Blessed be Kna(转发)

Kna looks debonair on the cover of this collection. Has he traded in his cowboy suit for a dinner jacket to play Texas Hold `Em Poker with Showboat Billy on a Mississippi paddle-steamer? Watch out Kna - there's more than four aces in circulation!

Kna was in exemplary form when he conducted these live performances in the early Sixties with the NDR orchestra. The mono sound throughout is warm and detailed; it could almost pass for stereo.

Knappertsbusch did untold damage to his reputation by participating in that crab-like, studio-bound cycle of Beethoven Piano Concertos with Backhaus - sadly, they're the most prominent recordings in his discography. The circumstances of the endeavour were unpropitious. Here, Kna is back in form with a vengeance in Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto and the Emperor even if the soloist, Paul Badura Skoda, is distinctly B grade (in a non-pejorative sense). Blemishes from the keyboard are legion; indeed, it takes a brave pianist to perpetrate the mishaps in the first movement of the C Minor concerto and yet finish the performance with such bravura. The spirit of these works is observed. They're listenable but not definitive. Gieseking in his famous air-raid performance is regnant in the Emperor ( Piano Concerto 5 " Emperor " ).

Bruckner's Third Symphony is more unruly than the Roaring Forties. Kna is its master. This circumnavigation is arguably the best of his many readings. Drama is conjugal with mysticism. Kna was never so well-served by the sound-engineers. The NDR as a unit punches above its weight-division. It's a highlight of this collection.

Zubin Mehta - such as he is - attended some Knappertsbusch concerts in his youth which left him in a state of a amazement: how could the "old crocodile" perform works so slowly and yet still maintain such tension? Perhaps Mister Foghorn Leghorn attended this performance of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony: there's no better illustration of this point. The commencement of the finale is a sucker-punch - it's testudinal enough to shock Klemperer - and yet how quickly does Kna demonstrate that genuine excitement has nothing to do with surface-speed: whack, whack, whack. It's gutsy stuff and almost on par with Edition Hans Knappertsbusch & Bpo: Comp Rias Rec .

As expected, the Wagner is magisterial even if the NDR cannot match the sonority of the Vienna Philharmonic in the Siegfried Idyll ( Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture; Siegfried-Idyll; Tristan und Isolde ) or their Berlin counterparts in Die Meistersingers ( Wagner: Orchestral Music ). Christa Ludwig, a mezzo-soprano, copes amazingly well with Brunnhilde's tessitura. Her characterisation is vivid.

That leaves one work on the program: Beethoven's Coriolan Overture. Aeschylus tells us that

He who learns must suffer - and even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart

until, in our own despair, against our will,

comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

The great tragedy of Kna's life was the loss of his only child, Anita Knappertsbusch, at the age of 19. She died of a brain tumour. For the remainder of his life, Kna kept the key to her sepulchre on his personage - even in concerts. Only someone versed in suffering could've evoked this reading of the Coriolan. It's pitiless in its depiction of fate, tragedy and oblivion. Such be its ferocity, it makes the listener fearful for their own safety and that of loved ones. To my mind, this eclipses the wartime Furtwangler performance or Karajan in Moscow 1

Three stars for the Beethoven Piano Concertos, Four Stars for the Wagner and Five Stars for the Bruckner and Beethoven Eighth. The extraordinary reading of the Coriolan overture is off the charts.

Blessed be Kna.