Furtwangler 9

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 trans¬mitted 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recreate the feeling of actually sitting in front of an old radio in 1951, listening to this important concert – a true historical document.

These recordings were made in wartorn Berlin by one of the past century's greatest conductors, Wilhelm Furtwangler, who was one of very few international caliber artists who remained in Germany during WWII. Combine Furtwangler's passionate conducting with the sad context of war and you've got an utmost interesting and pertinent package.

The re-opening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 represented a major step forward in the international rehabilitation of Germany following the end of the Second World War. As the leading conductor of his generation, Wilhelm Furtwängler was the obvious choice to conduct the opening performance of the Festival, traditionally devoted to a single work, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the ‘Choral’.This work had a deep spiritual significance for Furtwängler: he only agreed to conduct it on special occasions, and never made a studio recording of it. First released in 1955, after his death, the recording of this 1951 performance represents one of the most profound realisations of Beethoven’s masterpiece ever to have been committed to disc.