Though less well-known outside Germany than the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, founded in 1893, has a long pedigree. Its early years were particularly distinguished – Felix Weingartner was an early music director, and Wilhelm Furtwängler made his debut with the orchestra; guest conductors included Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner and Max Reger. It gave the premieres of Mahler’s Fourth and Eighth Symphonies, and, posthumously, of Das Lied von der Erde, and at the same time it developed a tradition of Bruckner performances, which persisted after the second world war.
The last 60 years of the orchestra’s history, during which it has regained much of its former lustre, is documented in this 125th-anniversary collection. Nearly all of the conductors closely associated with it during that period are represented, from symphonies by Beethoven and Brahms conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch in the 1950s, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade from 2017 and Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind, recorded in February this year, under the current chief conductor, Valery Gergiev.
The copiously illustrated booklet accompanying the set includes a detailed account of the orchestra’s beginnings but becomes increasingly sketchy as it moves further into the 20th century, and gives no rationale for what has been included and what isn’t here. There’s no Bruckner or Mahler, for instance, and nothing conducted by Rudolf Kempe, who was chief conductor from 1967 until his death in 1976. Yet it’s still a substantial, serious set, even if not everything is genuinely cherishable – a 2014 Verdi Requiem, conducted by Lorin Maazel, is unremarkable, for instance, while James Levine’s account of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust from 1999 seems dramatically underpowered.
Given the Munich Philharmonic’s history – after the Nazis came to power it was known as the “Orchestra of the Fascist Movement” – it’s certainly brave to include a 1998 performance of Von Deutscher Seele, the Pfitzner song cycle, which had been included in a Nazi festival of “approved” works in 1938. But a couple of items are exceptional by any standards. Christa Ludwig’s performance of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, with Eugen Jochum conducting (a disc that also includes a superb account of Reger’s Hiller Variations) is one, while the other treasure is a complete performance of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte from 1964, conducted by Fritz Rieger; the cast, led by Anneliese Rothenberger, Fritz Wunderlich and Hermann Prey, is just about as good as it could have been at that time.
