The surprising thing is not that these recordings from the '30s sound so clean and clear. Mark Obert-Thorn has been digitally remastering and restoring ancient recordings with the skill of an engineer and the love of an enthusiast for decades and the extremely high quality of his work is well-known. No, the surprising thing about these recordings from the '30s is how contemporary the performances sound. Felix Weingartner may have been born while Wagner was still composing Tristan, but his style of conducting is anything but nineteenth century German Romantic. In Weingartner's Beethoven, the music is lucid and direct with none of the interpretative flourishes that the nineteenth century was heir to. In Weingartner's June 1939 recording of the Piano Concerto in C minor, Op. 37, the music is dramatically powerful in the outer Allegros and deeply expressive in the central Largo, but the long line and the tight structure of the work is never bent or broken by tempo rubato or portamento. In Weingartner's October 1937 recording of the "Triple" Concerto in C major, Op. 56, the music is lyrically sustained and profoundly playful, but the work's wit and whimsy are never distorted and degraded by accelerando or ritardando. Although French pianist Marguerite Long and the Paris Conservatory Orchestra might at first seem odd partners for Weingartner in the C minor concerto, Long's playing is astonishingly idiomatic and astoundingly virtuosic, and the Paris Orchestra's playing is amazingly Germanic, which, in this repertoire, is a compliment. And while the three soloists for Weingartner in the concerto C major might not be often remembered today, the Vienna Philharmonic was then as it is now and always shall be the best Beethoven orchestra in the world.
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