As
the late John Ardoin’s booklet notes remind one, Furtwängler
was by no means an extensive performer – much less recorder – of
Schubert’s music. The last two symphonies certainly and
Rosamunde represent
the boundaries of his real engagement. Apparently he never
performed the Second Symphony and whilst he did perform
Nos 3, 4 and 5 he never did so after the Second World War.
His turning away from No.5 in particular seems odd if not
wilful.
Music & Arts
here disinters his live 1952 performance of the
Unfinished and the commercial
Great. The notes reprise Ardoin’s wise summaries
derived from his book
The Furtwängler Record which have the advantage of documenting
the surviving material and analysing in detail that varies
from relatively extensive to necessarily brief. Whether
one agrees with his judgements or not the analysis is persuasive,
and I happen – on rather less comprehensive appreciation
and knowledge of the surviving commercial and off-air survivals
- to trust his view.
There
was a 1948 Berlin performance of the
Unfinished followed by the commercial 1950 Vienna recording for
EMI, then this 1952 Berlin broadcast, followed in turn
by the RAI Turin performance from a few weeks later, and
other Berlin traversals from 1953 and 1954. A truncated
Allegro moderato (only) exists from a wartime (Stockholm)
Vienna Philharmonic and there are post-war rehearsal segments
from Berlin. An important omission therefore is any surviving
complete wartime broadcast, one that might have thrown
the post-war material – given the conductor’s galvanic,
often titanic 1941-44 material – into profound relief.
Nevertheless this 1952 performance is imbued with his rapturous
metrical freedoms, an omission - habitual it would seem
- of the first movement repeat, and a constant sense of
flux, of motion deferred and acceded to, and of lyrical
proportions taking their rightful place in the schema.
It’s notably well played as well.
The
Great offers a different perspective. Here wartime
performances do exist - Berlin from 1942 and Stockholm
(with the Vienna Philharmonic) in 1943. There are also
two post war inscriptions off air with both orchestra as
well as this 1951 studio performance. The 1942 is the most
visceral, the most potent and also the most undisciplined,
something that this later performance doesn’t share to
nearly the same degree. Ardoin locates a certain artificiality
in the first movement introduction of this performance – which
I would attribute to the conductor not being able to settle
in time for his studio joust with the red light. In all
other respects the performance is sonorous, commanding
with a characteristically slow Andante, its
con moto marking tending to dissolve in the warmth
of the conductor’s direction.
These
performances have been out before. For these inscriptions
Lani Spahr has used the so-called ‘harmonic balancing’ technique,
one I’ve commented on before in its varied guises. The
brass leap out in the
Unfinished whilst the winds in particular are vivid
and very forward in the
Great.
Balance realignment has been sensitively employed here;
others may prefer balances derived from older transfers;
but there’s no gainsaying the vivid dynamic range engendered
here.
Jonathan Woolf
Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra/Wilhelm Furtwängler 
