One of the most interesting documents found for me by the late Stroma Sutherland, fabled keeper of Robert Layton's office at the BBC, was a transcript of a discussion of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony which took place on Interpretations on Record on December 28, 1959. The panel, chaired by Sir Jack Westrup, consisted of Deryck Cooke, Walter Goehr and Denis Matthews. The discussion confined itself to four readings that even now might be thought seminal: by Weingartner, Furt-wangler, Toscanini and Klemperer.
Though it was not part of Interpretations on Record's brief to choose a 'preferred' version, a consensus did emerge. Toscanini's was clearly the most dramatic reading, Weingartner's and Klemperer's the most unaffectedly straightforward, and Furtwangler's the most profound: this latter judgement (an unfashionable one in 1959) rested on the premise that the performance had the power to imply as well as state, to go beyond mere narrative.
The Klemperer version was his 1957 EMI studio recording, much collected at the time, and since. The arrival of CD made for absolute ease of reproduction in the finale (never easy to reproduce on the original stereo LPs) though it also exposed a certain blandness of image in the earlier movements. Just how bland (relatively speaking) the image was is confirmed by this revelatory new Testament CD which reproduces a live recording by EMI's engineers of a performance of the Ninth Symphony conducted by Klemperer at the Royal Festival Hall immediately before the recording.
Anyone who heard Klemperer live in the concert hall will know that his characteristic way of balancing the orchestra gave particular prominence to the winds and the timpani. It was not a string-based sound: line mattered more than colour. In the music of late romantic composers such as Brahms and Bruckner the effect could be startling. Since Beethoven's characteristic sound is not string-based, the shock was never quite so great; even in Beethoven, though, the Klemperer 'sound' was always distinctive.
Listening to this live Festival Hall Ninth one hears that special Klemperer balance. Where the studio recording gives us a frontal, ground-level view of the players spread out across the spaces of the Kingsway Hall - winds and timpani heard at a certain distance over and through a veil of string sound - this live Festival Hall recording offers us a strategic overview of the on-stage orchestra. Strings, and in the finale the chorus, are nicely focused; but from where we are perched, somewhere above the first oboe (Sidney Sutcliffe, presumably), it is winds and timpani which are most persistently the centre of interest.
No one would have dared balance a studio recording this way, yet this is far closer to what a Klemperer performance really sounded like. There are a couple of oddities in the finale. In the preliminary orchestral statement of the 'joy' theme, the bassoon descant drowns out the violas and cellos; then, later on, we get a less than clear view of the tenor. (A blessed relief, you might say, given Kmentt's thin, dried-out sound. Like the splendidly distinct Hans Hotter, Kmentt is rather more at ease in the studio recording.)
Interpretatively, the two performances are identical, though the live performance is tauter: not faster, just that bit more intense, with hair's-breadth tightenings where the studio performance merely trundles reliably on. The first movement does not benefit greatly (as a reading it remains slacker than Toscanini's, less searching than Furtwangler's) but the Scherzo is transformed; what rather lumbers in the studio is here a thrilling dance of the Titans. The slow movement also takes on a more numinous quality, with sublimely simple string playing, a nice 'lift' to the tricky 12/8 section, and awe-inspiringly solemn brass annunciations towards the end.
As for the finale, this is wonderfully of a piece, thrillingly articulated by the choir (the newly-founded Philharmonia Chorus) and by the Philharmonia players. How they play for the great man, the woodwinds in particular! To phrase and project Beethoven's 70-minute epic at the level of intensity Klemperer's reading clearly invited must have been a labour of Hercules, but also of love. Detail after detail shines out, etched into one's imagination by the playing and the persistently enquiring recording. One phrase, the oboe's poco adagio towards the end of the orchestral exposition of the 'joy' theme (finale, bars 204-05, 6'09''), so caught my imagination that I found myself seeking it out again the moment the performance was over.
The Philharmonia Orchestra also features live in what is arguably Furtwangler's finest extant account of the Ninth, his 1954 Lucerne Festival performance. As a reading I would put it marginally ahead of the Klemperer and the Toscanini, but the thrilling new perspective we now have on Klemperer's 1957 performance makes it a close-run thing.'