Beethoven Violin Concerto – Schneiderhan and Furtwängler

There is something almost perverse about listening to Wolfgang Schneiderhan’s silvery, exactingly placed tone hovering above Furtwängler’s famously undisciplined tempo rubato, and finding that it works — not despite the friction between them but because of it. The violinist stands apart, poised, a touch aloof even, while the old magician underneath stirs the orchestra into one of his characteristic long, slow-building storms. You can practically hear the podium creak.

Pristine’s reissue, scrubbed and aerated by Mark Obert-Thorn’s XR process, pulls this 1953 Berlin account out of the sonic fog that has clung to it since its first Heliodor pressings. The mono source still sounds like mono. But the string tone has body now, the timpani thwacks land with real weight, and Schneiderhan’s instrument (a Lorenzo Guadagnini, if memory serves, on loan to him through much of this period) rings out instead of swimming in murk.

Furtwängler recorded Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, op. 61, five times across his career. Three of those versions involved Schneiderhan, his favored collaborator in this repertoire, and this Berlin traversal sits between the earlier Vienna performances and the famous 1953 one with the Vienna Philharmonic that collectors prize so highly. Here the orchestra is his own Berlin Philharmonic, the band he’d led, mostly, with that gaping, traumatic interruption between 1945 and 1947, since 1922. The sound they make for him is unmistakable: dark-grained, weighty in the lower strings, horns with that peculiarly covered, veiled quality unique to postwar Berlin brass playing before the orchestra’s tone brightened under later batons.

The first movement unspools at a pace many modern listeners will find unhurried to the point of indulgence. Timings alone won’t tell the story. Furtwängler treats the long orchestral exposition less as introduction than as argument, building tension through harmonic underlining rather than rhythmic drive. When Schneiderhan enters, arcing up through that famous octave leap, the effect isn’t rupture but continuation. He seems to emerge out of the orchestral texture rather than against it. His cadenza, the Kreisler, is dispatched with total security and a certain reserve. This isn’t a violinist interested in pyrotechnic display. Elegance, rather. Aristocratic reticence.

The slow movement is where Furtwängler’s conducting earns its reputation. Those string chords breathe. He lets silence do real work between phrases, something few conductors dare anymore. Here it reads as devotion.

Then the Große Fuge, op. 133, arranged for string orchestra: Beethoven’s most forbidding utterance, originally conceived as the finale to the String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major before his publisher, horrified, persuaded him to detach it. Hearing it blown up to full string-orchestra scale under Furtwängler is a genuinely unsettling experience, in the best sense. The fugal lines, impossibly dense even for four solo instruments, become something almost orchestral-apocalyptic here: thick, grinding, at times barely holding together, which is rather the point. Beethoven in his late style doesn’t care if you’re comfortable.

Is this version a necessary library staple over, say, the postwar Busch-led accounts, or Toscanini’s visceral NBC performances of the concerto, or more recent period-informed recordings by Isabelle Faust and Il Giardino Armonico? No, not necessary in that sense. But necessary isn’t always the right question. This is a document of a particular sensibility, Furtwängler’s unruly Romantic conception of Beethoven refracted through a violinist of classical poise, captured just as the maestro was clawing his way back to the podium he’d been forced to abandon.

Obert-Thorn’s restoration serves this history honestly. He hasn’t tried to make 1953 Berlin sound like 2024 digital, just more itself. For devotees of Furtwängler, or of Schneiderhan’s quietly aristocratic artistry, this disc belongs on the shelf. For anyone wanting their first Beethoven concerto release, look elsewhere.