Wilhelm Furtwängler was undoubtedly the living embodiment of the highest ideals of German music of the last century, and he undeniably lived through the worst imaginable catastrophe for his country. After he was allowed to conduct again in 1947,
Furtwängler resumed his leadership of the
Berlin Philharmonic and the
Vienna Philharmonic and thereby the leadership of German musical life. With the
Vienna Philharmonic,
Furtwängler also gave ten concerts at the Salzburg Festival between 1947 and his death in 1954, concerts that show the living embodiment of the highest musical ideals having been harshly tested and severely chastened, but ultimately thoroughly transformed and wholly transfigured.
In this eight-disc set drawn from seven of those ten concerts,
Furtwängler's performances are communal sacraments enacted before an international festival audience. Tested and chastened,
Furtwängler's interpretations are expansive and inclusive, exalted and exhilarating, awesome and ecstatic, luminous and numinous, sublime and humane. They are not without flaws: the opening of the finale of
Hindemith's Die Harmonie der Welt 1951 is out of tune, portions of the Grosse Fugue from 1954 are out of sync, most of
Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements from 1950 is out of temper, and the Beethoven Ninth from 1951 is more harshly severe than the celebratory Ninth from the opening Bayreuth Festival a few weeks earlier. However most of the performances -- the passionate Brahms Fourth and magnificent Beethoven Third from 1950, the glorious Bruckner Fifth and the fervent Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with
Fischer-Dieskau in 1951 -- are among the greatest ever made. Most revelatory is
Furtwängler's playing the solo cadenza of Bach's Fifth Brandenburg on the piano in 1950. Alone with the music before all eternity,
Furtwängler meditates on creation and destruction, on transformation and transfiguration. Orfeo's remastering is as good as possible.