Bruckner: Symphonies Nos 4 to 9 – review

EMI has embarked on a systematic repackaging of the recordings that Otto Klemperer made for the company with the Philharmonia (later New Philharmonia) between 1954 and 1971. The first batch of releases include boxes devoted to Beethoven, 19th-century symphonies and overtures from Schubert to Tchaikovsky, and to Mozart's Don Giovanni, as well as these six symphonies by the composer with whom Klemperer first made his name as a conductor in the 1920s. His Bruckner was, like the conductor himself, craggy and uncompromising, worlds away from the more moulded approach of his great contemporary Wilhelm Furtwängler, or the effulgence of Karajan's performances. What gives them such strength and purpose is their faultless sense of symphonic architecture. The reputation for slow tempi that stuck with Klemperer in the last decades has never seemed more irrelevant; however measured, the great spans of the opening movements of the Fifth and Eighth Symphonies never seem a moment too long.