Audition: Brahms: Symphony No. 4 - Philharmonia/Klemperer

Otto Klemperer recorded Brahms' Symphony No. 4 for EMI at Kingsway Hall, London between March 27-29, 1957, with the Philharmonia Orchestra. 

The general characteristics of Klemperer’s Brahms are well known and admired - forward woodwind, granitic interpretation fantastically brigaded strings and of course a certain uncompromising objectivity. Unsentimental to the last.

This recording is all that but in Brahms’s most problematic symphony Klemperer pulls off a reading which aligns with Karajan‘s estimation that this is a gorgeous symphony of cleverness and compositional acuity which subjects the listerner to wonderful moments only to end in complete tragedy.

How he does it baffles me but the “straightforward“ interpretation is most beautifully realised but never shaped towards the listener until the grim end. 

It is as though the music was written for an empty room - neutral to the mood of it’s listener - disdainful in parts. 

This is not contempt on Brahms’s part or conceit from the conductor. The most obvious of the Play “what’s written and no more” school does that. Brahms does the rest

The first three movements are glorious - in three different worlds - they are all accelerating. It’s only the progress of the last movement which finds Klemperer reveals Brahms trap. From our later perspective the last movement variations point to a post-romantic emptiness – the hollow world of Berg, Webern and Schoenberg but Brahms turned romanticism on its head. 

The grim repetition of these variations is hiding their progress, masked by orchestral intricacies and what Brahms probably regarded as cheap shots. Like Dvořák‘s tone poems beneath (and not far beneath) is a darkness that the listener did not expect. 

Throughout Klemperer keeps the music magnificent in flow, articulation and unlike Karajan he isn’t coy. Klemperer doesn’t prefigure the angst by watering down in early movements. But he springs the trap through brass and winds and unwillingness to indulge the Brahmsian tendency to mere melancholia. It is a near perfect reading of disaster we should have seen coming. It delivers without mercy.

Performance 9 out of 10

Interpretation 10 out of 10

Recording 9 out of 10.