Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3 (HQCD review)

Also, Hebrides Overture. Otto Klemperer, Philharmonia Orchestra. HDTT HQCD233.

German conductor and composer Otto Klemperer had a career that spanned some seven decades, a career that went so far back he knew and was friends with Gustav Mahler. However, audiences today probably know him best from his stereo recordings with the Philharmonia and New Philharmonia Orchestras, a tenure that lasted from 1959 until his retirement in 1971 and resulted in any number of fine recordings.

Although he was a conductor whom millions of people loved, he also garnered much negative criticism. Many people continue to view him as too old fashioned, too rigid, too monumental a conductor, his music-making too ponderous and slow. Certainly, that last criticism is valid. He did offer up slower tempos as he got older, largely because he enjoyed shaping every musical phrase meticulously, taking his time about letting the music unfold as the notes informed him, often making them come alive with a strength and concentration listeners had seldom heard before. People also sometimes say his performances were unsmiling, that his interpretations were without wit or charm. To this latter criticism, I would sincerely disagree. Klemperer gave us some of the most-buoyant, most-delightful renditions possible of the German and Austrian repertoire he knew so well, particularly the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner. Many of his recordings of these composers are among my favorites by anyone.

Which brings us to his Mendelssohn, his stereo EMI recordings of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Symphony No. 4 being for me at the top of the charts. If his reading of the Symphony No. 3, here remastered by HDTT (High Definition Tape Transfers), isn't quite in the same exalted category, it is at least a sweet and loving tribute to the composer's love of lyric Romanticism.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) finished his Third Symphony in 1842, and despite its number, it was the last of the five symphonies he wrote. He referred to it as his "Scottish" symphony and started it over a dozen years earlier after a visit to Scotland. It's not really very Scottish, though; it's more of a brief, musical impression the composer got of the country and expanded upon through the years. Anyway, Klemperer takes the opening movement at a gentle, leisurely, flowing, always melodious gait, which may only serve to reinforce the critics' notion that the man's music making was simply slow. True, the Scherzo that follows does not come off as exuberantly under Klemperer as it does under some of his rivals, but it does maintain the same genial spirit of the preceding section. The third-movement Adagio actually moves along at a relatively quick pace, yet Klemperer never hurries it, keeping it ever graceful and fluid. It's only in the finale that Klemperer truly disappoints, the music never catching fire. While I suppose it's a part of the conductor's grand scheme, it does seem more than a tad lax, lacking much passion. Interestingly, Klemperer recorded the same symphony about a decade earlier in mono, which people claim is a more impetuous, more spontaneous, more high-spirited performance. I haven't heard it, so I can't say.

Be that as it may, even though Klemperer makes a strong case for the beauty and eloquence of the Third Symphony, I continue to prefer the recordings of Peter Maag (Decca), Claudio Abbado (Decca or DG), Herbert Blomstedt (Decca), Leonard Bernstein (Sony), Bernard Haitink (Philips), and Andre Previn (EMI) to his. Still, it's hard to knock Klemperer's calm repose.

Coupled with the symphony, we find Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, also called Fingal's Cave, a concert overture he wrote in 1830, revising and premiering it in 1832. Here, Klemperer shows more energy than he did in the Third Symphony and provides a moving portrait of the island landscape, sea, and waves.

Recorded by EMI in 1960 and remastered by HDTT in 2011 on an HQCD, the sound is quite good.  Coincidentally, I had on hand for comparison the same symphony recording remastered by EMI Japan in 2010, also on an HQCD. Both discs are splendid, with reasonably wide dynamics, a realistic midrange, and a natural ambient bloom to the acoustic. The differences are that the newer HDTT sounds slightly smoother and fuller to me, with a marginally stronger bass response; and the EMI Japan sounds to a very small degree more open. Nevertheless, both discs could have used a little more sparkle at the top end, possibly the result of noise reduction.

After listening first to the entire HDTT disc to appreciate the performances, I switched back and forth between two CD players for the sonic comparison. While the differences I found were not huge, they did, overall, tend to favor the HDTT. Nevertheless, to its credit the EMI-Japan disc comes with Klemperer's outstanding Fourth Symphony as a companion piece, the HDTT only the Hebrides Overture. However, one has to order the EMI Japan all the way from Japan, which isn't the cheapest proposition I can think of.

For details about HDTT products, you can visit their Web site at http://www.highdeftapetransfers.com/storefront.php.

JJP

Meet the Staff

Meet the Staff
John J. Puccio, Founder and Contributor

Understand, I'm just an everyday guy reacting to something I love. And I've been doing it for a very long time, my appreciation for classical music starting with the musical excerpts on the Big Jon and Sparkie radio show in the early Fifties and the purchase of my first recording, The 101 Strings Play the Classics, around 1956. In the late Sixties I began teaching high school English and Film Studies as well as becoming interested in hi-fi, my audio ambitions graduating me from a pair of AR-3 speakers to the Fulton J's recommended by The Stereophile's J. Gordon Holt. In the early Seventies, I began writing for a number of audio magazines, including Audio Excellence, Audio Forum, The Boston Audio Society Speaker, The American Record Guide, and from 1976 until 2008, The $ensible Sound, for which I served as Classical Music Editor.

Today, I'm retired from teaching and use a pair of bi-amped VMPS RM40s loudspeakers for my listening. In addition to writing for the Classical Candor blog, I served as the Movie Review Editor for the Web site Movie Metropolis (formerly DVDTown) from 1997-2013. Music and movies. Life couldn't be better.

Karl Nehring, Editor and Contributor

For more than 20 years I was the editor of The $ensible Sound magazine and a regular contributor to both its equipment and recordings review pages. I would not presume to present myself as some sort of expert on music, but I have a deep love for and appreciation of many types of music, "classical" especially, and have listened to thousands of recordings over the years, many of which still line the walls of my listening room (and occasionally spill onto the furniture and floor, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife). I have always taken the approach as a reviewer that what I am trying to do is simply to point out to readers that I have come across a recording that I have found of interest, a recording that I think they might appreciate my having pointed out to them. I suppose that sounds a bit simple-minded, but I know I appreciate reading reviews by others that do the same for me — point out recordings that they think I might enjoy.

For readers who might be wondering about what kind of system I am using to do my listening, I should probably point out that I do a LOT of music listening and employ a variety of means to do so in a variety of environments, as I would imagine many music lovers also do. Starting at the more grandiose end of the scale, the system in which I do my most serious listening comprises Marantz CD 6007 and Onkyo CD 7030 CD players, NAD C 658 streaming preamp/DAC, Legacy Audio PowerBloc2 amplifier, and a pair of Legacy Audio Focus SE loudspeakers. I occasionally do some listening through pair of Sennheiser 560S headphones. I miss the excellent ELS Studio sound system in our 2016 Acura RDX (now my wife's daily driver) on which I had ripped more than a hundred favorite CDs to the hard drive, so now when driving my 2022 Accord EX-L Hybrid I stream music from my phone through its adequate but not outstanding factory system. For more casual listening at home when I am not in my listening room, I often stream music through the phone into a Vizio soundbar system that has tolerably nice sound for such a diminutive physical presence. And finally, at the least grandiose end of the scale, I have an Ultimate Ears Wonderboom II Bluetooth speaker for those occasions where I am somewhere by myself without a sound system but in desperate need of a musical fix. I just can’t imagine life without music and I am humbly grateful for the technology that enables us to enjoy it in so many wonderful ways.

William (Bill) Heck, Webmaster and Contributor

Among my early childhood memories are those of listening to my mother playing records (some even 78 rpm ones!) of both classical music and jazz tunes. I suppose that her love of music was transmitted genetically, and my interest was sustained by years of playing in rock bands – until I realized that this was no way to make a living. The interest in classical music was rekindled in grad school when the university FM station serving as background music for studying happened to play the Brahms First Symphony. As the work came to an end, it struck me forcibly that this was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and from that point on, I never looked back. This revelation was to the detriment of my studies, as I subsequently spent way too much time simply listening, but music has remained a significant part of my life. These days, although I still can tell a trumpet from a bassoon and a quarter note from a treble clef, I have to admit that I remain a nonexpert. But I do love music in general and classical music in particular, and I enjoy sharing both information and opinions about it.

The audiophile bug bit about the same time that I returned to classical music. I’ve gone through plenty of equipment, brands from Audio Research to Yamaha, and the best of it has opened new audio insights. Along the way, I reviewed components, and occasionally recordings, for The $ensible Sound magazine. Most recently I’ve moved to my “ultimate system” consisting of a BlueSound Node streamer, an ancient Toshiba multi-format disk player serving as a CD transport, Legacy Wavelet II DAC/preamp/crossover, dual Legacy PowerBloc2 amps, and Legacy Signature SE speakers (biamped), all connected with decently made, no-frills cables. With the arrival of CD and higher resolution streaming, that is now the source for most of my listening.

Ryan Ross, Contributor

I started listening to and studying classical music in earnest nearly three decades ago. This interest grew naturally out of my training as a pianist. I am now a musicologist by profession, specializing in British and other symphonic music of the 19th and 20th centuries. My scholarly work has been published in major music journals, as well as in other outlets. Current research focuses include twentieth-century symphonic historiography, and the music of Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Malcolm Arnold.

I am honored to contribute writings to Classical Candor. In an age where the classical recording industry is being subjected to such profound pressures and changes, it is more important than ever for those of us steeped in this cultural tradition to continue to foster its love and exposure. I hope that my readers can find value, no matter how modest, in what I offer here.


Bryan Geyer, Technical Analyst

I initially embraced classical music in 1954 when I mistuned my car radio and heard the Heifetz recording of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. That inspired me to board the new "hi-fi" DIY bandwagon. In 1957 I joined one of the pioneer semiconductor makers and spent the next 32 years marketing transistors and microcircuits to military contractors. Home audio DIY projects remained a personal passion until 1989 when we created our own new photography equipment company. I later (2012) revived my interest in two channel audio when we "downsized" our life and determined that mini-monitors + paired subwoofers were a great way to mate fine music with the space constraints of condo living.

Visitors that view my technical papers on this site may wonder why they appear here, rather than on a site that features audio equipment reviews. My reason is that I tried the latter, and prefer to publish for people who actually want to listen to music; not to equipment. My focus is in describing what's technically beneficial to assure that the sound of the system will accurately replicate the source input signal (i. e. exhibit high accuracy) without inordinate cost and complexity. Conversely, most of the audiophiles of today strive to achieve sound that's euphonic, i.e. be personally satisfying. In essence, audiophiles seek sound that's consistent with their desire; the music is simply a test signal.

Mission Statement

It is the goal of Classical Candor to promote the enjoyment of classical music. Other forms of music come and go--minuets, waltzes, ragtime, blues, jazz, bebop, country-western, rock-'n'-roll, heavy metal, rap, and the rest--but classical music has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds more. It's no accident that every major city in the world has one or more symphony orchestras.

When I was young, I heard it said that only intellectuals could appreciate classical music, that it required dedicated concentration to appreciate. Nonsense. I'm no intellectual, and I've always loved classical music. Anyone who's ever seen and enjoyed Disney's Fantasia or a Looney Tunes cartoon playing Rossini's William Tell Overture or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 can attest to the power and joy of classical music, and that's just about everybody.

So, if Classical Candor can expand one's awareness of classical music and bring more joy to one's life, more power to it. It's done its job. --John J. Puccio

Contact Information

Readers with polite, courteous, helpful letters may send them to classicalcandor@gmail.com

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"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa

"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa