasis on the bass line. Then, too, all these recordings were made within the space of only two years, from 1960 to 1962, without benefit of much rehearsal or even the services of a standing orchestra familiar with the conductor’s methods. The players of the “Columbia Symphony” heard in these reissues were culled from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the studio orchestras--an ad-hoc group, but a highly responsive one, with some notably fine wind soloists.

The good, original sound has been enhanced by digital remastering. There are no heart-stopping surprises in these performances. Nor are there eccentricities.

Least successful is the earliest music, works requiring a lighter, lither conductorial touch, more spring and fleetness: the last six symphonies of Mozart (MK 42026/27/28); the Haydn 88 and 100 (MK 42047), and the less weighty of the Beethoven symphonies, all nine of which are included in the release.

Much more satisfying and idiomatic are a trio of Bruckner symphonies, the Fourth (MK 42035), Seventh (M2K 42036, two discs) and Ninth (MK 42037). These are all in the best tradition of “Teutonic Grandeur”--nobly paced, with a vast dynamic scheme, yet sufficiently taut in rhythm to harness the inherent sprawl. Walter is wonderfully convincing in the stomping, heavy-footed scherzos, which here convey an endearing bumptiousness rooted in the dances of the rustics in the Beethoven “Pastoral” Symphony, another Walter-Columbia Symphony treasure (MK 42012, with the “Leonore” Overture No. 2).

The Walter brand of Mahler--at least as reflected in the latter-years CBS interpretations of the First (MK 42031), Second (with the New York Philharmonic, MK 42032, two discs) and Ninth symphonies (MK 42033, two discs)--was a good deal less intense, less neurotic, more broadly laid out than that of such fiery Mahlerians as Leonard Bernstein and Georg Solti. Walter saw the music, including that of the Ninth (he conducted its world premiere in 1911) in a benignly lyrical 19th-Century light.

One gets a more subtle and penetrating view of Mahler from Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic in a live-performance Fourth Symphony recorded at the 1950 Salzburg Festival (Varese Sarabande compact disc 47228). The excellent soprano soloist in the finale is Irmgard Seefried.

This is Mahler with the flexible beat, the dynamic nuancing and warmth of string tone we associate with the greatest post-Romantic conducting--and the greatest European orchestras: Mahler sweet, ironic, languorous, grotesque, tautly dramatic by turns. Where the Columbia Symphony works hard and often successfully to convey the appropriate style, the Vienna Philharmonic--which had played this music regularly under Walter prior to 1938--has it in its bones.

Two other, particularly attractive components of the CBS release feature the aristocratic, sweet-toned violin playing of Zino Francescatti in the Beethoven Concerto (MK 42018) and the Brahms Double Concerto (MK 42024), where his equally commanding partner is the late French cellist Pierre Fournier. The Brahms is coupled with a Schumann Piano Concerto in which Eugene Istomin is the faceless, graceless soloist, and Walter gives the impression of wanting to be, or perhaps being, elsewhere.

The CBS Walter release further includes solidly respectable readings of the four Brahms symphonies (MK 42020/21/22/23) and heavyweight versions of the Dvorak Eighth (MK 42038) and Ninth (MK 42039) symphonies, the former disc also including the Prelude and “Good Friday” music from Wagner’s “Parsifal.”