Bruckner Symphonies Nos. 4-9 – Klemperer

There is something almost perverse about coming to Klemperer’s Bruckner expecting the granite and finding, instead, patches of quicksand. We think we know what we are getting — the monumentalism, the tempi slow enough to make a listener check his watch — and mostly we do get that. But not always, and not in the ways the legend suggests.

Klemperer’s Bruckner did not begin with Bruckner. It began with Mahler, whose protégé and assistant he had been, and whose Second Symphony he had led from memory in 1905 at the age of twenty. Bruckner came later, but it stuck. By the mid-1920s, when he gave the Adagio of the Eighth in Berlin — recorded as early as 1924 for Polydor — Klemperer had already staked a claim on this repertoire that would irritate Furtwängler for the rest of both their careers. Furtwängler’s Bruckner was numinous, mystical, full of rubato and swoon. Klemperer’s was granite and armature. Or so we are told, and so, mostly, it is.

The Fifth was his calling card through the 1930s, in Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, New York. It is fitting, then, that the Fifth here — the New Philharmonia’s 1878 Nowak text — emerges as the finest thing in this set. The introduction has real weight without turgidity, the strings dark and grainy rather than merely slow, and when the brass chorale arrives in the finale it does so with an inevitability that younger conductors, chasing structural clarity, often fail to earn. Klemperer does not build to this moment so much as reveal that it was always there, waiting.

The Fourth is a stranger case. EMI’s studio account from 1963, made with the Philharmonia, is expansive, weighty, at times becalmed — everything the received wisdom on Klemperer would lead you to expect. And yet there exists, on Vox, a 1951 account so fast — the fastest on disc, by most reckonings — that it seems to belong to a different conductor altogether. Sturm und Drang rather than cathedral. It is worth remembering, before we canonize the “Klemperer manner,” that the manner shifted, sometimes violently, across a release career oddly compressed into his final EMI decade after years of near-invisibility on disc.

The Seventh catches everyone on an off day. Legge apparently had little enthusiasm for Bruckner, and it is hard not to hear that indifference seep into the 1960 sessions. The strings attack raggedly at the first forte of the Adagio, and the same scrappiness recurs at each repetition, as though nobody in the section quite believed the moment mattered. When the meter shifts to three, Klemperer simply refuses to lean into it, and the music sits, stalled, like traffic at a broken signal. Compare this with any of the surviving live Klemperer Sevenths — even ones from the mid-sixties — and the studio recording sounds oddly enervated, its loping tempo failing, this time, to generate the cumulative pull it manages elsewhere. Timing tables can mislead: yes, at 65 minutes this is quicker than many admired versions, Celibidache’s nearly eighty minutes among them. But raw duration tells you nothing about tension, and tension is precisely what goes missing here.

The Sixth restores the balance somewhat. This undervalued symphony, all cross-rhythms and syncopated undertow, suits Klemperer’s foursquare instincts rather well, the Haas edition’s textures given room to breathe without turning soupy. And the Eighth, the symphony that made his name back in 1924, still carries authority: the finale’s cuts are a scholarly quibble beside the sheer physical presence of the playing, brass like hammered bronze in the coda.

The Ninth, left unfinished by its composer and left, in a sense, unresolved by every conductor since, gets from Klemperer a reading more valedictory than searching. He does not chase the metaphysical terror that Karajan or Wand later found in the Adagio’s final pages, offering instead a plainer, sturdier farewell. Some will miss the terror. I find I do not, entirely; there is an honesty in Klemperer’s refusal to over-interpret, even when — as in the Seventh — that refusal costs him.

Taken as a whole, this cycle is not the place to begin a Bruckner collection, and it is not evenly achieved. But the Fifth alone justifies its survival on disc, and the Sixth and Eighth are honorable, granite-solid readings from a conductor who got there first, and never entirely lost the thread.