Klemperer

With no slight intended to the other great recordings of the Missa Solemnis in the world, there's this one and then there are all the rest. Truly. Even with the 1940 Toscanini and the 1974 Böhm, this 1965 recording of Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus embodies everything that's great about the Missa Solemnis. And everything that's great about late Beethoven is in the Missa Solemnis: the energy, the nobility, the strength, the vision, and – above all – the overwhelming sense that the numinous is imminent. Beethoven thought it was his best work and who could not agree? That's what's in Klemperer's performance.

It was as a supreme interpreter of the German Classical masterpieces, from Haydn to Richard Strauss, that concert audiences chiefly admired Otto Klemperer in the years between about 1951 and his retirement in 1972, the period to which most of his records belong. In Beethoven, particularly, he offered a granite-like orchestral sonority, and an objectivity in his balance of form and content, that contrasted refreshingly with the styles of such idolized conductors as Furtwangler, Bruno Walter, and even Toscanini. Under Klemperer the greatest Beethoven sounded more truthful and honest, and even more grand and inspiring.

This extraordinary set of live Klemperer performances should be in the collection of everyone who cares about Klemperer and his marvelous style of music making. Massive and often slow but always vital and alive, they will not appeal to everyone.

Klemperer's Mozart recordings have been available almost without a break since their original LP releases. It's not hard to see why, since he conducted Mozart with authority, never lapsing into either heavy-handed Romanticism or its opposite, treating the music like a fragile piece of porcelain. Klemperer's sturdy rhythms make even some of his slow dance-based movements seem faster than they actually are. Period performance buffs will still feel this big-band Mozart is too heavy but the more open-minded will appreciate the way Klemperer brings the winds forward to create appropriate balances with the strings.

This is an indispensable document, capturing Otto Klemperer in an incandescent moment from Feb. 1956 in Cologne. The program notes say that this live reading of the German Requiem "easily surpasses" the conductor's EMI recording from just a few years later – and that is an understatement. It's a wholly different interpretation, full of urgency and spiritual passion of the kind all but unmatched on disc. Furtwangler made two versions in execrable sound that could be said to match this one, and there's Karajan's celebrated account from the ruins of postwar Vienna, best heard in remastering on Naxos Historical.