New Philharmonia Orchestra

Eugene Fodor was a pupil of Heifetz pupil who became a 1974 Tchaikovsky Competition prizewinner.

Erich Leinsdorf conducts the Tchaikovsky; Peter Maag conducts the Mendelssohn.

Together with the Requiem, Mozart's C minor mass is one of the brilliant composer's great unfinished sacred works. The work combines monumental power, solemn spirituality and moving solo passages. This recording under the baton of Baroque and Classical expert Raymond Leppard has great expressive depth, and offers a truly legendary vocal ensemble featuring stars like Kiri Te Kanawa and Ileana Cotrubas.

The first symphonic work by Mozart that Klemperer ever conducted was K.550. The Kölnische Zeitung noted that his use of a reduced string section emphasised the dark aspects of the score and the work was played ‘con espressione, yet with a translucency and a rhythmic and dynamic finesse in the true classical style’. His 1956 recording of the symphony for EMI drew praise from Gramophone magazine’s conductor/critic Trevor Harvey – ‘for me easily the most satisfying recorded performance. I wouldn’t want a bar altered anywhere. The Philharmonia give Klemperer the most lovely playing, especially in the quiet string tone...’. In later years Klemperer liked to couple the Mozart G minor with Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony (soon after this 1965 London concert he gave the same programme in Hamburg, his mother’s birthplace). He had first conducted the Bruckner in 1921. It became a work that he used to champion the composer’s music where it was less known and which he liked to perform for his own début engagements in Europe and America. After a concert with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra in 1927 the critics rejected the music but noted drily that Klemperer was applauded ‘as, it is safe to say, no conductor of a Bruckner symphony has ever been applauded in New York’. Much the same story (appreciative audience, hostile critics) repeated itself in Rome in 1931 and in London.

In February 1958 Klemperer returned to the Symphony in Vienna where the concert began with another of his Mozart favourites, the A major Symphony K.201. The critics, thrilled that Klemperer could now conduct standing up – recovery from a hip operation had kept him seated for a decade before, built up a romantic picture of triumph over physical adversity and, for the Bruckner Seven, bordered on the ecstatic. One writer recalled how Klemperer was actually named in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus novel as composer Leverkühn’s conductor of choice for the première of his Apokalypse. Others hailed his ‘great deeds’, ‘style of interpretation which made the music into a spiritual power’, his awareness of ‘music’s highest sense, its role as a spiritual discipline’ and his handling of the symphony as ‘song-like, full of streaming lyricism and powerfully shaped climaxes’.

Although neither man lived in the country at the time, there could be little doubt that Otto Klemperer and Yehudi Menuhin were regarded in the mid 1960s as the UK’s leading ‘resident’ Beethoven performers, even though Menuhin had not taken part in the widely applauded Beethoven cycles that Klemperer and the Philharmonia had initiated in 1957. Indeed it seems that the two artists had not worked together since collaborating on the Schumann Violin Concerto in Los Angeles in November 1938.

The collaboration was much anticipated. The Guardian wrote of ‘the unexpected conjunction of magician and monolith’ and warned that ‘a monolith can be severe to the point of dullness and a magician can sometimes seem to be using the wrong spell-book’.

Its review found, however, that ‘the conjunction began to find its form... the slow movement brought the most ethereal music-making of all, and the finale became a relaxed country dance, something that might almost have fitted in the Pastoral Symphony’.

Klemperer’s association with the Symphonie fantastique may have begun (during one of his periodic depressions) in Berlin in 1928 when, newly chosen as the Kroll Opera’s first music director, he was searching for more radical concert repertoire. The Fantastique did not appeal to him at the time (he probably just read the score without rehearsing or performing it) but he changed his mind rapidly after giving the work in concert in Los Angeles in December 1933 – ‘a work of a hyper-genius’ he told his wife.The Guardian’s 1966 concert review summed up Klemperer’s approach to the Fantastique in relation to the contemporary critical attitude to the work – ‘he pays Berlioz the very just compliment of treating him as a real symphonist and not merely as an atmospheric colorist’. But this is not the pure ‘classical’ interpretation of the score that it’s often portrayed as; rather is it a document of the fascination of one conductor (and a composer and an experienced leader of opera to boot) with radical music.

This concert was given as a memorial to the British publisher, liberal humanitarian and music-lover Sir Victor Gollancz (1893-1967). The founder of the influential Left Book Club, Gollancz started his own publishing company in 1927 which came to specialise in left-wing and American books. He was also a prolific writer on political and humanitarian subjects and, eventually, on music. His life was informed by his unconventional religious beliefs – a combination of the Judaism into which he was born, his individual version of Christianity and readings into other faiths. This motivated a life-long activity in human rights issues. It was typical of Gollancz to have been a campaigner both for rescuing Jewish victims of Nazi persecution (and the first to predict a six million death toll) during the Second World War and for giving increased aid to German civilians once the war was over, contesting Field Marshal Montgomery’s plan to allow the population only a little more than concentration-camp rations.

The repertoire for the concert was chosen by Gollancz’s widow Ruth and his daughter Livia and represented all his favourite composers bar Verdi. The programme opened with an appreciation by his friend, The Observer music critic Peter Heyworth, and incorporated quotes from Gollancz’s own writings on the music being performed.

The Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart were old friends of Klemperer’s repertoire; he had first recorded the Unfinished and the Beethoven item with the Berlin Staatskapelle in the 1920s, re-recording them with the Philharmonia in the 1960s. The Love Scene from Roméo et Juliette harked back to Klemperer’s Strasbourg days under Pfitzner when, in 1910, he gave the complete symphony its local première.

The concert programme ended with Gollancz’s praise of music from his 1952 autobiographical sketch My Dear Timothy. ‘Why has no one ever included, among the various “proofs” of the existence of God, the musical? Music is as much mimesis, imitation, as any other of the arts: Beethoven doesn’t invent anything, he perceives something and tries to reproduce it. Then how does it happen, what Beethoven tries to reproduce in, say, the E flat quartet? Can anyone imagine that it happens accidentally?’

Although Otto Klemperer was approaching his 80s and not always in the best of health, the years 1967/68 were a period of great activity for him. The interpreter and creator who had been so at home with the radicalism of late 1920s-early 1930s Berlin picked up on the energy and youth of the age in 1960s London both to make and to work with new friends and colleagues.

With Pierre Boulez he attended and debated contemporary music concerts... . With Daniel Barenboim Klemperer debated Mahler 7, engaged in friendly banter about his own compositions and agreed ... to record with him the Beethoven Piano Concertos and Mozart No.25. He even did some work with Jacqueline du Pré on a test recording of Strauss’s Don Quixote. On his visit to Bayreuth he met Anja Silja and was charmed by her personality and the unsentimental nature of her performance as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser.

While Klemperer’s interest in cutting-edge contemporary music remained lively... his own performing and recording repertoire remained of an earlier vintage... . His Mahler now expanded to take in Symphonies Nos.7 and 9... . The Mozart operas and late symphonies that had once been so important to him... would now be performed, and recorded, in London as well... .

The London newspaper critics in October 1968 talked about this performance of Schumann Two as the rediscovery of a long lost work... . At first Peter Stadlen was perplexed: ‘it still comes as a surprise that Otto Klemperer’s tidily analytical mind will enter a happy symbiosis with Romantic music’. Mosco Carner (The Times) worried about Schumann’s mental health at the time of the score’s composition: because he was having ‘dark days’ (the composer’s own euphemism) surely the symphony couldn’t be good? ‘With Schumann’s difficulty in thinking in strict symphonic terms and his often clunky management of orchestral mechanics, the work would seem to merit its neglect’. Yet, eventually, Carner’s heart won out over his head. ‘Genius must out.

For all its faults each of its four movements contains moments of the sheerest beauty and the Adagio is a pure gem – typical Schumann in its introspection and Versponnenheit (‘airiness’) and demonstrating the puzzling fact of being like most of his slow movements, most imaginatively scored’.

No less an interpreter of Bruckner than Günter Wand once called the Fifth Symphony ‘the most perplexing work in the composer’s canon’. Under Otto Klemperer performances of the Symphony (which he had substantially to relearn when the new Robert Haas edition restored a 122-bar cut in the finale) were always something of an event, even if audiences outside Austria and Germany – especially American ones in the late 1930s, and Walter Legge in the 1950s – at first found the work something of a trial.

Klemperer first conducted the Symphony in June 1927, in his last days as general music director at the Wiesbaden Opera. He repeated this programme in October 1932 when he had become sole director of the Berlin Staatskapelle concerts, ignoring a request from Furtwängler to substitute another symphony to avoid duplication with the Berlin Philharmonic later in the season. Enthusiastic reviews preferred Klemperer’s ‘sharper outlines and clear, cooler light’ to Furtwängler’s ‘essentially romantic’ approach. The Berliner Börsen Courier found that ‘Klemperer gave the enormous Symphony all the splendour of colour, the pathos, the hymn-like fervour it calls for. The structure was entirely clear, never before has one experienced the intellectual unity of the finale so strongly... precisely because Klemperer never exaggerated... everything was contained by a calm that comes with complete maturity’. It was Furtwängler who had to change his programme that season.

This is now the ninth performance of a Klemperer Schubert Unfinished to be preserved. It follows an early 1924 studio version with the Berlin Staatskapelle (one of Klemperer’s first discs), the EMI Philharmonia recording of 1963, and ‘live’ performances in Budapest, Turin, Jerusalem, Munich, Vienna and London (the last two also available on Testament). The Symphony was always a Klemperer favourite and one which responded well to his characteristic forward woodwind balance... Klemperer’s choice of the Symphony to open the programme for Bruckner’s Fifth made for a less abrasive, perhaps more relevant start to the concert than the Beethoven and Mahler he would have preferred before the war.