Brahms Symphonies and Piano Concerto – Fiedler

Some ghosts arrive politely. Max Fiedler’s does not.

You put on this restoration expecting a museum piece, a document, something to be studied rather than felt. Then the Academic Festival Overture comes crashing in with such unbuttoned high spirits, such swaggering brass and thumping timpani, that you remember these were living, breathing music-makers, not waxworks. Fiedler knew Brahms. Sat in rooms with him. Watched him scowl into his beard, presumably, the way Brahms did with almost everybody. That fact gives this disc, drawn from his early-1930s Berlin sessions, a claim on our attention that musicianship alone could never earn. Weingartner has the same claim. Nobody else living or dead who made records does.

But knowing Brahms and knowing how to conduct him are not the same thing. Fiedler’s version of Brahmsian authority runs through a different filter than you might expect: Hans von Bülow’s, not Brahms’s own working methods as later codified, rightly or not, through Fritz Steinbach and the Meiningen tradition that so captivated Toscanini and Boult. Steinbach died in 1916, before electrical recording existed to preserve him, and that is one of the great losses in the whole history of Brahms performance. What we have instead, in Fiedler, is a wilder, more improvisatory temperament, one that treats bar-lines as suggestions.

The Second Symphony, taped in 1931 with the Berlin Philharmonic, is glorious and maddening in roughly equal measure. There’s a rich, dark-grained string tone here, and climaxes that open up with real breadth, unforced but massive. Nobility, yes; that overused word actually fits. But the luftpausen. Good heavens, the luftpausen. Fiedler stops for breath in places no other conductor thinks to breathe, and while each pause has its own private logic, the cumulative effect is of a horse-drawn carriage negotiating potholes. Momentum bleeds away, then has to be rebuilt from nothing. Compare Weingartner’s lean, forward-driving 1940 account with the London Philharmonic, recorded less than a decade later, and you would scarcely believe these two men breathed the same rehearsal-room air as Brahms. Weingartner trusts the line. Fiedler keeps interrupting it, like a raconteur who can’t resist a digression.

The Fourth Symphony fares worse, structurally, though it’s arguably more interesting as a psychological document. This is the 1930 recording, made not with the Philharmonic but with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, a perfectly decent band, but not, technically, in the Philharmonic’s league, and it shows in some scrappy horn attacks and a general sense of players hanging on for dear life. The opening is almost willfully anti-heroic: Fiedler seems to apply the brakes before the music has even gotten moving, and a stable tempo never quite arrives. Rubato piles on rubato. It’s unsettling in the way a dream is unsettling. You’re not sure the floor will hold.

I went back afterward to Toscanini’s live BBC broadcast of the same symphony, made only a few years on. The slow movement clocks in barely thirty seconds apart from Fiedler’s — the numbers tell you nothing — but Toscanini’s rhythmic pointing, his refusal to let inner voices go soft-focus, makes Fiedler sound positively soporific by comparison. Ponderous is the word, and I don’t use it lightly. Whether that’s Fiedler’s temperament or the State Opera band’s unfamiliarity with his eccentricities of gesture, I can’t say for certain. Probably both.

Elly Ney joins for the Second Piano Concerto, and here the disc’s temperature rises considerably. She was a formidable, old-school virtuoso with a mastery built for granite rather than porcelain, and her Brahms has weight without turning to sludge, though her rhythmic freedom occasionally collides with Fiedler’s own — two strong-willed musicians agreeing to disagree in real time. It’s a performance of enormous character. Whether it’s a “great” one in any absolute sense is a separate question. I’m honestly not sure the word applies to playing this idiosyncratic, this obviously of its moment.

Sound, inevitably, is the sound of its era: boxy, close, with the strings occasionally thinning to a wiry edge and brass that can blare rather than ring. Anyone coming to Brahms for the first time should look elsewhere, to Furtwängler’s postwar Berlin accounts, or Klemperer’s granite-solid EMI cycle, both of which achieve an architectural coherence Fiedler never quite manages. But as a link to a vanished performing tradition, filtered through Bülow rather than Steinbach, flawed and fascinating in roughly equal measure, this disc is indispensable. Not for pleasure exactly. For understanding.