Available on 13 June. Price: €15
Some Furtwängler concerts are less appreciated than others, and suffer from unfavourable prejudices.
Such is the case with the concerts of Furtwängler's final season. A year ago we published a treasure of a performance: Bruckner's 8th Symphony from May 1954 in Vienna, grandiose, overwhelming and of a rare perfection of execution. Enough to silence these prejudices. We are doing it again with the very last concert he performed with the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg on 30 August 1954.
On the programme: Beethoven's 8th and 7th symphonies, and between them — the Great Fugue op. 133, the version for string orchestra.
Some insist on dismissing Furtwängler's final Beethoven performances and swear by the ‘war recordings’. As if Beethoven had written at the top of his scores: ‘My works should only be performed under the stress of a murderous conflict’. A former president of the SWF even stated that only the Grand Fugue deserved to be exhumed from this concert, the two symphonies being far inferior to the other known performances. Furtwängler would thus have been — no doubt suffering from the fatigue of age — below his best, only to wake up for 20 minutes of music in the middle of the programme! This is obviously absurd.
Comfortable readings? Of course, the symphonies exhibit an uncommon vision, but without compromising a constant commitment. And that the writing of the Grande Fugue led him to violence of expression only confirms an obvious fact that many music lovers seem to forget: Furtwängler knew how to read a score...
This is a tape of exceptional clarity, dynamics and balance of the sound spectrum, which Christophe Hénault has restored to its full potential. The main part of the work consisted in bringing the music back into tune (we set it to A = 444 Hz for Vienna), eliminating a few noises and imperfections, and above all revising the levels, which were very disparate between movements and works.
Here's an extract (mp3): the last reprise in the 3rd movement of the 8th Symphony.