Seventy years ago, on the 29th July 1951, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at a concert marking the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival after seven years of silence following the Second World War. It was a momentous occasion, and the concert was broadcast by Bavarian Radio and transmitted across the world, for instance by Swedish Radio. Using the analogue mono tape as digitized by Swedish Radio, the present disc reproduces the broadcast as it would have been heard by listeners in Sweden: we have chosen to not change anything, not to ‘brush up’ the sound, not to clean and shorten the pauses or omit audience noises within the music, but to keep the original as it was. In this way we hope to recreate the feeling of actually sitting in front of an old radio in 1951, listening to this concert – a true historical document.

REVIEW:

Nothing else in the realms of recorded music is quite like it and I would urge you to share the experience...I’m not claiming that this performance will suit every mood or even every taste, but if and when it does hit target it will leave you changed for ever.

-- Gramophone (Editor's Choice, March 2022)

Beethoven was Wilhelm Furtwängler's guiding musical force. In his interpretations of the symphonies, the conductor generates irresistible dramatic momentum - and a constant sense of imaginative freshness - through the interrelationship of form, harmony, texture, rhythm and tempo. These recordings, all made in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the Musikverein in Vienna and at concerts in London, Bayreuth and Stockholm, have been remastered in 192kHz/24-bit at Art & Son Studio (in 2021 for the 7 recordings included in The Complete Wilhelm Furtwängler on Records and newly for this edition for the 3 other ones), bringing their sound more alive than ever before and for the first time here on a physical medium.

As a bonus the 5th Symphony live performance from 1950 in Copenhagen restored in HD from an excellent condition analogue source has been added.

This box set comprises all the operas and sacred works Otto Klemperer conducted for EMI Columbia and HMV. Oratorios by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Handel are accompanied by operas of Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner. There are also rehearsals and listening playback sessions for the recording of Mozart's Don Giovanni and a Bonus CD with recollections from artists who sang in Klemperer's opera performances. Otto Klemperer deeply loved both the theatricality of opera and the spirituality of oratorios, and these performances from his great Indian Summer represent the fruits of his lifetime of thought and experience in this repertoire.