The new digital album can be downloaded from the shop:
Furtwängler and the Stockholm Philharmonic 1942-1943
Dedicated to the memory of our friend Sami Habra, it brings together two original recordings made by the Swedish Radio, which provided us with digitised sources:
– 25 November 1942: Strauss' Don Juan, Prelude and Isolde's Death from Wagner's Tristan;
– 8 December 1943: Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
Furtwängler conducted the orchestra of the Stockholm Concert Society, the future Philharmonic.
These two programmes have had varying success on disc. The background noise, which was quite present for the 1942 concert, had led previous publishers to filter the sources drastically. Christophe Hénault and we decided to limit the processing, enough to ensure a comfortable listening experience, but not too much so that the musical information is not undermined. Fortunately, Beethoven's 9th Symphony is of much better sound quality. We included the long silences between I and II and between II and III, as well as the applause.
The booklet, written by Nils-Göran Olve and Göran Södervall, provides a wealth of valuable information about Furtwängler's activities in Sweden during the war years.
Any Furtwängler enthusiast should own this singular testimony to the conductor's art, which is very different from other, often overexcited, performances from the same period.
This product is available at a price of €13.