Now, this is a great Bruckner performance. Almost forgotten a generation after his death Franz Konwitschny, director of both the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig and the Berlin State Opera from 1949 until his death in 1962, was much the finest and by far the most successful East German conductor of his time. Konwitschny didn't seek to match the glamour of Herbert von Karajan, his West German opposite number; he was interested in something else entirely. Born in 1901 at the height of German romantic idealism, Konwitschny came of age in the milieu of post-War modernism, and in his maturity the one influence tempered the other so that the classic Konwitschny performances were clean and lucid but enormously concentrated and unbearably intense. In this 1953 recording with the Czech Philharmonic first released on Supraphon, Konwitschny brings his combination of lucidity and intensity to bear on Bruckner's Fourth Symphony. Then as now one of the warmest and supplest orchestras in Europe, the Czech Philharmonic here sounds initially a bit uneasy with Konwitschny's muscular directions, but they settle down by the opening movement's development and stay tight and together for the rest of the performance. With them, Konwitschny molds a performance of unstoppable drive, immense gravity and tremendous grandeur, all the hallmarks of a great Bruckner performances. For latter-day Brucknerian who know best Karajan's more charismatic recordings, Konwitschny's grand but not grandiloquent recording will be clear the mind, cleanse the palette and sooth the spirit.
Preiser's re-issue of the Supraphon originally sounds clear but quite dim, colorful but very distant.