Otto Klemperer, Wiener Philharmoniker - Live Broadcast Performances (8CD) (2005)

This extraordinary set of live Klemperer performances should be in the collection of everyone who cares about Klemperer and his marvelous style of music making. Massive and often slow but always vital and alive, they will not appeal to everyone. But it is astonishing how these CDs bring into sharp focus Klemperer's real magnetism on the podium. As good as his EMI recordings are, they are so very much the product of the recording studio one can be forgiven for wondering whether they represent what Klemperer was in fact capable of achieving in live performance, particularly near the end of his career when his various physical disabilities became almost overwhelming impediments to performance.

Somehow, almost miraculously, Klemperer put it all together for a few weeks in the late Spring of 1968 in Vienna to produce truly incandescent performances. Not note perfect by any means, this is music making nevertheless for the ages. I suppose the Mahler 9th comes closest to failure as it offers some of the most ragged playing in the set. (According to the excellent liner notes, some of that can be attributed to Klemperer but more to the orchestra's unfamiliarity with Mahler's last great symphony and even downright hostility to Mahler's music.) But in the end that raggedness doesn't matter at all. Klemperer's trademark qualities as conductor are very much present in the Mahler as in all these performances: clarity of polyphonic texture; structural integrity; overall rhythmic coherence (even if ensembles are a bit 'shaky' at times). I was particularly moved by the performances of Bach and Mozart -- the 'Jupiter" symphony is positively incandescent -- as well as by the Bruckner Fifth which is, hands down, the greatest performance of that symphony I have ever heard, live or on record. But all these performances are well worth hearing again and again in spite of their foibles.

All performances from the 1968 series are in good quality stereo sound; the single mono recording, a very decent-sounding performance of the Brahms German Requiem, is taken from a Klemperer concert in Vienna about ten years earlier. I don't recommend this set to the 'note perfect' crowd or to anyone who has a fixed idea about what is the "best" recording of the Beethoven Fifth or Mahler Ninth. But if you are prepared to hear the 'thoughts' of an old man who has struggled with this music all his life, for whom this music meant more than anything else on earth and for which he was willing to push himself past pain and infirmity, then I think you will be moved and enriched by this priceless set.