Otto Klemperer
0724356785229
EMI Classics
About the album
Two more of the famous Beethoven recordings made by Otto Klemperer in 1955, at the start of the great German-born conductor's relationship with Walter Legge's Philharmonia Orchestra. Recorded originally in mono, the Seventh Symphony was also taped in experimental stereo by a legendary EMI engineer, Christopher Parker, whose own 1987 re-editing of his original tapes is featured in this reissue. As a result, and in the words of Richard Osborne in his booklet note, 'we are able to hear Klemperer's reading in all its spatial and dramatic splendour'. The Fifth Symphony has been recorded hundreds of times, yet genuinely satisfying recordings can be counted on the fingers of two hands, and Klemperer's rightly revered 1955 account is certainly amongst them.
