The third volume devoted to Furtwängler’s ‘Early Recordings’ is
not extensive enough to span its entire length and has therefore to share disc
space with Erich Kleiber’s 1929 recording of the incidental music to
A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Furtwängler’s contribution however amounts to some fifty minutes or
so of a fairly lightweight programme. Many years later in 1954 he recorded the
complete
Freischütz but it’s pleasing to hear these 1935 extracts.
He was attracted by the overture which he’d already recorded in 1926, on
an early electric, and was to do so again in Berlin in 1944, twice in 1952, and
again in ’54. In fact that 1926 disc was his first commercially released
recording. There’s foreboding in the Overture - fine horn playing as one
would expect - and a sense of linearity and tension throughout. The horns are
on equally vivid form in the Entr’acte. The Overture was spread over three
78 sides whilst the Entr’acte was on the fourth.
Unlike the Weber this performance of the
Invitation to the Dance in the
Berlioz orchestration was his only recording of it. It’s well textured,
elegant, forthright, but not punctilious over repeats; it’s also true to
say that on this evidence, given the orchestration, he was no match for Harty
as a Berlioz conductor. Moving on, this isn’t the sole example of the overture
to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in his discography as there’s
a 1947 recording. This earlier recording is sympathetically contoured and well
recorded into the bargain.
Fingal’s Cave comes from a 1930 session
and is briskly dispatched without over-much warmth, one feels. His Vienna recordings
in 1949 and ’51 were somewhat better and the sound, obviously, demonstrably
so; for 1930 this is a bit of a mushy affair, constricted and opaque, and with
more obviously audible surface noise; altogether a rather brusque case is made
out in this performance. There’s a welcome return to form, interpretatively
and in terms of recording technology, for the
Rakoczy March even though
the two pieces were set down very close together. The Kleiber envoi is full of
his vitalised rhythmic brio, warmly moulded and trammelled, and with fine string
tone, cultivated and unflabby, from the Berlin Philharmonic.
It ends a well selected but ultimately - and necessarily, perhaps - patchy kind
of programme which has been, however, extremely well transferred.
Jonathan Woolf
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Wilhelm
Furtwängler, Erich Kleiber ¹ 
