The Vienna Philharmonic at 150: It Still Stands Alone

Of the great European orchestras, none radiates a mystique comparable to that of the Vienna Philharmonic. The orchestra, with its lack of concern for traditions other than its own, has retained a personality independent of its chosen conductors.

The Vienna Philharmonic also has its own sound , which has remained remarkably consistent over the years. This is attributable in part to the Viennese education of most of the players and to the instruments constructed for, or collected by, the orchestra.

That sound can be studied at length in two releases from Deutsche Grammophon commemorating the 150th anniversary of the orchestra’s founding: a 12-CD set (435 321, mid-price) and a two-disc package devoted to the waltzing Strausses and to be the subject of a future column.

The big box documents what the orchestra’s directorate (playing members and ex-members) regards as high points of the years 1944 through 1976, under conductors with whom it closely identifies. All the performances were recorded in concert, most in the orchestra’s home, the Musikverein in Vienna, as much a part of the ensemble’s sound as the players and their instruments.

First, the only outright loser: the 1971 teaming of the VPO and its beloved Lenny Bernstein in a bloated interpretation of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102 and Ravel’s G-major Concerto with Bernstein an erratic piano soloist and directing a fumbling orchestra. Surely something better could have been found to represent this happy and productive partnership.

Acoustical problems blight the orchestra under the urbane Clemens Krauss in 1953: a lean, intense Beethoven “Missa Solemnis,” dimly perceptible through distant miking and a scratchy master. There’s better sound but scrappy execution in their Stravinsky “Pulcinella” Suite, while Dukas’ deliciously atmospheric “L’Apprenti Sorcier” is decently reproduced.

The earliest items here, from 1944, find Richard Strauss, never the most engaging conductor of his own music, leading the “Sinfonia Domestica” and “Till Eulenspiegel.”

A curious entry is the 1957 Schubert “Great” C-major Symphony under willful, witty, Nazi-baiting Hans Knappertsbusch, who gives the opening downbeat at the height of the audience’s welcoming applause and proceeds to alternate vigor and nobility with buffoonish eccentricities of tempo and phrasing.

The “Kna” coupling is one of those dense dumplings, out of Brahms by way of Reger and Lehar, that only a Viennese could write--or the Viennese love: “Variations on a Hussar Song” by native-son composer and VPO cellist Franz Schmidt (1874-1939).

Another controversial maestro was the venerated, excoriated, nearly indescribable Wilhelm Furtwangler, whose work with the VPO is here preserved on two discs. One contains a 1953 Beethoven Ninth Symphony, where listeners may be tempted to bail out quickly in the face of the conductor’s ponderous noodling.

The less antsy are, however, urged to stay tuned for passages of blinding illumination--the first-movement coda is a marvel of accumulating tension and cathartic release--and grandeur, as in the massively sustained slow movement. That the interpretation is being invented on the spot seems barely to faze the alert instrumentalists. The chorus is less adept.

The second Furtwangler disc combines a 1945 Brahms Second Symphony, erratically led and sonically fuzzy, with a clean-sounding, hugely dramatic Beethoven “Leonore” No. 3 and “Grosse Fuge,” the latter in Felix Weingartner’s arrangement, ferociously driven, blazingly executed by the VPO strings and one of the set’s glories.

From 1955 comes a coupling under Bruno Walter of Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony, thickset and dull until its brightly sprung finale, and an airy, loving account of Mahler’s Fourth, with Hilde Guden the charming last-movement soloist.

The late 1960s bring Strauss’ “Tod und Verklarung” and Schoenberg’s “Pelleas und Melisande,” contradicting the opinion--gained through studio recordings--of Karl Bohm as little more than a jumped-up routinier . Both disclose strong convictions and an intelligent shaping hand.

From the ‘60s as well come two distinctive performances by Otto Klemperer: a deep, slowish but usually firm Beethoven Fifth, and a mysterious, lyrically resplendent, superbly executed (oh, those VPO cellos!) Schubert “Unfinished” Symphony.

Carl Schuricht contributes a tidy account (1963) of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony that sounds tepid indeed beside the radiant 1976 performance of the Bruckner Ninth under Herbert von Karajan.

Banish preconceptions based on the Karajan recordings of this score with the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestra he formed in his own aural image.

The VPO belongs to no one. Its members took from Karajan and they gave, resulting here in an interpretation of inspired, inspiring grandeur and dramatic thrust, unhampered by the prettifications of Karajan-the-producer’s notions of recorded sound: a sublime communion of conductor, orchestra and the absent, but ever-respected, composer.