Beethoven: Violin Concerto op. 61, Romances Nos. 1 op. 40 & 2 op. 50. Yehudi Menuhin, Lucerne Festival Orchestra (in Concerto), Philharmonia Orchestra (Romances), Willhelm Furtwängler. Testament SBT 1109 (1997) barcode 749677110925
Recorded 26 & 29 August 1947 in the Kunsthaus, Lucerne (Violin Concerto), 9 April 1953 in Kingsway Hall, London (Romances)
Compiled on CD 9 of 51 CDs EMI 2 64131 2 “Yehudi Menuhin The Great EMI Recordings” (2009) 5099926413129 (for complete contents see listing on Discogs.com):
(Concerto only) Compiled on CD 7 of 21 CDs EMI 9078782 “Wilhelm Furtwängler The Great EMI Recordings” (2011) 5099990787829 (not listed on Discogs.com. Best description of contents is on Musicweb-international):
Compiled on CD 9 (Concerto) and 11 (Romances) of 18 CDs Warner “The Menuhin Century – The Historic Recordings” (2016) 0825646777051 (best listing of contents is under the Discogs.com entry for the FLAC download edition):
Set compiled in 80 CDs + 11 DVDs Warner “The Menuhin Century” (2016) 0825646782741 (see listing on Discogs.com):
Compiled on CD 13 (Concerto) and 35 (Romances) of 55 CDs Warner 0190295232405 “The Complete Wilhelm Furtwängler on Record” (2021) (for complete contets see Discogs.com):
(For the non-EMI, non official CD releases, see at the end of this review)
Menuhin-Furtwängler’s best Beethoven
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 3 August 2014
Menuhin made two studio recordings of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with Furtwängler, and the later one, with the Philharmonia Orchestra in April 1953 (link will open new tab to my review), all but eclipsed this one, from August 1947 with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. The Lucerne recording was, politically, an important event, and even statement: the post-war ban on Furtwängler’s conducting activities had just been lifted, in May he had been able to conduct his first post-war concert in Berlin 
(Beethoven’s 5th and 6th Symphonies, both on Tahra FURT 1016, barcode 3504129101619, from 1997, and on Audite’s 2009 Furtwängler set, 21.403 “Live in Berlin – The Complete RIAS Recordings”, barcodes 735084493904 and 402143214038
), and Menuhin, anxious to play with a conductor who had been recommended to him by many French friends as the greatest living German one, was ready to brave the hostility of many American Jewish circles.
But a number of reasons explain that the older recording was immediately overshadowned by its 1953 successor: the 1947 recording was issued on 78rpm, His Master’s Voice DB 6574/79 (listed on Discogs.com!) and, for reasons that I cannot entirely account for, not even reissued on LP in the early 1950s, as was the case with many significant 78s versions (for instance, Kulenkampff and Schmidt-Isserstedt’s 1936 Telefunken version, Heifetz and Toscanini’s Victor recording from 1940, and Szigeti-Walter’s from 1947 on Columbia): maybe EMI’s Walter Legge had planned all that time for a new recording to be made by the two artists and didn’t want to undercut the new version’s anticipated success by reissuing the older one. Or maybe the reasons were political. The Lucerne recording was also never distributed in the US, even in its 78rpm form. David Hall, in the second, 1950 edition of his encyclopedic book “Records”, complained about it, saying that “if Victor were to issue these records in the U.S.A. they would offer the strongest kind of competition to the near-definitive Szigeti-Bruno Walter reading, regardless of the latter’s availability in LP format”. Little did he know (and I, before reading the liner notes) that RCA, then HMV’s affiliated company in the US, had refused to issue it as it was “not thought politically expedient”, given the controversy surrounding Furtwängler’s attitude during the Nazi era.
So by 1954, with the release of the new recording, hardly anyone had the older version to compare or the equipment to play it on, and even if they had, the 78rpm sonics would have been considered antiquated and non competitive anyway. And how was the pickup Lucerne Festival Orchestra going to compete with the glorious Philharmonia, the orchestra established in London by Walter Legge, the one with which all the luminaries on EMI’s roster, Furtwängler, Karajan, Kubelik, Boult, Cantelli, Galliera, Dobrowen, Sargent, Böhm, Süsskind, Markevitch, recorded? In an era when new LP versions of the Concerto were multiplying fast (Ida Handel-Kubelik, Francescatti-Ormandy, Krebbers-Otterlo, Campoli-Krips, Ricci-Boult, Szeryng-Thibaud) but were still, compared to what we have now, in limited amount, the new version met with immediate and universal success, and it hasn’t abated since. [Addendum upon repost, September 2024] It is probably telling of the respective status of both recordings that, outside of the “non-official” CD reissues listed below, the Lucerne recording has NOT been reissued by EMI, as an individual CD, since the publication of this Testament release in 1997.
Yet, the Lucerne version is better.
First, it has to do with the sonics of this Testament reissue. The original recording was “digitally remastered at Abbey Road Studios by Paul Baily”, and I don’t know how he did it. In transfers from 78s you expect, even in the best ones, to hear a modicum of surface noise. Not here, it sounds like a taped performance (there is more audible background noise in the hushed beginning of the slow movement). Second, the orchestra and soloist have a touch more presence and vividness than on the early EMI digital remastering of the Philharmonia version, originally reissued to CD in 1984 on CDC 7 47119 2
and reissued in 1988 on EMI References or Great Recordings of the Century, CDH 7 69799 2 (barcode information under my review, link provided above). And although the 1999 remastering for the reissue on EMI’s Great Recording of the Century series (5 66975 2 & 5 66990 2, European and North-American editions
) has very marginally improved the impact of the 1984 reissue
, there is no evident sonic superiority of the 1953 remake over this Testament reissue of 1947, on the contrary. In fact, between Testament and References, both the sonics and, for a large part, the interpretations are so similar that, at times, I find myself doubting if I am really listening to two different recordings, rather than two different transfers of the same.
And the interpretations, then. The two are so similar in the outer movements as to be nearly and startlingly identitcal – so much so that, listening to the opening Allegro ma non troppo, I started wondering if the very slight differences that I thought I heard (beyond the slight difference of sonic perspective) weren’t the product of my imagination, and if Testament hadn’t in fact reissued the Philharmonia recording, passing it off for Lucerne. So here I was, jumping from one to the other, trying to detect those minuscule and almost undistinguishable performance glitches or stage noises that allow to conclude that a recording is not the same as another one. Well, there weren’t many glitches or stage noises in either to be absolutely conclusive, but I did detect some, really minuscule. Anyway, in both cases, both outer movements unfold in typical Furtwängler fashion, large, expansive, unhurried, but it seemed to me that, more vivid orchestral presence helping, there is a touch of added muscularity and bite in the orchestral tutti of the 1947 recording: 1953 sounds more mellow. The Philharmonia, infinitely superior to the pickup Lucerne Festival Orchestra, as some reviewers claim? Let’s have facts, not just vague generalities: where, how, what? As for the soloist, Menuhin plays the first movement with incomparable tonal purity and luminosity and great emotional involvement, but again the tonal purity is better highlighted, it seemed to me, in the 1947 recording.
But if ever there was the shadow of a doubt hovering over the first movement, the two remaining ones are sufficiently different from one performance to the other to dissipate it, and here the advantage definitely goes to 1947. In all his recordings – his wartime performance with Erich Röhn (first issued in 1989 on Deutsche Grammophon 427 780-2, part of a 10-CD set of Furtwängler’s wartime recordings in Berlin, DG 427 773-2, link to my review), his final live performance of the Concerto with Wolfgang Schneiderhan in May 1953 (Deutsche Grammophon Dokumente 474 728-2 or 477 5030), the one from Lucerne and the one given again with Menuhin and the Berlin Philarmonic a month after the Lucerne recording (on the Audite set mentioned above, previously, and in a more problematic transfer, on Tahra FURT 1020) -, Furtwängler always conducted a spacious and held-back Larghetto. With the January 1944 performance with Röhn, the one from Lucerne with Menuhin is the most spacious and held back of all, and the effect, together with Menuhin’s tonal luminosity and emotive delivery, is beautiful. The solo line is not just played, but delicately and plangently sung, with Menuhin’s top notes boasting a moving frailty, almost whistle-like, like the ethereal pianissimos of a great soprano. By comparison the 1953 remake, as beautiful as it is, strays a bit from Furtwängler’s norm by being somewhat more flowing (9:23 TT to Lucerne’s 10:37), and the impression is overall, I find, plainer and less deeply felt. Menuhin approached the level of Lucerne’s emotional intensity in his later stereo recordings with Silvestri in 1960 and Klemperer in 1966 (links will open new tabs to my reviews) – but never equaled it.
Differences are more subtle between both versions of the Finale, and again, jumping from one to the other, they often sound eerily identical. As was Furtwängler’s custom, tempo is again unhurried (although there is much more of a tradition for that in the Finale, then and now, than in the Larghetto), but, either by interpretive choice or due to some technical difficulties Menuhin in 1953 tended to over-legatoize the phrasings of this dance-like rondo, robbing it of some of its bounce. That, added to the mellow orchestral outbursts, tended to make the movement sound squarer than it might and even, in some spots, dangerously verging on the plodding, eliciting a vague feeling of boredom halfway through. Not so in 1947, and although tempo is the same, the bounce in Menuhin’s phrasings and the added muscularity and impact of the orchestral tutti always keep attention awake. There is also a touch of wiriness to Menuhin’s tone in the runs and double stops in 1953 that is absent in 1947, and in 1947 they sound more efffortelessly played.
By the way: as in all his recordings of the Concerto, Menuhin plays Kreisler’s cadenzas. Just for a laugh, let me reproduce what the Gramophone critic had to say about that in the March 1948 issue: “in the midst of the great thoughts, I am more than ever weary of a cadenza. I am told this one is by Kreisler. Some of us would not love it even if it had been Beethoven’s. It is wonderful fiddling, but entirely out of place, I feel”. Shows – let me phrase it kindly – how grotesquely inept SOME critics USED to be. Not anymore, of course (although how Rob Cowan, the Gramophone critic who reviewed this Testament reissue in November 1997, could find that the Lucerne Larghetto was “faster than the Philharmonia recording” defies me).
Testament’s pairing, the two Violin Romances, is also a valuable one: Furtwängler’s only recording of them , they were taped on 9 April 1953, the day after the remake of the Beethoven Concerto, and served to complement the LP of the two artists’ recording of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto from May 1952 … which now serves as a pairing on EMI’s various edition of the 1953 Philharmonia Beethoven! And although they seemed the natural fillers to that recording, those two Romances have had very limited circulation on CD: outside of Japan, this is their only reissue on an individual CD, which makes the Testament CD even more indispensable to the Furtwänglerite and/or the fan of Menuhin (Menuhin made another recording of the Romances, with John Pritchard and the Philharmonia in 1960, and they’ve been paired, in various editions, with both Menuhin’s recordings of the Concerto with Silvestri in 1960 and Klemperer in 1966, see my reviews links above; and in 2003 EMI posthumously released a recording from 1971 of op. 40 with his Menuhin Festival Orchestra in which he conducted as well (5 62523 2 barcode 724356252325 or 5 62607 2 barcode 724356260726, paired with a self-conducted performance of the Violin Concerto).
That said, I don’t think that Furtwängler and Menuhin’s typically deliberate and stately approach is the best suited here, solemnizing and sentimentalizing this unassuming music, especially in op. 50, too much for its own good. Some small technical glitches of Menuhin may have called for a retake also (listen for instance at 2:26 in op. 50).
But the Romances are only the complement, bringing the CD to a TT of 62:31. Without hesitation, if I were to keep only one version of the Violin Concerto by Menuhin-Furtwängler, or by Furtwängler, or possibly by Menuhin (he made three more in the studio, those already mentioned with Silvestri in 1960 and Klemperer in 1966, and with Kurt Masur in 1981, reissued in 1995 on EMI Voix de son Maître 4 83497 2 barcode 724348349729; there’s also one more, live, with himself conducting the Menuhin Festival Orchestra in 1971 on the same posthumous release with the First Romance, mentioned above; and there are various other lives on other labels), it would be 1947. The 1944 performance with Röhn is a strong contender, especially on account of its first movement, one of the most perfectly shaped that I’ve ever heard in its architecture of tension and repose, but Menuhin’s Lucerne Larghetto and better sonics win the day.
At least one undisputable authority agrees with me. Menuhin had been so enraptured by his Lucerrne encounter with Furtwängler in the Beethoven Concerto that for a while he said that he’d never play the Concerto again under any other conductor, later adding: “of course this is impossible, and I have often played it again under others and also with joy But at the time I was so impressed that I never wanted this precious, this unique moment in time to become obliterated – I just wanted the sound to fade away in my ears – the way in which Furwängler had conducted this Concerto” (from the liner notes of the Philharmonia CD on References). Later, there’s a famous anecdote, recounted in the Testament liner notes, in which Menuhin is hearing a broadcast of the 1947 recording without knowing who is playing, and doesn’t recognize that it is his earlier version. “As the work was played he reflected that he would dearly love to be able to realize the Beethoven Concerto so such a fashion, only to be informed in an announcement at the end of the performance that he himself was the soloist”.
Non-EMI editions:
Dante LYS 249 (1997) 3421710412490
4 CDs Music & Arts CD-1018 “Wilhelm Furtängler at the Lucerne Festival – 1947-1953 Recordings and Broadcasts” (1998) 017685101823
Naxos historical 8.110996 (2006) 636943199626 (audio restoration Ward Marston)
Compiled in 10 CDs Documents 223508 “Wilhelm Furtwängler” (2006) 4011222235084
Compiled in 30 CDs Documents 600260 “Anniversary Collection Yehudi Menuhin” (2015) 4053796002600. Document, a label from the German company Membran, is an offshoot of the infamous pirate label The International Media. I do not trust their releases and transfers, and avoid them.