Bruckner, Anton/Strauss, Richard: Otto Klemperer conducts (Medici Masters Audio CD)

Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester / Otto Klemperer

Recording: Saal 1, Funkhaus, WDR Cologne 5 April 1954 (Bruckner)
27 February 1956 (Strauss)



Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) was born in Breslau and studied in Berlin making his conducting debut in 1906. He met Mahler and through him obtained an appointment at the German Opera in Prague in 1907. Through Mahler’s help, he had a succession of positions, notably in Cologne (1917-24) coupled with frequent guest conducting. In 1927 he was director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin (1927-1931). With the rise of the Nazis, he left Berlin, and fled to Austria, then Switzerland followed by Los Angeles (1933-1939) where he conducted all the main US orchestras. After the war he returned to Europe, coming to London in 1947. He settled in Zürich and in the mid-1950s gave a large number of superb concerts with the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, his old orchestra, a period when Klemperer emerged as one of the truly great conductors of his generation along side Erich Kleiber, Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler. It was at this time Walter Legge appointed him to be principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1959, where he remained until 1971.

To quote John L.Holmes in Conductor’s on Record, “As an interpreter of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner, his performances had a rock-like inevitability that placed him in the same class as Toscanini” and “when he conducted in Vienna in the 1930s, the members of the VPO believed that he, not Furtwängler or Walter, was the greatest and most impressive conductor of Bruckner’s symphonies.”

Bruckner’s Symphony No.4 is here given a great live performance captured in excellent sound in 1954. Klemperer recorded it twice commercially for Vox (1951) and EMI (1963) but this performance offers a powerful alternative to Klemperer’s older commercial recording of the work in its choice of tempi and dynamics, leading to some overwhelming climaxes.

Klemperer knew Richard Strauss and so his 1956 live performance of Don Juan is totally idiomatic. He made two commercial recordings in 1929 (Parlophone) and 1960 (EMI) but the Cologne version is more dramatic and fast paced. Again an excellent recording from WDR.

Both titles have been transferred from the ORIGINAL MASTER TAPES.