Beethoven Symphonies 4-6 – Klemperer

There is a particular sound Klemperer gets out of an orchestra that nobody since has quite managed to reproduce, and it has nothing to do with tempo, though tempo is what everyone remembers first. It is a sound built from the ground up: cellos and basses given real weight and presence, winds allowed to speak without being smothered, brass that cuts but never blares. Listening again to these Philharmonia recordings from the late 1950s, made in the flush of the orchestra’s greatest years, I was struck less by the famous slowness (which in these particular performances is often not so slow at all) than by the sheer structural honesty of the playing. Klemperer does not interpret Beethoven so much as let him stand there, unadorned, daring you to look away.

Take the Fourth. This is the one modern listeners tend to undervalue, sandwiched as it is between the Eroica and the Fifth, lacking a nickname, lacking the drama of C minor. Klemperer treats it as no lesser work. The slow introduction unfolds with genuine mystery — those hesitant, chromatically sidling steps toward B-flat major sound genuinely uncertain of their destination, the way they should and rarely do. Then the Allegro vivace arrives with real spring in its step; this is not a plodding account, whatever reputation precedes it. The second movement is where Klemperer’s control of orchestral texture becomes almost unbearably radiant: strings singing long-breathed lines while the horn, in this instance the young Alan Civil (thrust into the principal’s chair after Dennis Brain’s fatal car crash only weeks before), delivers a closing phrase of aching tenderness. You’d never guess it was an artist still finding his footing in an impossible situation. The scherzo has real wit, sprung rhythms, a sense of an audience actually present and enjoying itself — which, this being a studio album assembled with sessions running parallel to the Royal Festival Hall concert cycle, tells you how well Klemperer’s players knew this music by then. And the finale is granite. No other word for it. Not brilliant in the Toscanini sense, not glittering. Hewn.

The Fifth is trickier ground, and I say this as someone who has gone back and forth on it for thirty years. Klemperer recorded this symphony three times within a decade: first with the Vienna Symphony for Vox (an interpretation I haven’t revisited in ages and recall as somewhat undernourished), then this stereo Philharmonia account, and a mono version from 1955 that many collectors, myself included at various points, have preferred for its taut, driving urgency. The stereo remake broadens the argument, particularly in the first movement, and some will hear indulgence where I hear inevitability. The famous four-note motto doesn’t snap so much as press forward with accumulating gravity, like weather moving in. The slow movement breathes. The transition into the finale — that extraordinary passage of harmonic ambiguity, timpani rumbling beneath sustained strings — is one of the great structural achievements in the whole cycle. Klemperer’s pacing of it, unhurried, almost agonizingly patient, pays off completely once C major floods in with those blazing trombones, added, notoriously, only in the finale, an orchestrational masterstroke Beethoven saved like a trump card.

The Pastoral is the disc I keep returning to, and did again this week with real pleasure. Klemperer was often accused of an inability to relax, yet here is total contentment, unforced and unsentimental: no cuckoo-clock cuteness, no picture-postcard Alpine kitsch. The “Scene by the brook” flows without ever becoming precious; woodwind birdcalls near the close are placed with exquisite naturalness rather than pointed for cheap effect. The storm has genuine ferocity, timpani cracking like actual thunder rather than percussion following a score. The “Shepherd’s Song” afterward emerges with such unaffected gratitude that I found myself, not for the first time, slightly moved.

The Grosse Fuge, offered here as makeweight, is a curious but valuable inclusion. Klemperer conducts the string-orchestra arrangement with a granite severity that suits the music’s uncompromising logic, though I’d not want it as a substitute for hearing it in its native quartet habitat.

Sonically these transfers, sourced from LP rather than the tape masters used for EMI’s later budget box, sound remarkably vivid. The antiphonal violins (Klemperer, old school to his bones, always split them left and right) come through with real spatial clarity, something too many modern seating arrangements sacrifice without a second thought.

Does this displace Bruno Walter’s autumnal, songful Beethoven, or Karajan’s sleeker 1962 traversal, or the period-instrument revelations Norrington brought to this repertoire a generation later? No. Nothing displaces anything in Beethoven, thank goodness. But no serious collection can be without Klemperer, and this disc, whatever its vintage, remains close to indispensable.