Sawallisch Edition: Mozart, Schubert, Haydn and Orff

Grief has a way of accelerating a record label’s schedule, and Profil, sensibly, did not wait long after Sawallisch’s death at Grassau to remind us what we lost. Eight discs, seven works, four decades. A survey, not a monument, though it plays like both.

Start with the Mozart, because that’s where any honest accounting of Sawallisch has to start. His Haffner is trim, unfussy, moving at a tempo that never calls attention to itself, which was always the man’s way. No exaggerated accents, no interpretive thumbprint pressed into the score for its own sake. Compare this with Karajan’s glossier Berlin account, or Bruno Walter’s old Columbia recording with its Old World warmth, and you hear immediately what Sawallisch withheld: personality as a commodity. He trusted the material. The Jupiter that follows has more heft, the finale’s five-voice contrapuntal peroration built with a bricklayer’s patience rather than a showman’s flourish. It works, mostly, though I confess a slight impatience with the andante cantabile, which could have breathed a bit more.

The Trout Quintet is the disc I keep returning to. Sawallisch at the keyboard, not on the podium, playing chamber music with what sounds like real joy, the variations movement bubbling along with a lightness of touch you don’t always get from pianists who spend their careers in front of an orchestra. There’s a wonderful moment, maybe ninety seconds into the fourth variation, where cello and bass trade the theme back and forth and Sawallisch just… recedes, lets them have it. Generous playing. The Notturno is a lesser piece, frankly, and no performance fully disguises that fact, though the horn calls near the opening are gorgeously blended here.

Then the big oratorios, and this is where the set earns its keep. The Seasons, Haydn’s late, garrulous ode to nature and labor and the turning year, gets a rendition of unusual warmth from the Bavarian Radio forces, the choral “Komm, holder Lenz” arriving with real spring sunlight in it. Sawallisch never recorded much Haydn commercially; this is a corrective, and a welcome one. Elijah is even better. Mendelssohn’s oratorio can sag under its own Victorian earnestness if the conductor doesn’t keep things moving. Sawallisch does, propulsively, without ever rushing the big choral tableaux. The storm music has genuine menace. I don’t know that it displaces my old affection for Sargent’s mono disc with its stiff-upper-lip grandeur, or the more recent period-conscious accounts, but it belongs in the conversation.

And then Antigonae. Orff, not Carmina Burana Orff but the austere, granite-hewn Orff of the Sophocles setting, all percussion and declamation and ritual weight. Two and a half hours of it. This is genuinely rare repertoire on disc, and Sawallisch, who championed Orff when it wasn’t fashionable to do so, gives it a performance of real conviction. The piano and battery of pitched percussion clang and toll like something out of a nightmare liturgy. Not an easy listen. Not meant to be.

Sound quality across the set is variable, as you’d expect from radio archive material spanning the 1960s through the 1990s, the earlier Mozart a little boxy, the Orff caught with startling immediacy. Profil hasn’t remastered with any particular finesse; this is repertoire rescued, not polished.

Is it an essential Sawallisch document? Not quite. His Strauss and his Bruckner, recorded elsewhere, tell you more about what made him one of the last great Kapellmeister in the old German sense, a player who served the score rather than his own reputation. But as a memorial, gathered quickly and a little roughly, it shows the range: symphonist, chamber pianist, oratorio director, advocate for a difficult modern masterpiece nobody else was much bothering to record. That’s not nothing. That’s a career.