Symphony 3 Philharmonia Otto Klemperer

Otto Klemperer's Beethoven is one of the towering achievements in the history of recordings. By today's standards, these performances are hopelessly old-fashioned: dark, heavy, and frequently very slow. But they are also the grandest, most unsentimental, most purposeful versions in the catalog.

Otto Klemperer's Mahler is invariably dry-eyed, yet urgent, a valuable corrective to the number of latter-day interpreters who would either self-indulgently wallow in the music's sentiment or, even worse, treat it as pure sonic architecture, as though it were pre-Schoenberg. If this 1967 reading of the Ninth sounds slightly detached by modern standards, if its expressive points seem slightly understated, it is nevertheless deeply engaged and masterfully controlled. Klemperer was beginning to slow down by this point in his career, and the tempos are just a hair on the slow side, especially in the two middle movements. But the old firmness of conception and rocklike steadiness are still there, even in the stormy weather of the Rondo-Burleske.

The Philharmonia Orchestra was in superb form in the autumn of 1957 when the opportunity came for it to perform all nine Beethoven symphonies, plus the five piano concertos, in a series of 10 concerts at London's Royal Festival Hall under the baton of Otto Klemperer. Credit for that certainly should go to Herbert von Karajan, who had been the orchestra's principal conductor since its founding a decade earlier, and had recently been tapped by the Berlin Philharmonic as its conductor for life.