Jump to content

‘The Complete Wilhelm Furtwängler on Record’ Review: Making the Case for the Maestro - Feel the Music - InviteHawk - Your Only Source for Free Torrent Invites

Buy, Sell, Trade or Find Free Torrent Invites for Private Torrent Trackers Such As redacted, blutopia, losslessclub, femdomcult, filelist, Chdbits, Uhdbits, empornium, iptorrents, hdbits, gazellegames, animebytes, privatehd, myspleen, torrentleech, morethantv, bibliotik, alpharatio, blady, passthepopcorn, brokenstones, pornbay, cgpeers, cinemageddon, broadcasthenet, learnbits, torrentseeds, beyondhd, cinemaz, u2.dmhy, Karagarga, PTerclub, Nyaa.si, Polishtracker etc.

‘The Complete Wilhelm Furtwängler on Record’ Review: Making the Case for the Maestro


peekaboo
 Share

Recommended Posts

The conductor was one of the greatest of all time. A new 55-CD boxed set reminds us of his importance.

im-415033?width=860&size=1.5&pixel_ratio

Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in 1941

Who is the greatest conductor of all time? The question is frequently asked and impossible to answer. Top contenders include Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, but there are practically as many candidates as there are music lovers. Yet one figure towers above most: Wilhelm Furtwängler, the German maestro who though no longer a household name in the U.S. is no fringe figure, either. He was twice selected to lead major American ensembles—the New York Philharmonic in 1936 and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1949—but political complications prevented his serving. Now Warner Classics is reminding us of his importance with an edition of 55 CDs titled “The Complete Wilhelm Furtwängler on Record”—the bulk of its bounty from the EMI archives, with contributions from Polydor, Telefunken, English Decca and Deutsche Grammophon. 

Furtwängler shot to fame in 1922 when, at just 36 years old, he succeeded the legendary Arthur Nikisch as chief conductor of both the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus, though he abandoned the latter post five years later for the Vienna Philharmonic. His first recordings appeared in 1927, and he continued making discs until his death at age 68 in 1954, the vast majority of them with those orchestras in Berlin and Vienna. 

The conductor’s great gift was an ineffable ability to perceive the gestalt of a score from its initial downbeat, and then to manifest that conception through an indivisible musical line punctuated by bursts of energy and judiciously employed pauses. Combined with minutely managed dynamic shifts and an ear for artful phrasing, along with an uncanny sense of proportion, Furtwängler stamped his performances as uniquely as any conductor ever has. 

Only Toscanini’s advocates have rivaled Furtwängler’s in ardency. But whereas Toscanini was a vocal critic of fascism who abandoned Italy, the country of his birth, Furtwängler took a more measured approach and refused to leave his homeland after the Nazis came to power. The decision would dog him long after the collapse of the Third Reich. Even today, despite official postwar exoneration, his reputation remains tainted for some.

But the focus here is on the music making. Naturally, no conductor favors all composers equally, and Furtwängler, like his contemporaries, was a product of his time. Thus Wagner, Brahms, Schubert and Schumann predictably loom large, as does Beethoven, the conductor’s lodestar, whose symphonies dominate this box. 

Yet Furtwängler was as much a gifted Mozartean as he was a painter of vaster canvases, as two recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic from the late 1940s demonstrate. His version of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 (K. 550) is among the finest from the era before period-performance practices came to dominate the field, and his account of the composer’s “Gran Partita” (K. 361) for 13 wind instruments is 40 minutes of pure bliss—the small forces balanced ideally, the textures transparent.

Though Furtwängler was not avowedly antimodernist, the closest this set comes to “new” music is his 1953 recording of Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, and Yehudi Menuhin as the incisive soloist; the equally distinguished reading of Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer” from 1952, with the Philharmonia and the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; and three of Richard Strauss’s great tone poems, with the Vienna Philharmonic from the early to mid-1950s.

A 1930 recording of Strauss’s “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” with the Berlin Philharmonic is complemented by nearly nine minutes of rehearsal captured for posterity. Aficionados of the conductor will delight in odd bits like that or the two recordings, with and without glockenspiel, of Johann and Josef Strauss’s “Pizzicato” Polka, both from the same session in 1950. But they will primarily celebrate the material that is either newly issued—like the excerpts from Wagner’s “Ring” cycle with the sopranos Kirsten Flagstad and Maria Müller and the tenor Lauritz Melchior recorded live at Covent Garden with the London Philharmonic in 1937—or so little distributed as to be obscure even to fans, like a Beethoven Ninth Symphony recorded in London by the Berlin Philharmonic that same year.

Most listeners will rightly meditate on the core repertory, much of which was re-recorded by the same or similar forces, as was the fashion then. We get innumerable interpretations of Wagner preludes and assorted orchestral interludes—all of them worthy—in addition to two versions of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (both with Menuhin) and three accounts of the overture to the opera “Der Freischütz” by Carl Maria von Weber. Several Beethoven symphonies also receive multiple performances—the Fifth, thrice—but not the Second and Eighth, which don’t appear even once.

In addition to the operatic excerpts with singers, three complete operas recorded late in Furtwängler’s life—Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and “Die Walküre”—anchor this set, each still a touchstone.

Everything in this box has been newly transferred, and the results, the monaural sound notwithstanding, possess greater depth and dynamic range than in previous incarnations. Even some of the editing is new, most notably a complete recording from Vienna of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion compiled from four live concerts in April 1954. 

The collection’s title requires comment. Some enthusiasts may be hoping for performances first broadcast on radio or captured live in concert but not originally meant for commercial release. They will be disappointed, for the parameters of this compendium limit its contents to performances, in studio or otherwise, that were from the outset intended for issue on record. Only in that sense is this compilation “complete.” 

Yet that fact in no way diminishes what is here—an overwhelming cache of some of the 20th century’s most essential cultural documents. Equally important, this set stands as a living musical biography of an incomparable artist whose genius continues to elicit a torrent of feeling among those who revere him.

—Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on classical music and film.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Customer Reviews

  • Similar Topics

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.