Bruckner Symphonies Nos. 4-9 – Klemperer

There is a moment in the Adagio of the Symphony No. 9, somewhere past the eleven-minute mark, where the Wagner tubas enter like a memory returning against one’s will. Klemperer simply lets it happen. No underlining. No coaxing. He trusts Bruckner to be Bruckner, which sounds like faint praise until you consider how many conductors cannot resist improving on that trust.

EMI has gathered six symphonies recorded across the back half of the 1960s into the tail end of a career that stretched back to Mahler’s own podium. Klemperer assisted Mahler; he absorbed Bruckner from an entirely different, older Central European inheritance, one that predates the interpretive fussiness later generations brought to these scores. He is reported to have said, more than once, that he considered Bruckner the greater composer but performed Mahler more, for reasons having nothing to do with musical judgment and everything to do with tribe and gratitude.

The temptation with Klemperer is always to reach for the word “slow” and stop thinking. Lazy criticism, that, and demonstrably wrong. Compare his two recordings of Mahler’s Resurrection: both fit on a single disc, while Rattle’s version with the CBSO needs two. Klemperer’s tempi in Bruckner are broad where breadth serves the architecture and no broader. What distinguishes him is not pace but the refusal to shape a phrase merely because a phrase invites shaping. Where Furtwängler surges and recedes like weather, where Jochum breathes and rubatos with almost vocal freedom, where Günter Wand achieves his songful pliancy through infinitely graded dynamics, Klemperer holds the line. Blocks of sound, granite against granite. Some listeners find this cold. I find it clarifying: you hear the bones of the structure in a way Bruckner’s more overtly reverent interpreters sometimes obscure with incense.

The Fifth here, at nearly eighty minutes, might seem an outlier of expansiveness, yet it never drags. The counterpoint of the finale’s great fugal peroration emerges with a lucidity few recordings, before or since, have matched. Klemperer’s players give him massive, unhurried brass choirs, string tone that’s grainy rather than plush (this is the Philharmonia sound of the era, never quite Viennese, never trying to be), and a sense of harmonic patience that suits Bruckner’s cathedral-building better than showier virtuosity would.

The Sixth, comparatively neglected by conductors even now, gets one of its most persuasive advocacies on disc. The Haas edition, muscular, unsentimental, the Adagio taken with a gravity that never curdles into heaviness. I’ve always thought the Sixth Bruckner’s most misunderstood symphony, lacking the obvious profundities of the Eighth and Ninth, and Klemperer’s refusal to sentimentalize it does the piece a genuine favor.

Not everything convinces equally. The Fourth, recorded in Kingsway Hall three years before his live Munich account with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, sounds slightly buttoned-up next to that later rendition’s spontaneity, the horn calls in the first movement more correct than magical, though EMI’s engineering here is the more secure of the two by some margin, warmer in the bass, more space around the winds. The Eighth, using the Nowak text with Klemperer’s own small adjustments, is monumental almost to a fault: eighty-four minutes of unbroken gravitas that occasionally had me wishing for a touch more air, a little daylight between the granite blocks.

The Ninth closes the set as it should: spare, valedictory, the horn writing in the Scherzo’s trio like something glimpsed through fog. Bruckner died leaving it unfinished, reportedly dedicating it “to the beloved God.” Klemperer, no believer himself so far as anyone could tell, conducts it like a man who understood exactly what was at stake without needing to genuflect over it.

Sound throughout, dating from 1963 to 1970, holds up remarkably well. Nothing here demands apology on technical grounds, whatever allowances one might once have made for tape hiss or close-miked brass. Walter Legge’s fingerprints (and later Suvi Raj Grubb’s) are audible in the balance: brass never covering strings, inner voices never buried.

Is this the Bruckner cycle to own above all others? No single cycle ever is. Jochum’s Dresden traversal has more warmth, Wand’s late Berlin recordings more luminous transparency, Karajan’s last version with the Vienna Philharmonic more sheer sonic splendor. But for those who want Bruckner stripped of easy consolation, presented with an almost Old Testament severity and total structural honesty, Klemperer remains indispensable. Six discs, no waste. Buy it.