Hans Knappertsbusch was not, by any reasonable standard, a rehearsal conductor. He famously told orchestras what he wanted, trusted them to deliver it, and then — sometimes — they did. The Vienna Philharmonic, who adored him, could rise on those terms to heights that more methodically prepared performances rarely touched. But they could also fall, and this 1962 concert, preserved on the IDIS label in sound that does nobody any favors, catches them on a night when the bargain went badly wrong.
Start with the Schumann. The Symphony No. 4 in d minor has a peculiar history — composed in 1841, set aside, fundamentally revised a decade later — and that layered genesis shows in the score itself, which is denser in texture than Schumann’s earlier symphonies, more reliant on the orchestra playing together rather than in conversation. Knappertsbusch’s tempi are, oddly, not slow; he moves the music along. Yet the first movement sounds ponderous anyway, weighed down by strings that are approximate in intonation, screechy where they should glow, and an ensemble that hasn’t quite found its footing. Lightness — the thing the opening Lebhaft most needs — is the first casualty. What you’re left with is the skeleton of the piece, the connective tissue exposed, and Schumann’s detractors across the decades, those who accused him of being unable to orchestrate, find their case inadvertently strengthened here.
That’s not entirely fair to the man on the podium. Knappertsbusch at his best — the Parsifal recordings, the Bruckner symphonies with this same orchestra in the late 1950s — had a gravitational authority that was unlike anyone else’s. He didn’t so much conduct as preside, and the VPO responded to his slightest gesture with something close to devotion. None of that electricity is present in the Schumann. He sounds, frankly, as though he’s somewhere else.
Tod und Verklärung fares a little better, though not without its own embarrassments. Strauss wrote the tone poem at twenty-five — the audacity of it — depicting a dying artist’s final hallucination of transfiguration, and the score demands absolute coordination between the timpani and strings on those massive downbeats. Here, they’re simply not together. Around the sixteen-minute mark the ensemble nearly comes apart entirely. Nearly. The conclusion, the great C major apotheosis, does arrive with something like conviction — but the IDIS engineers have clipped the final chord before it stops resonating, a carelessness that feels almost symbolic of the whole enterprise.
The recorded sound itself is part of the problem, though sorting out how much is the 1962 source tape and how much is the Milanesi team’s remastering is difficult. Hard, wiry, flat — little depth, next to no warmth in the lower strings. The opening of the Schumann begins abruptly, without the ambient silence that any decent transfer preserves; someone hit record a moment too late. These are not small things when you’re trying to evaluate a performance.
The audience applauds warmly at the end. Audiences at live concerts frequently do, even when the evidence on tape suggests they should know better.
There are VPO/Knappertsbusch recordings from these same years — the Bruckner Symphony No. 8 especially — that show what this partnership was genuinely capable of. This isn’t one of those occasions. Collectors who want the Schumann symphony from this era should be looking at Furtwängler’s 1953 Berlin Philharmonic disc, which has all the dark Romantic intensity this interpretation gropes for and never quite finds. For the Strauss, Kempe or the early Karajan will serve far better. This release, for all its historical curiosity, is finally a document of a great maestro’s off night — and not much more than that.
