This 16-SACD/hybrid Edition brings together all recorded performances by Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. They include the studio recordings they made for VOX Records, a small but enterprising American label that had quickly taken advantage of the new vinyl LP format, and the live concerts preserved on tape at the time by Austrian Radio.
The 1951 VOX Recordings
VOX Records pioneered the “budget label” strategy, which in matters of production meant doing things relatively “on the cheap.” At the same time, VOX’s producers never interfered with the musicians they recorded but let their microphones pick up their performances in the spirit of the moment. Thus, what VOX records may have lacked in technical finesse and acoustic sophistication they often made up for in artistic authenticity. This makes Klemperer’s VOX recordings intriguingly revealing. Klemperer disliked working under studio conditions and never listened to his own records. VOX’s hands-off approach suited him: the results have an undeniably spontaneous “live” quality about them, abundantly in evidence in Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos 5 and 6, Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony and the three piano concerto recordings with Guiomar Novaes.
The most outstanding among the VOX recordings is Klemperer’s performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. An incandescent account of overwhelming power and unassailable authority, it has remained without equal these past 70 years and occupies a unique position even among Klemperer’s other performances on record.
Klemperer’s gripping performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, “Resurrection,” is included here in both the studio version and the live concert recording that followed on 18 May 1951, the fortieth anniversary of Mahler’s death: Klemperer’s visceral intensity and propulsive energy forges Mahler’s five disparate movements into a seemingly unbroken span. Alma Mahler wrote him from New York his tempi had reminded her of Mahler’s own.
The live Concerts
Klemperer’s pre-war career started out in Prague but flourished in the Weimar Republic, reaching its zenith in his Kroll Oper years (1927-1931).
Between 1920 and 1937 he gave eleven concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and two with the Vienna Symphony. After the war, between March and July 1947 he conducted the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in seven concerts and in June 1951 in a further five during their Greek concert tour on the heels of their VOX recordings. These were then followed by the four concerts published here.
It is therefore all the more intriguing to witness how the profound impact of virtually all of the concerts he gave with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra is not reflected in their number. As Fritz Skorzeny epitomized Klemperer’s performance with the Vienna Symphony of Bruckner Seventh in Der Abend of 28 February 1958: “One experienced a great and also one of the last conductors who carries this world-encompassing music in his head and heart as part of his own self, has fully mastered it and yet always remains its servant. A sold-out hall justly rendered homage to Klemperer and the Orchestra way beyond the usual.”
Three of the four live concerts that have survived on tape appear here for the first time complete and in the chronological order of their original programs. Missing only is Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 in A major, K 201, that preceded Bruckner’s Seventh.
Their final concert together, on 16 June 1963 in the Theater an der Wien, an all-Beethoven program, may also well have formed the culmination of their collaboration, as Herbert Schneider wrote in Der Kurier am Morgen, 17 June 1963:
No wonder that under such a musician of truth the “Eroica” turned into a startling experience. Klemperer has totally absorbed the content, the message of this music and passes it on with the unassailable authority of one chosen. (…) He is without a doubt the most significant Beethoven musician of our time, perhaps the most complete there has ever been.
A deeply moved audience together with the Symphoniker’s to peak performances driven musicians celebrated this solitary old man, whose existence music, thank-God, continues to secure for us.
