4 Orchestral Suites BWV1066-9 / etc

"Some years ago, I received a call from the then producer of BBC Radio 3's Record Review, Arthur Johnson, asking me if I would do Bach's Four Orchestral Suites in 'Building a Library'. 'You're winding me up,' I said, 'I'm not a Bach specialist. I shall probably choose Klemperer, and cause mayhem.' 'That's rather what I'm hoping,' was this far from humourless Scotsman's amused reply. In the event, I caused modified mayhem, in scholarly circles at least, by choosing the marvellous HMV recording Menuhin made with the Bach Festival Chamber Orchestra in 1960, with a little-noticed Erato recording by the then far-from-famous John Eliot Gardiner as runner-up. Klemperer was nowhere in the reckoning, largely because, in the mid-1980s, the 'wrong' Klemperer version (his 1969 New Philharmonia remake) was in the catalogues. Had this grand and challenging 1954 recording been available, I might well have been able to implement Arthur's Machiavellian fantasy.
Anyone familiar with Klemperer's career, or Peter Heyworth's version of it in his two-volume biography (CUP: 1996), will know that in Berlin in the 1920s Klemperer was one of the pioneers of the neue Sachlichkeit, the 'new objectivity', in the performance of the masterworks of the baroque and classical periods. Indeed, the Suite No. 3 in D was the work with which he chose to open a pioneering series of subscription concerts at Berlin's Kroll Opera in September 1927. By the end of a texturally severe yet fervent account of the Ouverture it was clear to those present that a revolution was afoot. The distinguished musicologist, Alfred Einstein, was one of the first to declare Klemperer's Bach 'unacademic but right': the fugato firmly propelled, the gavotte fiery, the bourrees properly burlesque, the famous 'Air' unemphatic to the point of coolness.

I quote that review (in Heyworth's lucid summary) because it stands as a pretty good description of what we have here in these ferociously grand 1954 recordings, with the important rider that the 'Air', though cool by the standards of a Furtwangler or Bruno Walter, is profoundly affecting. The violinist, Max Strub, would remember Klemperer directing this particular movement virtually without gesture yet with such deep inner concentration that by the end he was dripping with sweat. It is, indeed, a deeply affecting performance, tender and forgiving, sorrow bowing its head before a greater good, a wider dispensation. Klemperer's Handel – his 1956 recording of the Concerto grosso in A minor, Op. 6 – is also very 'forgiving', but, then, Handel is a more forgiving composer than Bach.

The 1954 recording shows Klemperer, newly signed by Legge, and the Philharmonia at their vital, eloquent best. This was a halcyon age for the orchestra, the winds in particular. Earlier that same summer, they had played like saints on famous Karajan recordings of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte and Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos; and here they are besporting themselves in Bach like gods on Olympus. Strangely, there are no solo credits, not even in the Suite No. 2 in B minor where the solo flute playing (Gareth Morris, presumably) has great pathos and wit.

As an old man, Klemperer paid tribute to the baroque with his own charmingly spare orchestration of Rameau's 'Gavotte avec six doubles' from Book 3 of his Pieces de clavecin. There are echoes here of Richard Strauss's stylish reworkings of music by Couperin and Lully, just as the towering 1963 recording of the overture to Gluck's Iphigenie en Aulide clearly harks back to the legendary production of the opera Klemperer heard Mahler conduct in Vienna in 1907 ('so perfect as to defy description').

New to the catalogues is Klemperer's 1960 recording of the overture to Cherubini's Anacreon. This was made in a single end-of-session take, but never published due to an intrusive studio noise (which the computer has now spirited away) right at the end. It is a performance of mind-blowing power, fervent as you have never heard this piece before. The horn halloos in the coda (8'26''ff) are alone worth the price of the two CDs.

Apart from a touch of peak distortion in one or two of the trumpet-saturated climaxes in Suite No. 3, all the recordings come up wonderfully well. To anyone lucky enough to have heard Klemperer in the concert hall or opera house in these years, the set will bring memories flooding back. To younger collectors, those whose ears are still open to the power of great music-making, it might just prove to be a revelation of what great conducting is all about."
(Gramophone)