BRAHMS by Furtwaengler = Haydn Variations, Op. 56; Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68 – Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Wilhelm Furtwaengler
Tahra FURT 2005, 70:20 [www.tahra.com] ****:
Myriam Scherchen’s Tahra label has remastered two vintage Brahms performances under Wilhelm Furtwangler (1886-1954), each taken from a public concert under the great Romantic maestro. The Haydn Variations derive from the National Opera Theater of Paris (4 May 1954), a slow, meticulous realization that savors the composer’s unusually happy lyricism. The palpable ritard or marcato that permeates the sequence verges on the ponderous, but for those who relish the divertimento-like ensemble, the strong ties this work has to the composer’s D Major Serenade, Op. 11, the deliberations will assume a tonic grandeur. The Andante Variation (No. 5), particularly, achieves an encompassing breadth of vision quite unlike most conductors’ more fleeting visions. A breezy Variation 6 leads to a Teutonic rendition of the Vivace episode, heavy of foot and ripe with the tympani. The Variation 7, Grazioso–a purring siciliano–receives loving treatment and makes a decided contrast to the martial affects that surround it on both sides. A sense of improvisation grumbles through the Poco Presto to take us to the Finale, a ceremonial Andante, warm in the lower strings and chirping in the woodwinds: an eminently vocal and heraldic invocation, it lacks only the Gaudeamus igitur of the Academic Festival Overture to make its stately valedictory complete.
The Brahms C Minor Symphony (10 February 1952) remained a specialty with Furtwaengler, who began his long association with the score 4 January 1913. Assuming that the music simply extended conceits directly from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Furtwaengler imposes a tremendous pressure on the opening Un poco sostenuto, a slow, tortured road to the establishment of the solid drumbeat that urges the Allegro into its singular, fateful momentum. The transitions themselves remain wonders of the conductor’s art, in which even the awkward metric shift from Brahms receives a breathed, artful pulsation. The preparation for the beat becomes as palpable as the driven sound itself. The ambiance of the Titania Palast Berlin captures a warm though fevered series of struggles and storms of the spirit, a titanic exertion of the will impose anguish into symbolic form. The grinding out of the low strings under the “fate” motif finally achieves something a fierce liberation, martial though it is. With the final, tutti statement of the main theme the Manichean confrontation seems to have favored the forces of light – the French horn, oboe, and first violins offering consolations for a battle-weary combatant in Arnold’s clash with ignorant armies.
The Andante manifests as much tragic girth as the first movement, a bittersweet song whose low strings groan with nostalgic melancholy. The oboe theme moves to the strings in mournful valediction, a febrile intensity we know belongs to those kindred spirits, like Dimitri Mitropoulos and Erich Kleiber. A gorgeous homogeneity of sound permeates the fabric as the clouds disperse somewhat, and the pizzicati take us to a Brahmsian hospice in which the solo violin–likely Erich Roehn–can dispense its healing magic in tandem with the French horn. What an autumnal Intermezzo–Un poco allegretto e grazioso–follows, its five-bar phrases held in dynamic reserve until the quicksilver runs in the woodwinds turn the music into a nervous patter that may well dread the monumental emotions awaiting us in the last movement. Strings and horns rise up to achieve an angry, colossal onrush of sound, not so far from Debussy’s pounding seas. The trumpets warn us briefly, but the mood passes back to the cantering gait of the uneasy intermezzo’s opening, though innocence has been permanently lost in those wicked pizzicati and tormented low strings.
Even the audience seems to have held its collective breath for the upheavals of the finale. The dramatic Adagio, piu andante in grim and gloomy colors, yields by way pizzicati tiptoe, to the haunted realm of the Black Forest, a savage place where fountains and caves compete for expressive dominance. The brass slow down to a funereal crawl over a rolling tympani, then all swells to a sustained moment of cosmic expectation. To play the all-too-familiar theme without sentimentality and still achieve a nobility of line–that proclaims Furtwaengler’s special gift in Brahms. Thence, the sheer, formal might of the sonata-form process carries the players forward, the textures in constant, agitated locomotion, sweeping us to an inevitable, contrapuntal peroration, a world-historical moment. Can a collective, German national identity be rebuilt? Is faith still possible? Furtwaengler’s Brahms seems to pose these titanic questions out of the spiritual ashes of a wounded personality, questions as philosophical as they are musical.
–Gary Lemco
