''This is a great performance'' was Trevor Harvey's unvarnished opening to his review of Klemperer's account of the Eroica in July 1956. Three months later, Andrew Porter began his review of the LP of the Seventh Symphony with the words: ''A magnificent record, on several counts. Sometimes, one has the feeling, from the first note of a performance, that all is going to be well; and one has it here''. He also relished Klemperer's account of the Fifth Symphony: a ''weighty, penetrating performance'' moving to a ''glorious close''. These were irresistible endorsements in an age when the word of a reputable critic carried the kind of commercial clout you get today only from a four-figure marketing drive. Certainly, these reviews were dutifully reprinted by EMI, which no doubt explains why some time later I arrived home having spent £1 9s. 6½d. on my first LP: a handsomely packaged ten-inch disc of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in a dark red sleeve of unusual elegance.
I mention this, since, as record collectors, we all run the risk of being ready at the drop of a hat to extol the virtues of recordings that have little merit save that of having introduced us, more or less adequately, to the wonders of a particular piece of music. Years later, when I heard Erich Kleiber's Decca recording of the Fifth Symphony, I realized that the first movement could, with advantage, be moved forward with rather more urgency than Klemperer allows. Yet the wonder of this Klemperer Fifth (the second of three recordings he made for LP) remains its steadfastness and articulacy. True, tempos are measured. But, as Claudio Arrau was fond of pointing out, ''speed is the enemy of passion''. Certainly, there is no lack of passion in any of these performances. (In 1955 the Philharmonia Orchestra itself was at the peak of its powers.) And what cogency there is sustaining and feeding the drama. Where other orchestras and conductors whip themselves into a terrible lather at the start of the finale, Klemperer and the Philharmonia sail majestically on as C minor converts to C major and the tempo itself undergoes a seamless evolution as Klemperer, sustaining metronome=84, converts one bar of the scherzo into half a bar of the finale.
The sound is also magnificent, a model of what a good Beethoven recording should be. I would like to have heard more of the basses on their drop to F sharp in the transition to the finale (something Szell was always mindful of). Otherwise it is game, set and match to Klemperer, Legge and the Balance Engineer, Douglas Larter, over many latter-day recordings.
The Fifth Symphony is prefaced by the Seventh in its original mono recording. In October 1955 EMI ran a clandestine and experimental second tape on the sessions, in stereo. This appeared on CD in April 1988 ((CD) CDM7 69183-2). Despite a high level of tape hiss (much higher than on the mono tape where it is nugatory), SJ found the sound ''remarkable'' for its day. The advantage of stereo is that it allows one to hear the interplay of the Philharmonia's antiphonally placed first and second violins. Yet the mono recording is so vivid, and the 'placing' and sonority of the two groups of fiddles is so distinct, that the mono recording has its own unignorable stereophonic dimension. As for the performance, it is wonderfully truculent, though as an admiring Andrew Porter warned: ''there might be days on which I should find the slow tempos just a little too deliberate to be convincing''. The performance is a jaunt, though, alongside Klemperer's lugubrious 1960 stereo re-make.
Interestingly, the 1955 account of the Eroica seems to come at us out of a bigger, livelier acoustic than the recordings of the Fifth or Seventh symphonies, despite an identical venue (London's Kingsway Hall) and identical recording dates. This is a great performance, steady yet purposeful, with textures that seem hewn out of granite. (Once or twice they cause a slight buzz of distortion for which EMI apologise in their booklet.) There is no exposition repeat, and the trumpets blaze out illicitly in the first movement coda, but this is still one of the great Eroicas on record. As Karajan announced to Klemperer after flying in to a concert performance around this time: ''I have come only to thank you, and say that I hope I shall live to conduct the Funeral March as well as you have done''. In the Leonore Overtures, recorded in 1954, the playing is a bit more rough-edged.'