So popular is
Wilhelm Furtwängler the conductor 51 years after his death that
Wilhelm Furtwängler the composer gets recorded with amazing regularity. Almost all of his major works have been recorded and his best works have been recorded several times -- and not only by
Furtwängler himself. Even the Third Symphony, left unfinished at his death, currently has three recordings --
Alfred Walter's ham-fisted four-movement 1987 recording,
Wolfgang Sawallisch's warm-hearted three-movement 1980 recording belatedly issued in 1996, and George Alexander Walter thick-waisted four-movement 1998 recording issued first in 2000 and then again in 2005. Leading the Weimar Staatskapelle,
Walter's performance barely manages to hold the work's enormous and ungainly structure together for the first three movements and goes completely off-the-tracks halfway through the finale. Likewise, the Weimar Staatskapelle is only just up to the extraordinary demands of the music: the ensemble is more rough than ready, the strings have trouble with anything quicker than sixteenth notes, the winds are often out of tune in exposed passages, and the brass crack at climaxes and loose breath when holding harmonies. Although it contains only three movements of the four-movement work,
Sawallisch's recording of
Furtwängler's Third remains the best -- the most cogent, the most powerful, and the most affecting. Besides, there are certainly creditable arguments for performing the three-movement Third: unsure himself,
Furtwängler never authorized its performances in his lifetime. Arte Nova's sound is dry, gray, and hard.