This is the second volume in a three-disc project to record the six organ symphonies of Louis Vierne (1870-1937). Hans-Eberhard Ross, since 1991 choirmaster of the deanery of St Martin in Memmingen (Bavaria), plays the four-manual 1998 Goll organ there.

At the beginning of his interpreter’s notes in the booklet Ross quotes Vierne to the effect that he had in mind the instrument and ambience of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris for his organ compositions. Vierne was organist there from 1900 until he died. A few lines later, Ross is highly critical of recordings of Vierne on opulent Cavaille-Coll instruments in cathedrals with too much reverberation. Even if this contradicts the composer’s stated ideal, Ross does have a point. In Marie-Claire Alain’s 1989 recording of the first four Vierne symphonies at the Cavaille-Coll organ at St Stephen’s Abbey in Caen (Erato), to name but one example, a good deal of contrapuntal detail is inaudible in the overwhelming cloud of reverberation. What good is compositional detail if the listener can’t hear it? Ross’s mission is to rectify this in the present series of recordings, and not everyone will agree on whether he has managed that.

Donald Metz reviewed the first volume of this series (Audite 92674; March/April 2013) and remarked on Ross’s more clinical approach to the music in comparison with other recordings. Describing the present performances as clinical would be too severe. Ross achieves his aim of making nearly every detail of the music audible, and while his performances may not be quite heart-on-sleeve, I find them far from dispassionate or insensitive. The organ itself combines darkness with clarity in a room with a four-second reverberation that imparts warmth without obscuring the part writing. The instrument may not have the passionate character of Cavaille-Coll at his best, but it is not worlds removed from it. Ross also takes a somewhat free approach to registration in the interest of clarity, but generally reproduces the composer’s intended tone colors.

The Amadeus Quartet recorded this Beethoven cycle in RIAS broadcasts in the 1950s and 60s, at the peak of their long career. While modern in most respects the four voices are more distinct than is now the fashion; leader Norbert Brainin is particularly prominent. There is also more interpretation, Beethoven being made to sigh, skip, and shout with untrammeled abandon as if the scores were being interpreted biographically, as was often the case in earlier times. This is all to the good if you prefer warmly emotional performances. The recorded sound is also warm and appealing.

Here is a mite to add to the already large Stern discography: broadcast recordings from the Lucerne festivals of 1956 and 1958. The violinist is in fine form, making it all sound easy which is a problem for people who believe that Tchaikovsky should sound passionate and Bartok edgy. Perhaps critics of a historicist bent should not write about such things; to us it sounds like Stern imitating Milstein imitating Heifetz. Imitation is by no means a bad thing, at least when one can discern a progress of tradition or refinement; but if there is development here it seems at best but a progress of blandness. To be sure, here is technical brilliance. But while Heifetz can still be thrilling in his arch coolness, Stern’s way with the music seems but an echo of an echo.

It was inevitable that music would play no small part in the regeneration of Germany following the destruction of the Nazi empire. Amid the wreck and the rubble, the anguish and the finger-pointing, the music never stopped: as before, it lent ambiguous expression to a plenitude of conflicting sentiments and aspirations. Berlin’s musical institutions, no less than the divided city’s material infrastructure, were in immediate need of reconstruction. With Furtwangler, the musical moral compass, temporarily sidelined, much of the task of rebuilding fell to his place-holder at the Philharmonic, Sergiu Celibidache (1912-96), who was principal conductor from 1945 to 1952.

Much has been made of Celibidache’s peculiarities – his Buddhism and refusal to make studio recordings – but what one hears in this massive retrospective of his postwar work with the Philharmonic and Berlin Radio Symphony is in one important respect almost conventional: his allegiance to the Nikisch approach to music-making, the grand style that for two generations had been the dominant mode in Europe and America. It was about to go out of fashion – and Celibidache’s nascent career with it – but in these remarkable post-war recordings, as with Furtwangler’s, it achieved an apogee.

The Nikisch way was less a style than a principle. Its chief exponents all had their own individual style, but the principle was ever to seek out and heighten the dramatic elements in a composition. Celibidache, comparatively new to conducting, did not in 1945 have much of a personal style; and the performances here might be easily mistaken for Furtwangler, Walter, or Beecham (how glorious is that?). They are marked by strong contrasts of tempo, timbre, and volume and not a little freedom taken with shaping melodic lines.

Listening to this long parade of emotive performances is exhausting enough to demonstrate Celibidache’s point about the unnatural quality of recordings, which drain the contextual and dramatic elements from musical drama. Such potent medicine as this is best taken in small doses. But we can report that, while all is compelling, Celibidache is most comfortable and effective in German repertoire – and outside the realm of the familiar he can be odd – but still compelling.

Recall the circumstances under which these broadcast performances were made: most of the music had not been performed in Germany for two decades, if at all. It was new to the conductor, new to the musicians, new to the audiences. O brave new post-war world! The collection opens with Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, given a zest implicitly expressing the joy of music without limits. French and Russian works are abundantly represented in dramatic if strikingly unidiomatic interpretations. Here are long-forbidden decadent Jewish moderns: Milhaud, Copland, David Diamond. Appalachian Spring in Berlin! And Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, more appropriate to the occasion. No Wagner.

The electrical excitement of the original broadcasts, the experience of all these musical novelties, reverberates across the decades and is given a strong boost by the conductor’s wayward way with a score. But most memorable for this listener is a small, familiar item tucked away in the middle: the most perfectly insouciant, most perfectly executed Till Eulenspiegel I have ever heard – which is saying a lot. That, like the whopping explosion in the Haydn Surprise Symphony, gets to the essence of the Nikisch way of doing things. This mode was not to last, and the joyful historical moment here captured would dissipate amid the dull proprieties of the Karajan regime. There must have been a little of Till Eulenspiegel mixed up in Celibidache’s other-worldly character: though pushed from the throne he would not go away, and decades later was still reminding concert-goers who cared that there had been a time when giant-conductors stalked the earth – wayward, […]

Powerful performances: the Manderling Quartet’s Op. 44, No. 3, gives the lie to the judgment that Mendelssohn’s middle quartets represent a step backward.

The Amadeus inject into the slinky 6/8 meter a sudden urgency or impetuosity that jars us into complete attention. If Beethoven had provided the model in his E Minor Quartet, Schubert has taken his own path, a tumultuous and often blistering course, as the Amadeus realization insists most forcefully.

Eivind Aadland’s superlative third volume of orchestral Grieg for Audite brings performances of astonishing poise, intrepid character and enormous conviction, stunningly well captured by the WDR microphones and guaranteed to make you fall in love all over again with this entrancing, criminally underrated repertoire. It’s a joyous treat and no mistake!

Right from the off, things augur well. The Spring Symphony’s opening Andante un poco maestoso is also, usefully, con moto, which means a refreshing lack of portentousness. A marked relaxation of tempo before the excited acceleration into the fast main body of the movement accentuates the dramatic effect of Schumann’s writing. Holliger is one of those musicians who hears what he conducts from the inside, a crucial virtue in Schumann and a neat way to disqualify curmudgeonly commentators who wrongly accuse Schumann of ineptitude in orchestration. Nonsense, I say – as this disc proves. The Larghetto expresses itself fluently and without unwarranted indulgence, the Scherzo wears its accents lightly and the finale takes the dance as its starting point.

Aside from its Faustian opening, the wonderful symphony in three movements that goes by the name of Overture, Scherzo and Finale breathes Mendelssohnian fresh air, even though the Scherzo seems to suggest infant Valkyries. The Finale’s coda blazes triumphantly, which leaves what’s called in this context the Symphony in D minor, in reality the Fourth in its original 1841 incarnation, leaner, lighter and more abrupt than the familiar revision and with some different thematic material. It’s useful to have, though there can be little doubt that Schumann’s later thoughts were his best, and by some considerable distance. Precise playing and fine, detailed sound guarantee a generous pleasure quota. Other excellent Schumann conductors on disc such as Rafael Kubelik (DG), Fabio Luisi (Orfeo), Paavo Järvi (RCA or C Major on DVD), David Zinman (Arte Nova) and Thomas Dausgaard (BIS) remain on hand as viable alternatives; but, as Holliger is en route to a complete cycle, I’d hold on to your shekels, at least for the moment. His may well be the one to go for.

This CD presents the first-ever releases of the Berlin Radio Symphony concert of March 1963, in which 18-year-old Jacqueline du Pre; and 22-year-old Bruno Leonardo Gelber made their German debuts. I must confess that Gelber’s name was unknown to me prior to auditioning this disc, even though he is still with us. An Argentinian pianist who made his public debut at the precocious age of five, Gelber (according to ArkivMusic) has but a few recordings in the current catalog, among them a CD of Bach transcriptions which he split with Alexis Weissenberg on EMI, and a couple of discs of Beethoven (the Emperor Concerto partnered with the Moonlight and Pathetique sonatas, and the Second Concerto under Klaus Tennstedt). His playing is described as nimble, gentle in tone in one review, unmannered but unremarkable in another.

But of course, the real focus here is du Pre and to be honest, either she wasn’t in her best form or the recording isn’t particularly good. She sounds slightly flat in places and the tone is particularly muddy, a quality which is the antithesis of every other recording and performance I’ve ever heard by her. Yet at times, the string section of the orchestra also sounds a little muddy, not so much as du Pre’s own playing but not terribly clear, either; and since the sound of her cello clears up after the first six minutes or so, I would put the blame on the tape. An anonymous reviewer on ArkivMusic website claims that this performance seems more vivid and contains greater contrasts even than her later recording of the work, but unless you’re willing to tolerate the peculiar sonics (which I find tolerable only in really old broadcasts of pre-World War II vintage) I would not recommend this disc. If you love this Concerto, and particularly du Pre’s unique way with it, try to track down the superb 1967 Avery Fisher Hall performance with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. (I didn’t much like her studio recording of this work; the tempo sags in the second movement to the point of musical collapse.)

Regarding the Brahms First, I’m reminded of Toscanini’s famous dictum: Germans always conduct their music too slow! Well, not always: there were Erich and Carlos Kleiber, Fritz Busch, and several others who didn’t normally do so, but Albrecht’s tempos and particularly his phrasing are positively leaden. Consider: this performance clocks in at 50:33, almost a full five minutes longer than the superb recording by Artur Rubinstein with Fritz Reiner on RCA/BMG! Within this uninspiring and uninspired framework, however, Gelber gives a good account of himself. His playing is lightweight but elegantly phrased and with some subtle nuances.

Thus, a split review of sorts. If you’re a Gelber fan, you might wish to add this to your collection despite Albrecht’s uninspired conducting, but the rest of us can safely skip it.

My first Karl Ristenpart review appeared way back in Fanfare 2:5, actually before the magazine adopted its current method of identifying back issues. It was of a Nonesuch recording of Haydn’s Morning, Noon, and Evening symphonies (Nos. 6, 7, and 8), for which I paid the late Sam Goody, rest his soul, the munificent sum of $1.49 not necessarily the best buck and a half I’ve ever spent, but close. For you nostalgia trippers who have been with us long enough to remember, it was also my very first Classical Hall of Fame nomination. A decade or so later I welcomed Ristenpart’s Brandenburg Concertos to CD. Ristenpart’s Brandenburgs, on two Nonesuch LPs, had been my first stereo version – my third overall – some years before. I’m sure that price was a factor in that transaction, too, but I have no documentation of it. The Nonesuch LPs served me well, but by the time they were transformed into two Accord CDs the period-instruments movement was in full sway, and the Ristenpart versions had lost a little of their luster.

Ristenpart was a player in the transition from the traditional reverential and monumental Bach that held sway during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the tighter, lighter, and brighter idiom that prevails today. Case in point: He sang through the fermatas that mark the ends of phrases in Bach’s chorales. Rather than interpreting chorales as if they were miniature tone poems, he treated them more in the manner of congregational singing. His choruses, too, shed some of their massiveness. This Christmas Oratorio is, in a sense, an historical document. One can sense a change from the opening chorus of the first cantata to the later ones. Audite’s notes cast a revealing light on the situation. The recording was made in 1950, just five years after the end of the War. The RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) Chamber Chorus of Berlin was a relatively new organization, so Ristenpart started the sessions cautiously, gradually picking up his tempos as his singers became more comfortable with them. Another hint of things to come is Ristenpart’s reading of the famous pastoral Sinfonia in Cantata 2. It would be a surprise to me if Reinhard Goebel were to adopt Ristenpart’s breathless tempo. The soloists were among the best of their time; I was especially impressed by alto Charlotte Wolf-Matthäus, but all were excellent. I can’t recommend this set as a first Christmas Oratorio, but it’s a valuable document, worth preserving, and rewarding on its own terms.

Ristenpart did benefit from the innovative marketing efforts of the then new and active minor labels. Caught between the older traditions and changes yet to come, he isn’t well remembered today. He deserves better.