Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Symphony No.7 in A, Op.92 [35:00]
Symphony No.8 in F, Op.93 [24:06]
New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra/Bruno Walter
rec. 1951, 1948. ADD/mono
Reviewed as streamed in 24-bit sound
First released as Columbia
ML4414
Download only
SONY G010004058262O
[59:08]
Some time ago, I rashly promised to write an article on the recent Sony Bruno Walter – The Complete Columbia Collection (19075923242, 77
CDs) and the single download offshoots from it. I’m still working on it,
but I thought it might be worthwhile to review some of the plums from the
set separately. Jack Horner in the nursery rhyme put in his thumb and
pulled out a plum; that’s thought to be a reference to an actual historical event – at
the dissolution of the monasteries, Thomas Horner sent his bid for a rich
mansion that had belonged to the abbot of Glastonbury, a ‘plum’
acquisition, in secret, sealed in an empty pie case, and got the prize.
I shudder at the thought of where I would put such the complete collection
– and at the thought of laying out over £200 for a set which includes many
recordings which I already own – but for Mahler enthusiasts there’s a
slightly less daunting prospect in the form of another Sony set which
remains available as a download for around £50 in lossless sound: Bruno Walter conducts Mahler (Classical Masters 88691920102).
If the complete set is the covering pie – rather a bulky pie if your house
is already crammed with CDs, DVDs and blu-rays – this Beethoven recording
is one of the plums. As a naturally sedentary – too sedentary – person,
there’s not much that gets me wanting to move about in time with the music.
David Munrow’s Renaissance Dance 2-CD collection, still available
at super-budget price (Erato Veritas 3500032) is one; Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony is another, and the Walter recording is guaranteed to do it.
I’ll start by admitting the downside of the separate downloads. They
certainly save on shelf space and avoid duplication, but, at around £11.50
each in lossless format, you would end up paying more than the £200 of the
77-CD set before you were a third of the way through downloading its
contents. I advise against economising by choosing transfers on labels
other than Sony; these may have been made without much care and may not
deliver what it says on the box: ‘Beethoven: The 9 Symphonies’ for £8.49 in
full 320 kb/s mp3 looks like good value for the NYPO set, but actually
contains only Nos. 1-8! Someone can’t count – perhaps a descendant of the
music student who assured his professor that Beethoven wrote three
symphonies, the ‘Eroica’, the Fifth and the ‘Choral’.
The Seventh may not have been one of the student’s three, but Walter’s New
York recording is a classic, an example of how to live dangerously and get
away with it. Throughout the work Walter is fully in tune with this
‘apotheosis of the dance’, but it’s the really fast tempo for the finale
that makes it so special – a train crash that miraculously never happens.
It was only his special rapport with the NYPO that made that possible – he
didn’t dare to do it in the Columbia SO remake – although that’s less than
30 seconds slower, it sounds altogether more sedate. Along with his
Columbia SO late Mozart symphonies (CDs 62-64 of the complete set, or
G0100040942846, download only), this is my special pick of these
recordings.
I don’t want to get too involved in comparisons with a classic recording of
this vintage, but it’s impossible to put a recording of the Seventh into
context without a glance in the direction of Carlos Kleiber’s 1976 account
with the Vienna Philharmonic (DG Originals 4474002, with an equally classic
No.5; No.7 also included in DG Beethoven 2020: Symphonies and Overtures –
review
). The DG stereo sound is obviously superior to that of a recording from
the very earliest days of mono LP – there’s even an SACD (E4716302) and
both the CD and lossless download are less expensive than the Sony – but
the Sony transfer is more than acceptable. I owned the Philips LP of the
two Walter performances (GBL5619), and, from memory, the sound is now very
considerably improved on that.
The Kleiber coupling undoubtedly deserves all the praise that has been
lavished on it, but Walter scores in the outer movements with a slightly
greater sense of energy, and not least in the finale. We easily forget that
the Seventh and Eighth symphonies were composed only slightly earlier than
the late quartets. The opening movement of No.7 offers a premonition of
that late quartet style, with phrases arching upwards only to be dismissed
as leading nowhere, so that it’s easy to imagine the surreal scenario of
Wagner dancing on top of the piano to explain the music to Liszt.
Walter’s may not be quite the fastest account of the finale, but it is
faster even than most chamber orchestra or period instrument versions, and
it remains for me the most convincing. Surprisingly, one of the few other
conductors to bring the movement off at a similar speed is Otto Klemperer,
with the Philharmonia in 1955 (Warner 5678512, download only, or Naxos
8.111248, both with No.5). Klemperer is a little lumpen elsewhere, and he
opens the finale a little more deliberately than Walter, but the movement
never drags, belying the automatic assumption that Klemperer is going to
make the dance sound elephantine. Whether attributable to the superb
rapport that he had with the Philharmonia, or the advances made in
recording quality in the short time between the two recordings, all the
strands of the music stand out more clearly in his recording, originally
released on UK Columbia 33CX1379.
That Klemperer 7 is coupled with a classic Fifth, fast enough to have been
released on a 10” LP; it’s one of the treasures of the repertoire of the
conductor whose recordings were usually regarded as complementary to
Walter’s. You were supposed to prefer one’s Beethoven or Mahler to the
other’s; now, with hindsight, we see them not as rivals but as different
sides of the same Austro-German tradition. You’ll see if you look at
Christopher Howell’s
review
of the Klemperer, that I rate his Beethoven much more highly than my
colleague.
No.8 follows a shade too hard on the heels of No.7, but that’s my only
reservation. Walter refuses to treat it as the poor relative of its
predecessor, yet avoids making it sound too self-important. If Beethoven
had a fault, it’s that some of this music can easily be made to sound
pompous. Walter’s Beethoven in general avoids that, and nowhere more than
in these two symphonies.
If I had to choose just one Beethoven recording for my Desert Island, I’d
be hard pressed to choose between the VPO/Kleiber 5 and 7 and these two
NYPO/Walter recordings.
Why did Walter’s Columbia Symphony Orchestra remake not quite catch fire in
the same way? It’s also included in the complete set, in a smaller 7-CD
collection of Walter’s Columbia SO Beethoven (88875123912), and available
separately as a download, with the same coupling of Nos. 7 and 8. The
(stereo) recording quality is better, but the playing never quite gels as
the New York recording did.
The Columbia SO consisted of hand-picked players, but they performed
together only on record, and Walter never seems to have developed the
rapport with them that he had with the NYPO. Additionally, his health had
deteriorated in the meantime, and that seems to have had an effect on his
physical presence, as seems also to have happened in the case of Klemperer.
Ralph Moore summed up the Sony complete set of these Walter stereo
recordings very fairly in his
review.
Some dealers still have copies of that set; otherwise, it’s download
only.
With mono recordings of this vintage, there’s little to be lost by choosing
mp3. I compared the sound as streamed in 24/192 hi-res with the mp3
streamed from Naxos Music Library, and there’s very little difference –
it’s tolerable in both formats. Even the mp3 download is not inexpensive,
but, at around £8, it represents a saving over lossless. Some dealers offer
a BnF transcription of these two recordings for around £4 in mp3 and around
£6 in lossless sound; it even comes with a very rudimentary pdf booklet.
The sound is noticeably thinner than the Sony transfer, so I don’t
recommend economising.
Unless you are in the market for the complete 77-CD Bruno Walter
collection, this is one of the most worthwhile individual downloads from it.
Brian Wilson
