Klemperer Brahms 1

Otto Klemperer's Brahms needs no introduction. It remains a classic reference edition, one of the very few complete cycles with absolutely no weak links. It's customary to call these performances "granitic", an adjective that certainly applies to the First Symphony but doesn't begin to describe the swift and thrilling finale of the Fourth, the grand but impulsive Third (with its first-movement repeat in place), or the warmly lyrical Second. In general Klemperer's unsentimental but always gripping approach to this music practically defines the word "idiomatic".

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.

By the time he made these celebrated recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra in the early 1960s, Otto Klemperer was a grand old man of conducting. Christa Ludwig, by contrast, was in the glowing early prime of her extraordinary career, which encompassed repertoire for both mezzo-soprano and soprano. “Klemperer was marvellous for the singing,” she later said, “because he did nothing against the composer.” This collection shows the fruits of their collaboration in Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms and Mahler.