Icon of Baton: Furtwangler in All His Glory

Conductors are no longer idolized, worshiped or held in reverent awe. They may be liked, even respected, but not much more.

Ironically, it was Leonard Bernstein, the most beloved of them all, who shattered the conductor’s iconic status. He was just too available, too much in our presence--on the tube, on radio, in print--to radiate much in the way of mystique. In today’s celebrity-overloaded media age, no one has been able to stand too securely on an old-style pedestal.

But a few famous icons never descended from the distant Olympian heights. There’s Toscanini, the imperious taskmaster, conveying the composer’s desires as transmitted by the only reliable authority, the score. And, of course, Wilhelm Furtwangler, the philosopher-dreamer, with his unending search for the meaning behind the notes.

Now, there’s Furtwangler redux, with a Beethoven Ninth Symphony recorded live at the Lucerne Festival in August 1954, shortly before the conductor’s death. It goes as far as anything we’ve had in explaining what it was about his conducting that so gripped audiences during his lifetime and that continues to make his interpretations required listening, both for other conductors and for a still-growing assembly of cultists that even includes today’s conservatory students.

The performance has been around for some years, but only in ghastly-sounding bootleg editions, taped off the air on inferior equipment. Now, via the little Tahra label, it’s with us in what must closely resemble its original glory and effect.

Tahra is the brainchild of Myriam Scherchen, daughter of a celebrated conducting contemporary of Furtwangler, Hermann Scherchen. The CD’s number is FURT 1003, and its sound, derived from original Swiss Radio tapes, is astonishingly immediate and clear. The performance itself is gigantic.

The orchestra is London’s Philharmonia, an enthusiastic, keenly responsive youngster among the world’s great virtuoso ensembles then, with a full-throated (if not notably cohesive) Lucerne Festival Chorus and a strong solo quartet: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elsa Cavelti, Ernst Hafliger and Otto Edelmann.

The opening movement is incomparably dark and weighty, constantly coiling and uncoiling, broadening in tempo, then almost imperceptibly becoming taut before the long, tense crescendo, with tiny dynamic accretions, and its shattering drums-and-trumpets climax.

There’s no letdown thereafter, and the performance culminates in as festive and refreshingly vigorous an “Ode to Joy” as this jaded listener has ever encountered.

One conductor still with us, if infrequently visible, who offers the kind of deep-think interpretations exemplified by Furtwangler’s Beethoven is Carlo Maria Giulini, the L.A. Philharmonic’s own for a few blessed years.

In 1984, with the splendid Vienna Philharmonic, he recorded Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, a work of heavenly length in his hands, which has been reissued in Deutsche Grammophon’s mid-priced “Masters” series (445 529, two CDs).

It’s easy to play Bruckner slowly and noisily; and there’s no better way of turning off an audience. It is Giulini’s--and before him Furtwangler’s--path to the composer’s heart that keeps us interested, even enthralled. He maintains pace and pulse, whatever the tempo. With many conductors, Bruckner’s symphonies, particularly this longest of them, seem amorphous, music of fits and starts. Giulini can reveal and illuminate their soaring, cathedral-like architecture.

By contrast, the octogenarian Giulini’s newly recorded interpretations of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies with the La Scala Philharmonic (Sony 58921) sound aimless in their slo-mo unwinding. The Fifth needn’t be a frenzied race to the finish line, but Giulini’s amiability robs the music of all tension, and his Fourth lumbers when it should frolic.