BBC Legends 3: Klaus Tennstedt’s Beethoven

from the Facebook home page for the Klaus Tennstedt Appreciation Society

The tenth CD marks the midpoint in the latest BBC Legends series, as it did in the two preceding releases. However, on this new release the content can be considered as a “landmark,” which was not the case in the earlier collections. That landmark is a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 125 (“Choral”) symphony in D minor. The recording was made during a performance at the Royal Festival Hall on September 13, 1985. The CD is also a landmark because it presents the first appearance in the series of conductor Klaus Tennstedt. He leads the London Philharmonic Orchestra and (in the final movement) Choir, joined by four vocal soloists: soprano Marianne Häggander, contralto Alfreda Hodgson, tenor Robert Tear, and bass Gwynne Howell.

Tennstedt earned a fair amount of attention during the end of the last century. Back in 1971 when there was still an “East Germany,” he managed to emigrate to Sweden, where he was granted asylum. Once “in the West,” he quickly found performance opportunities in both Europe and the United States, conducting many of the leading American ensembles in the Seventies and Eighties. He also led a series of seven performances of Beethoven’s Opus 72 Fidelio at the Metropolitan Opera. The last of these was for a Saturday afternoon radio broadcast.

For the most part, my encounters with Tennstedt involved recordings I heard over the radio. Over the following decades, my memories of those recordings quickly faded. Unless I am mistaken, my only previous writing about him took place during my tenure with Examiner.com, when I wrote about his contribution to Profil’s twenty-CD collection of the music of Anton Bruckner in July of 2013. Tennstedt was the conductor for WAB 103, the third symphony in D minor. Since that time, my Bruckner listening skills have grown thanks to performances in Davies Symphony Hall. However, WAB 103 is far from the most popular of the Bruckner symphonies; and I continue to value my Tennstedt recording.

Where Beethoven’s Opus 125 is concerned, on the other hand, I feel as if I have reached a threshold of saturation in my listening experiences. Like many I watched the PBS video of the renovated home of the New York Philharmonic, now named the Wu Tsai Theater. The reopening of this space took place on October 8 of last year with Jaap van Zweden conducting the Beethoven symphony. While his reading was capable enough, I found the performance to be dutiful rather than expressive.

Ironically, this was basically the way in which I responded to the Tennstedt CD for BBC Legends. There was a clear sense of an orderly execution, applied not only to the individual notes but also to the overall phrasing of the thematic material. Nevertheless, it was all I could do to keep the familiarity from breeding discontent.

Given the impressive breadth of Tennstedt’s repertoire, I would have happily traded Opus 125 for one of those lesser-known Bruckner symphonies any day!