50 years after Kleiber’s Beethoven Fifth: The sound engineer speaks
OrchestrasIn October 1974, Carlos Kleiber made his first* commercial recording. It was Beethoven’s fifth symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon and it was instantly (and lastingly) acclaimed as the most perfect interpretation of that work ever heard.
A report in Die Presse discovers that Kleiber and the Viennese had a tryout run of concerts in Bratislava and Gothenburg before agreeing to make the record.
The sound engineer Hans-Peter Schweigmann adds this singular memory:
‘Kleiber arrived perhaps half an hour early in the Großen Musikvereinssaal. He sat down at the timpani and tried out the sound of the timpani alone. I have vivid memories of that. I have never seen a conductor sit down at the timpani and rehearse.’
* Correction: Carlos Kleibers first commercial recording was Freischütz for Deutsche Grammophon and Eterna (VEB Deutsche Schallplatten) recorded in Lukaskirche in Dresden from 22 of January until 8. February 1973.
‘The most perfect interpretation’ of any work of classical music simply does not exist. ‘Perfect’ according to which standard? DGG’s? The ‘audience’s’? Which audience, when, where? The critics’? (I hear Slonimsky laughing.) But then, the composer’s? But Beethoven is no longer among us to tell us and even Rosemary Brown has died.
A good work has more interpretative aspects than can be performed in the same time in one single performance. This is the richness of good music, and the opportunities it offers to good, understanding, truly gifted performers.
Also there are a myriad of nuances in music that cannot be notated. That’s why a performance tradition is important, which helps developing interpretation. But this is a flexible thing.
A composer knows these things and hence, the margin he would offer to performers’ subjective understanding of notation to get to a satisfying result. (This does not work for much 20C music since getting the notes more or less in the right place will exhaust all possibilities, given modernism’s purely materialistic ideals.)
Example: one day in his later years, Brahms received a famous string quartet in his house who wanted to play a string quartet of his for him to know his opinion about their interpretation. After they finished playing, he said: ‘Wonderful! Very very good… keep it that way.’ And after a pause he added; ‘By coincidence, last week the [….] quartet was here and they happened to play the same quartet, and they did it very differently. But also that was very, very good.’
It must be difficult for you to live in the 21st. Century.
Don’t tell ME!
Sally
“A good work has more interpretative aspects than can be performed in the same time in one single performance.”
Yes. Like trying to get the definitive photo of Mt. Everest.
I agree with everything you say and articulate so well, with two glaring exceptions – the assumption that the composer is always a “he” and the statement that “most 20th century music” is not open to interpretation. Otherwise, absolutely!
And it’s still the most boring, faceless B5 recorded.
I give you Roger Norrington as the man who gets closest to Beethoven.
Norrington was an idiot with a baton. End of.
Not Norrington, who managed Jahangir,the world’s greatest ever…underlined…Squash Rackets player ?
Was?
Well said Mr. Blackadder.
I met Sir Norrington in Pesaro after a thrilling performance of Rossini’s “Zelmira”. Good times!
Are you on glue?
This wasn’t his first commercial recording. Weber’s Der Freischütz was recorded the year before, for DG.
Recordings ought to give as much on-the-cover credit to the sound engineer as to the conductor, they are both there fiddling with dials and mic placements to augment, enhance, sections and sounds, that otherwise would not / could not be produced by human players alone.
Karajan is known to have individual players perched atop the orchestra under a ceiling to enhance the reverb of that particular instrument in a particular passage…. It sounds so artificial today.
Don’t even ask about Schoenberg Op. 31….
It is a tremendous performance. And yet for me, while it doesn’t get the same level of accolades, I think Kleiber’ performance of Beethoven’s 7th is even finer.
I was at the early stages of building a classical music collection. Money was very tight and the idea of laying out for a second 5th (I already had the Karajan complete set) seemed rather extravagant.
The reviews were so superlative that I felt obliged to. So glad that I did.
If you had the HvK set, money couldn’t have been that tight 😉
It was supposed to have been quite expensive for the day.
I don’t recall the price. It represented a fairly hefty outlay, but the Beethoven symphonies were a high priority in my collection.
At the time I bought the set, (1972, just prior to working in remote north Norway for six months), for a newcomer like me, Karajan was the musical equivalent of the (then) popular adage “No-one got fired for buying IBM”.
It is a magnificent performance, but in true DG style it has a catastrophically bad edit at the start of the last movement.
Amen.
…and a weird moment in the trio of the 3rd movement where a flute comes in a bar early and has it’s own little moment.
I worked with him at la Scala, Milan in the 1980s. He was one of the greatest, certainly by far the best I ever had the privilege of playing under.
You’re not the only orchestra member to say this. My friend in the Met orchestra said he was “hands down” the best conductor he had ever played with (and that included Levine, Karajan, Bohm)…..
I’ve spoken to several member of the CSO, some old timers who said the same thing. They were in awe of his genius
. And those guys are pretty jaded. I heard he personally marked all the orchestral parts. The cellist Frank Miller made a show of erasing Kliebers notations before rehearsal. Even he, who had played under Toscanini and Reiner, came around to Kleibers methods. But they also say Klieiber was an interesting bunch of guys. Down to earth but shy and very sensitive to any push back or criticism. On several occasions he left rehearsal and left town. But he got away with it. When he did perform it was always an event.
I believe Domingo went so far as to say he was in his own league, and if he had accepted the Berlin Phil position, it would have easily been the best orchestra of all time.
“…the most perfect interpretation of that work ever heard.” MSM at it’s best…
“at it is best”? Don’t understand.
It’s irony.
Plus bad grammar, to be sure.
Grammar is heard, not seen.
Any reader of normal intelligence can.
Forever indebted to Maestro Carlos Kleiber for his prolific, historic recordings of the Brahms 4th, Beethoven 7th, and, of course, Beethoven 5th Symphonies all with the Vienna Philarmonic Orchestra which were revelatory to me.
I have never seen a recording of the Beethoven 4th with Kleiber and the Vienna Philharmonic. Which label is it on?
Orfeo.
That’s not the VPO. That’s the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra on the Orfeo disc. He never recorded the 4th with the VPO…
The Orfeo 4th is with the Bavarian State Orchestra. Also separate Beethoven 6th and 7th DVDs on Orfeo, again with the Bavarians. There is also a DVD with the Concertgebouw playing Beethoven’s 4th and 7th, Philips.
Kleiber said this Beethoven 4 on Orfeo (which is a live performance) was one he was really happy with (hence it got released).
The most perfect version…ever? Who’s to say. It’s not the most perfect recording: you cannot hear the contrabassoon like in others.
The sloppy edit at 22:30 nearly ruins the recording. No excuse . But it is less noticeable than on the original release.
Wonderful anecdote! A beautiful scene that I am conjuring in my mind as I start my day! Carlos Kleiber: they broke the mold when they made him!
I love that recording, and the 7th as well.
Another “the most perfect, authentic, pure,” etc. claim coming from DGG and the VPO. Sadly, this sort of cultural nationalism is a vulgarity that that haunts classical music.
I’ve always found the sound quality of these recordings to be lackluster for the era. The tone is strident and harsh at times in the brass, and there’s too much reverberation. I have the SACD version, and the surround sound layer that used the quad tapes sounds like an echo chamber. I’m surprised this wasn’t adjusted for the release. IIRC correctly, Pentatone redid the balance for the quad recordings they licensed from Universal to fix this common issue.
I guess we’ll see if the new Blu-ray audio release gets it better.
Completely agree, sound is cold and not many details, it doesn’t give justice to Kleiber’s art….
DG released his recordings on 12 CDs plus one blu-ray in 2018. The recordings were supposedly remastered at 24 bit except Tristan, which was recorded digitally. The upcoming release is probably just a re-release.
So did his father come home after a hard day’s rehearsal, and say ‘now Carlos, we are going to go through the score of Beethoven’s 5th’ ?
Children do as we do, not as we say.
This indeed a great recording. Perfection isn’t easy to quantify since it could have numerous metrics– the orchestral playing, the recorded sound, and the interpretation. For me, the most important element is the expression. I find no recording of the Fifth has yet surpassed the 1963 recording by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. His musicians bring humanity to the score, revealing emotions not often, if ever heard in more “perfectly” played recordings. They bring to life the unwritten but clearly described story within the music.
Record engineering is, of course, always affected by the listener’s tastes, or even the state of the listener’s own hearing. In the time when this Kleiber recording was being made, I found that I much preferred the sonics of Decca recording the Vienna Philharmonic in the Sofiensaal to those of DG recording the same orchestra . . . wherever. But that was true of *my* perception of many DG recordings: a bit too much brightness in the treble and a certain lack of firmness and “definition” in the bass. I’m not in a position to say whether later remasterings of specific DG recordings altered the overall sonic character.
As to the Beethoven 5th itself, my current modern-instrument favorite (subject to change!) is Barenboim/Staatskappelle Berlin, which I consider spendid in terms of both interpretation and detailed but gracious recorded sound.
Absolutely magnificent performance. Bravo!
Interestingly, these concerts in Bratislava and Gothenburg, just before the recording, were CKs debut with the VPO!
He did however conduct five performances of Tristan and Isolde at the Staatsoper the year before – a production notoriously rejected by both Karajan and Leonard Bernstein!
Great maestro that is very rare now. His level of musical comprehension was much more common in the past. With a few exceptions, it’s mostly meaningless carving of air these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8veierstp-U
Was hoping the engineer would explain that jarring edit at 22:30. A big blemish on an otherwise perfect performance.
The sound engineer isn’t responsibe for the edit, the producer is.
Impossible to say who actually was responsible for that edit. DG producers didn’t touch the tape probably. A tape editor did that. Often based on an edit plan, without the producer present. Then also Kleiber himself could have requested that edit musically, and didn’t care when the recordists said that wouldn’t work. Who knows…
Ah, the bad old days, when you only got ONE Beethoven symphony on an LP.
Ah, but you got Horenstein’s Beethoven 9th on a single Vox lp!
I will certainly never forget the impact the Carlos Kleiber/Vienna Philharmonic Beethoven 5 had on my teenage ears at the time of first hearing and how it was being described as ‘white hot’ with intensity. Now, after the years have passed and many more recordings of the complete Beethoven Symphonies – but definitely not Norrington’s – have gathered on my shelves, others give equal pleasure as they all bring different things to compare and contrast. The Fifth is a great Symphony – I’ll always remember Leonard Bernstein’s TV programme about this work and still watch the DVD of it occasionally – but I would never say it’s my favourite Beethoven Symphony as they’re all brilliant in my Beethovenian mind. My first set was André Cluytens’s Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s set on Classics for Pleasure. The Antal Dorati/RPO DG set from the 1970s is one of my favourites but nobody ever talks about it. James Loughran’s Hallé set is also worth checking out, as is Paavo Järvi’s set with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, Bremen, if you love fast tempos. As for the Seventh, Lorin Maazel’s excellent Cleveland recording on Sony is well worth hunting out. I’m amazed at how much the Seventh ends up being a dud in a lot of complete sets. I like the variety that having many recordings provide. However, Kleiber’s Fifth still excites as do Mavrinsky’s fast-paced Tchaikovsky 4, 5 and 6 with the Leningrad Phil. At the end of the day, it’s a question of personal taste.
Has the James Loughran’s Hallé set been released as a CD boxset?
Previn/RPO is a fabulous 7th, but I’m guessing fdew have heard it.
I have 🙂
Dear Mr/Ms Corno di Caccia, Why do you write “many more recordings of the complete Beethoven Symphonies – but definitely not Norrington’s”? Are you referencing his ‘LCP’ period instrument recordings or the later German ones? Perhaps you disagree with his/Beethoven’s metronome speeds? I like the LCP’s pungent, biting wind and brass but dislike the bleached, puny string sound.
Fascinating.
Tastes vary from one individual to another, and in the case of a single individual, they can vary over time. FWIW, the recording of Beethoven’s Fifth that most resonates with me is George Szell’s with the Concertgebouw. As John Borstlap says, the idea of “the most [nearly] perfect” performance is an illusion. (And the concept of “most perfect” is illogical, in the same category as the lamentable “most unique”.)
My favorite Beethoven symphonies cycle is the underrated Hanover Band.
Well of course he would try the timpani first. Who wouldn’t. He knew what mattered most !
Maybe it was the only instrument on the stage.
For EMI, Kleiber recorded the Dvorak piano concerto with Richter in 1976, which is still in circulation but received mixed reviews. After his break with DGG he was lured back to EMI for a recording of Berg’s “Lulu,” only to change his mind after most of the cast had been assembled–No more commercial recordings after that expensive cancellation.
Kleiber’s 5th and 7th recordings of Beethoven are beyond compare. Roger Norrington – quelled idiot- I dropped his set of Beethoven nine symphonies into a charity shop, a year ago…….they are still there…..too pricey at £1….what about Kleiber’s live recording of the 6th..?. …truly wonderful.
Funny, when Hans Schmidt Isserstedt was booked to record a Beethoven cycle for Decca at the Sofiensaal with Wiener Philharmoniker, (an orchestra he had only worked with previously to record the piano concertos with Wilhelm Backhaus), he spent considerable time experimenting with different timpani sticks to get the sound he thought right, which somewhat held up the recording sessions. I must say I do like his Beethoven cycle, which seems more consistent than others. I only have a reservation about his tempo in the 7th’s Allegretto, just over 10 mins, seems a wee bit slow to me.
I seem to recall HSI saying to folk in England and US who could not recall his name, just to call him Messerschmidt!
Anyone heard Martin Haselbock’s orchester Wiener Akademie play Beethoven 5? I must say I like it along with Kleiber’s.