BBC Legends 3: Klaus Tennstedt’s Second Album

Conductor Klaus Tennstedt is the only performing artist in the latest BBC Legends series to be represented by more than one CD. This may be because the tenth CD is devoted only to a single composition, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 125 (“Choral”) symphony in D minor. As was previously observed, that album occupied the midpoint of the total collection. As a result, there is a certain element of symmetry in having the fifteenth CD, halfway between the tenth and the last, return to Tennstedt.

Once again he is leading the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall, this time on two different concert dates. The entire album provides a “journey” through the nineteenth century. It begins, appropriately enough, with an overture, the one composed by Carl Maria von Weber for his three-act opera Oberon. This is followed by another major achievement in the symphony genre, Franz Schubert’s D. 944 in C major, often called the “Great” to distinguish it from the D. 589 C major symphony, often called the “Little.” The album then concludes with a “symmetric return” to another overture, this one by Johannes Brahms, his Opus 81, given the title “Tragic Overture.”

This makes for such a satisfying chronological journey that it is a pity that the recording sessions did not follow that chronology. The Weber and Schubert selections were recorded on October 7, 1984. However, the final selection on the album was recorded earlier on April 7, 1983. Ironically, the plan for the CD would probably have made for a very engaging listening experience in its own right.

Indeed, that plan was so engaging that I never succumbed to that feeling of “saturation” that arose when I was listening to the Beethoven CD. The music itself was just as familiar to me as Beethoven’s Opus 125 was. However, what mattered was that the “journey” based on the ordering of the tracks was an imaginative one. By virtue of the overall plan, not one of those three familiar compositions left me with a here-we-go-again reaction. Furthermore, the freshness of the plan seemed to direct my attention to the freshness of interpretation that Tennstedt had brought to each of the three pieces, even though he could not have considered the underlying “chronological plan.”

This raises a point that may well deserve further examination. There is no questioning that a well-executed performance can be appreciated for its in-the-moment qualities. However, the track ordering of a CD has its own in-the-moment qualities, which almost always have more to do with the production team behind the CD than with any of the contributing performers. Put another way, there are distinct differences between the phenomenology of listening to a concert performance and that of listening to a recording. Now I need to retreat to some secluded spot to see if I can tease out just what those differences are! Most likely, phenomenology will have to share space with Hermann Weyl’s pioneering Symmetry monograph!