Word: kleiber
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With more elusive personalities like cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis in 1973, when she was 28, and Carlos Kleiber, the notoriously reclusive conductor who died last year, the interviews and documentaries that usually make up the bonus material on DVDs are scarce if not nonexistent. The producers are reduced to offering such extras as "photo galleries." No matter; the releases sell anyway. The performers' names and mystique are enough. Almost two decades after Du Pré's death in 1987, a DVD titled Jacqueline du Pré in Portraitis one of the best-selling offerings...
...final note, it's near impossible to imagine, but for an even more exhilarating experience, try watching Kleiber on Philips video conducting the same symphony, only this time with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam...
Though some of our colleagues at WHRB may suggest that these two symphonies are warhorses long overdue for the glue factory, Kleiber provides remarkably incisive and dramatic readings of both, perhaps even overshadowing his father's accounts on Decca. Although the German critical contingent criticized Kleiber's opening of the Fifth for its triplet tendencies, one can dismiss those caveats in light of the deliciously ferocious energy and forward momentum. An obsessive attention to detail is apparent, and the Vienna horns in particular have rarely sounded so resplendent. Remarkably, all of the repeats have been lovingly restored, and with great...
Beethoven's contemporaries declared that the Seventh Symphony could only have been composed by one who was drunk, perhaps alluding to Beethoven's unusual obsession with the rhythmic qualities of this composition. In that light, Kleiber presents a reading replete with charm and joyful abandon, tempered with sensitivity and intelligence...
Interestingly, Kleiber opts for the pizzicato ending of the second movement, like his father. Although scholarship more modern than Erich Kleiber's does not seem to support this novel gesture, it remains a provocative idea. Kleiber also manages to strike a balance between Beethoven's demands for an Allegretto in this movement and the correspondence other conductors note with the Eroica's funeral march...