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This is part of the Salzburg Festival's important series Festspieldokumente, which offers "official" releases mainly taken from the original radio tapes of many of the most important performances in the Salzburg Festival's archives. This series is being spread out over a few labels, primarily EMI, Orfeo, and Sony. While this Bruckner Fifth from August 19, 1951, has been issued before, notably by a number of the LP labels connected with Music & Arts (as well as on CD by Japanese Seven Seas, Virtuoso, and Hunt), this is the first time we have had the opportunity to hear it in decent sound quality. Furtwänglerians have reached a fairly strong consensus that the wartime Bruckner Fifth (October 28, 1942, issued on CD by DGG, Music & Arts, Japanese Columbia and Bella Musica) is the superior performance. Until now, it also had superior sonics despite dating from almost a decade earlier. This new EMI release enables us to evaluate the later Vienna reading more completely because of the notably fuller, richer sound palette.
What this release reveals most strongly is that the generally-held preference for the early performance is quite well justified. While the richer orchestral sonority gives us a firmer bass line, which is a critical component of Furtwängler's approach to all music but particularly Bruckner, what it cannot do is make us ignore the curious lapses in concentration that seem to mar this performance. The first movement suffers particularly from a line that seems to sag at times, a breaking of tension that has nothing to do with the shape of the music. Where the Berlin performance crackles with energy, this one sometimes lets down. The line is not maintained tautly in the Adagio, and Furtwängler doesn't solve the fugal wanderings of the finale here as well as he does in the 1942 reading. That finale is one of Bruckner's hardest movements to conduct; tempo relationships and dynamic shaping must be just right, and in 1942 they were. There is a blazing intensity to that early reading that seems replaced in 1951 by too much caution. Parts of the fugue just bog down. Only the Scherzo seems to me to come off as well in 1951 as it had in 1942.
Obviously there is much of merit here, and if the 1942 performance were not in existence this would be valuable. But frankly it would not be my favorite Bruckner Fifth (in addition to Furtwängler's earlier version, there are performances by Jascha Horenstein and Takashi Asahina that satisfy more deeply than this one). The complete Furtwängler collector will want to have this, even if he owns a prior version of it, because of the significant sonic improvement. All others would be wise to seek out Music & Arts CD-538 for the 1942 Berlin version, which will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
Henry Fogel
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