Klaus Tennstedt (conductor)
Live Recordings Volume 3
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 “Eroica”
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Symphony No. 8 in C minor
Boston Symphony Orchestra (Beethoven), New York Philharmonic Orchestra
rec. 30 July 1977, Tanglewood (Beethoven), 14 April 1992, Avery Fisher Hall, New York (Bruckner)
Doremi DHR8245/6 [2 CDs: 135]

I have been a great fan of Klaus Tennstedt since attending one of his concerts at the RFH in 1984. He was perhaps the last of the great German romantic conductors in the tradition of Nikisch and Furtwängler. I had had great hopes of Thielemann, and he is indeed wonderful in the operas of Wagner and Strauss, but too often I have found his symphonic performances underwhelming. Perhaps he will mature with age, and certainly his Bruckner has grown in stature enormously over the last couple of decades.

Every Tennstedt concert was a special event, but his studio recordings only fitfully approached his concerts. Like Furtwängler, he was essentially a communicator and found the studio, where there was no-one to communicate with, a difficult place, so the considerable number of live recording that have appeared on various labels over the last twenty years have been a wonderful addition to his legacy. I heard him conduct the Eroica in 1991, but his performance of Bruckner 8 from the Festival Hall in 1981(issued from BBC tapes on the LPO’s own label in 2008 on LPO-0032) was unfortunately just before I was attending concerts in London regularly.

The “Eroica” from Boston does not get off the best start. The tempo is on the slow side, but it is the lack of thrust and purpose that make it seem a little sluggish. This was most unexpected, as those are the very qualities which made Tennstedt’s conducting so compelling, and which are manifest in the Mengelberg performance which I recently reviewed (review). There is some lovely lyrical playing in places, e.g. at 3.05, but the mysterious passage following it is rather flat, though a comparable passage at 7.30 is much better. By the end of the movement, though, Tennstedt has got into his stride and the passage at 13.00 is very impressive. It is not by any means a poor performance, but you only need to listen to the first 30 seconds of the live performance with the LPO from 1991, which was issued by EMI in 1994 to hear the small but crucial difference. Fortunately, the performance maintains the quality of the end of the first movement throughout the remainder. The Funeral March is superb, suffused with grief, anguish and at times great drama. By modern standards it is quite slow at 17.23, but the conductor is alive to every fluctuation of mood in the movement, and deploys a flexibility which takes us back to the style of Furtwängler and Mengelberg. I think you would be hard pressed to find finer performances of, for example, the sections at 9.50 and 10.40. The Scherzo is also, by today’s standards, quite slow, but it has plenty of trenchant vigour, with dynamic accents and crisp articulation. The finale is quite fast and full of tension and drama. The coda is extraordinarily exciting and gains a justified ovation from the Tanglewood audience.

I have not always been entirely convinced by Tennstedt’s Bruckner. He can be rather too excitable a conductor in this music for my taste, and the first movement of this performance displays this tendency at times. While not necessarily demanding the full Günter Wand style, I do prefer a degree of stoicism in this movement which was not in Tennstedt’s nature. The great climax towards the end of the movement needs to be prefaced by this stoicism to fully allow the sense of apocalyptic, existential terror, something that is superlatively achieved in Furtwängler’s 1944 Vienna performance. The second movement is much more successful; the wonderfully vivid, energetic first section is contrasted beautifully with the gorgeously lyrical playing of the trio. This middle section is taken much more slowly, with a free rubato which I find very convincing.

As with the “Eroica,” Tennstedt really comes into his own in the slow movement. This takes an exceptional 29.18 – almost five minutes longer than at the Festival Hall in 1981. I find this a truly wonderful performance. The approach is quite free and the orchestral playing exceptionally fine. Call me a sentimental old romantic, but I find the idea of a journey (something that has become an appalling cliché when every contestant on “Britain’s Got Talent” and “The X Factor” claims to be on one) is entirely appropriate for this symphony, and particularly for this movement. Exactly what this journey is will differ for each listener (for Bruckner it almost certainly concerned religious faith), but the sense of an initially despairing quest for certainty, for an answer, for a resolution seems palpable to me. At various points this seems to be about to be found, but each time the climax fails to arrive, and at the final, overwhelming example at 23 minutes into this performance, the souring of the chord which seemed to be about to be the final resolution is overwhelming. But then there is a coda, not of despair, but of acceptance that certainty is an impossibility in this life – to adapt Robert Louis Stevenson, the hopeful journey is all there is. Tennstedt has the full measure of this; the expressive freedom of the phrasing, the precise emotional delineation of every detail is profoundly moving. He achieves this without ever becoming overblown or heart-on-sleeve. I can almost hear the shade of Toscanini shrieking in my ear “What are you drivelling on about – it’s a four-movement symphony in C minor, no more and no less!” Well, dear readers, you can make your own judgments about the matter. Tennstedt begins the finale in a very forthright, triumphant way – a little too much so for me; I feel it is an acceptance of uncertainty, not a triumph over it. Much of the movement is still replete with reflective regret (e.g. the passage three minutes into the movement), which he conducts with exceptional beauty and sensitivity.

Although the two performances are 15 years apart, there is little difference in terms of sound quality. They are obviously off-air tapings (indeed, the “Eroica” contains the announcements at both ends ), and pretty good for their dates, though there is an element of congestion in more complex passages and the high frequencies, especially in the strings, have a slight fuzz on them. However, I never found the sound quality in any way inhibited my enjoyment of the performances

While I have certain reservations about aspects of these performances, there is far more of exceptional quality which makes this pair of CDs well worth exploring.

Paul Steinson

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