Klemperer Recordings of Mozart and Haydn

In the first volume of the Warner Classics Remastered Edition of recordings of the conductor Otto Klemperer, the composer that receives the most attention is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (Where quantity is concerned, Ludwig van Beethoven is second on the list; but it is a relatively distant second.) The recordings began in the mid-Fifties after Klemperer had made London his musical base of operations, primarily as the conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra; and they continued into the mid-Sixties with the transition to the New Philharmonia Orchestra. This makes for a radical contrast with Herbert von Karajan, whose attention to recording Mozart only began to rise in the Seventies after his move to the Berlin Philharmonic.

Klemperer clearly took his Mozart seriously, but we have to remember that his approach to Mozart was cultivated long before the concept of “historically-informed performance” was born. Nevertheless, if we are willing to listen to these Warner CDs and take them on their own terms, there is much to appreciate in Klemperer’s capacity for the light touch that permeated so much of Mozart’s symphonic repertoire. Indeed, more often than not, these recordings are downright cheerful, as are his accounts of the opera overtures and the “entertainment” serenades, the most elaborate of which is the K. 361 “Gran Partita,” scored for twelve winds and one bass. Furthermore, while many will swear by the recordings of the four horn concertos made by Dennis Brain with Karajan conducting the Philharmonia in 1953, Klemperer’s sessions with Alan Civil in 1960 are just as spritely, if not a bit more on the humorous side.

Indeed, if I have any disappointment about Klemperer’s approach to Mozart, it is that he did not make a comparable number of recordings taking the same approach to Joseph Haydn. The Warner collection has only four CDs, each of which accounts for two Haydn symphonies, all of which were composed relatively late in his career and most of them associated with his time in London. Klemperer’s light touch is consistently spirited with Haydn’s never-ending capacity for humor. One can relish that delightful rhetoric without lamenting the absence of the best-known of those symphonies, Hoboken I/94 in G major, best known as the “Surprise” symphony. The fact is that Klemperer had his own capacity for surprising the attentive listener, and he could deliver those surprises in his approaches to Mozart as well as Haydn.

Warner’s revival of those recorded performances do much to acknowledge the freshness of Klemperer’s approaches to First Viennese School rhetoric.