Beethoven Violin Concerto – Schneiderhan and Furtwängler

There’s something faintly archaeological about digging up a Furtwängler broadcast that history has quietly filed under “also-ran.” The Titania-Palast in May 1953 was no backwater — it was where Berliners went after the war to hear music amid the rubble and the makeshift seating, the hall itself a jerry-rigged cinema pressed into service because so much else lay in ruins. Furtwängler had less than a year to live. You can hear it, if you listen for that sort of thing, though I’ve always been suspicious of critics who claim to detect mortality in a man’s tempo choices.

Wolfgang Schneiderhan was thirty-seven then, already the Vienna Philharmonic’s concertmaster in his youth, already a violinist of formidable technical composure — maybe too composed, if I’m honest. His sound was famously silvery, agile, unfailingly elegant. Placed beside Furtwängler’s massive, unhurried architecture, that elegance sometimes reads as slightness. The concerto opens with those four soft timpani strokes — Furtwängler draws them out with real gravity, the Berlin drums resonating into a hush that feels almost ecclesiastical — and then the winds enter, and you wait for the soloist to match that scale. He doesn’t, quite.

I don’t say this lightly, because Schneiderhan’s later stereo account with Jochum for DG remains, for me, a genuinely satisfying document — better balanced, better recorded, the give-and-take between violinist and conductor far more naturally negotiated. There he even ventured into Beethoven’s own cadenzas, the strange, arresting ones drawn from the composer’s own timpani-inflected transcription for piano — a curious choice, almost willfully anti-virtuosic, and it suited him. Here, with Furtwängler, he retreats to Joachim’s cadenzas, the safe romantic choice, well-turned but conventional. Menuhin, in his various encounters with this same director, chose Kreisler’s — equally safe, differently flavored.

The larghetto is where this interpretation should transcend itself, and doesn’t, quite. Furtwängler’s tempo is spacious, the orchestral texture glowing in that veiled, autumnal way only the postwar Berlin strings ever quite managed — but Schneiderhan’s tone, especially as he climbs into the instrument’s upper reaches, thins out rather than blooms. Intonation wavers here and there; nothing catastrophic, the sort of thing live performance forgives and studio disc doesn’t. What’s missing is rapture. Erich Röhn, in the wartime broadcast with this same conductor, found more of it, oddly enough, with less refined mastery. Menuhin found it too, in his best moments with Furtwängler, through sheer temperamental abandon.

Then the transition into the finale — ponderous, almost stuck, as though Furtwängler forgot momentarily where he was going. And then the rondo itself arrives at quite a clip, considerably more urgent than Jochum ever allowed, dramatic in a way that flirts with recklessness. Ensemble grows ragged in places. You sense Schneiderhan scrambling slightly to keep pace with a conception that is transparently the conductor’s rather than his own — which tells you something about where the real interpretive authority in this collaboration actually resided.

The Grosse Fuge, offered here in its full orchestral-string severity, is another matter entirely, and worth the price of admission on its own. Furtwängler had no fear of Beethoven’s most contrapuntally violent utterance — quite the opposite. He leans into its jagged rhythmic dislocations, its harmonic wrenches, with a conviction that never once tips into brutality for its own sake. This is playing of tremendous corporate discipline from the Berlin strings, sinewy and dark, phrased with a rhetorical intensity the composer surely intended and that too many performances sand down into mere difficulty. It’s arguably finer, more purposeful music-making than anything in the concerto that precedes it.

Mark Obert-Thorn’s restoration, sourced from a Heliodor pressing rather than the original tapes, clarifies without erasing the period fingerprint: the faint boxiness of a 1953 broadcast pickup, occasional pre-echo, a top end that never quite opens up the way modern engineering would allow. It’s honest work, not magic.

Would I recommend this over the Jochum? No. That remains the more completely satisfying Schneiderhan document — better integrated, better played, better recorded. Would I recommend it over Furtwängler’s other concerto collaborations, the Menuhin accounts, the wartime Röhn? Also no, probably. But for the Grosse Fuge alone, and for the sheer historical curiosity of hearing these two temperamentally mismatched musicians in the same room together, exactly once on disc, this is worth a place on the shelf, if not at its center.