EMI Trots Out an Icon: Klemperer

EMI Classics, the former (in this country) Angel Records, has entered the big-box reissue market by trotting out one of its past heavyweights, conductor Otto Klemperer (1885-1973), in a 10-CD, budget-priced “Limited Edition”--whatever that means--that serves as a potent reminder of what monumental, Germanic music-making was like.

Perhaps this listener isn’t the only one who has tended to confuse Klemperer’s majestically paced but rhythmically solid and precise style with the “inspired,” free-wheeling, across-the-bar-lines methods of his near-contemporary, Wilhelm Furtwangler. As it turns out, the similarities in the two men’s work barely extend beyond their shared desire for a big, bass-oriented sonority.

EMI has chosen from among recordings made with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London between 1955 and 1970 in compiling this giant volume: for the most part, scores well-suited to Klemperer’s craggy style.

Among the heavyweight pleasures here are the fourth, seventh and ninth symphonies of Bruckner, music that Klemperer was better able to keep in motion, regardless of tempo, than most of his contemporaries or even his less patient successors.

The four Brahms Symphonies as presented here, while perhaps not to the spare tastes of the analytical 1990s, never bog down and achieve a relaxed eloquence in the slow movements.

And there’s also the pleasure of hearing Christa Ludwig in her prime, as soloist in Brahms’ “Alto Rhapsody,” against the backdrop of Klemperer’s fittingly broad, wintry canvas and the gloriously expressive singing of the men of the Philharmonia Chorus, trained by Wilhelm Pitz of the Bayreuth Festival.

Speaking (by implication) of Wagner: While none of his music is included here, Schumann’s insufficiently credited influence on him is palpable in the present performances of the four Schumann symphonies--less for the late-19th-Century editions (Mahler’s?) employed as for the conductor’s pleasure in projecting Schumann’s imaginative, even futuristic brass harmonies and textures.

Otherwise, Klemperer’s Schumann is too dense to make much of the scores’ most tense and/or dashing moments, such as the scherzo of the Second Symphony or the corner movements of the fourth.

Likewise, the present version of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony is short of verve and charm, while the “Scottish” Symphony works only when the composer it at his most grandiose.

In Klemperer’s readings of Schubert’s “Great” C-major Symphony and above all in his magnificently brooding view of the “Unfinished,” however, we’re reminded of the spell exerted on Bruckner by Schubert’s late orchestral music.

The Philharmonia, very much Klemperer’s band at the time, plays in a fashion that may strike contemporary ears as old-fashioned. Not because of lack of individual or ensemble skill--far from it. But rather for the bottom-heavy thickness of its sound. This is the latter-years Klemperer sound, intent on projecting the big, dark aural picture rather than the telling detail.

EMI makes believe--with another “Limited Edition” budget box, this one a mere seven CDs--that the French conductor-composer (Klemperer was a similar hyphenate) Jean Martinon (1910-1976) achieved iconic status as well.

Martinon--who was in the unfortunate position of serving as music director of the Chicago Symphony between the glorious reigns of Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti--wasn’t sufficiently renowned, or sufficiently susceptible to pigeonholing, to be confused with the composers he conducted. There is no “Martinon’s Debussy,” for instance, or “Martinon’s “Bolero.” Rather, it was “Martinon conducts Debussy and Ravel,” as he does here with the French National Radio Orchestra and Orchestre de Paris.

Martinon’s work exemplified what we regard as the Gallic virtue of clear-headedness, with its balanced sonorities and lucidity of texture--in repertory quite different, on recordings at any rate, from Klemperer’s. Interesting, how conductors, Toscanini excepted, were largely restricted to their native repertory in the old days, particularly when it came to making recordings.

While there may be more lushly sensuous, mysterious readings than the Martinon-led “Daphnis et Chloe” of Ravel or the Debussy “Nocturnes,” the performances he directs are unfailingly mobile and communicative, as unfussy and heart-of-the-matter in their way as Klemperer’s are of his music. And there is special pleasure to be derived from the care Martinon gives to such secondary but hardly contemptible Debussy works as the attractive rhapsodies for clarinet and for saxophone, the lovely, Francko-Wagnerian “Printemps” and the “Khamma” ballet.

Noteworthy, too, is that these reissued 1970s recordings sound absolutely terrific--and that the price is right.*