There are only two possibilities for the date of the recording of Bruckner's Adagio from Symphony No. 7 in Berlin in April 1942:
– Henning Smidth, in his well-known discography (‘Olsen’ 1970), indicates Tuesday, 7 April.
– René Trémine gave the date of Wednesday, 1 April.
– Wilhelm Furtwängler site by shin-p indicates 7 April, but mentions: « Teldec states that this recording was made on 1 April. »
So what? If we stick to the data we can extract from the Berliners' activity at that time:
– 1 April was a day off between rehearsals (31 March) and the concert (2 April) of the St John Passion conducted by Georg Schumann, with the BPO and its Sing-Akademie choir.
– 7 April. An unpublished document does mention something, but it is difficult to decipher, and in any case it is certainly not ‘Aufnahme’ [recording], as appears to be the case for other confirmed dates. Actually, we can read ‘Doppelprobe - Krauss f. Reise’ [two rehearsals - Krauss for the tour]: Clemens Krauss spent several days rehearsing — from 7 to 10 April — preparing for the BPO concert in Vienna on the 11th, and above all for the long tour from 22 April to 23 May in Spain, Portugal and France.
Conclusion: we can go with April 1st. That is the date we will indicate on the upcoming SWF D21. After conducting similar research, it appears that the Overture to Alceste was engraved on 28 October 1942 and not on the 29th, as is usually stated.
