Ernst Pepping was born in 1901, the same year as Harry Partch, and Heinz Schubert’s 1908 birth year was the same as Elliott Carter’s. Without knowing this information, you’d swear that Pepping’s Symphony No. 2 in F minor and Schubert’s Hymnisches Konzert were composed in the last few decades of the 19th century! Imagine Dvorak breaking bread with Vaughan Williams at Bruckner’s house and you’ll get a sense of Pepping’s symphonic idiom. Furtwängler’s live recording from an October 20, 1943 concert is remarkably well-engineered for its time and free of the stridency and overloaded dynamics that you often find in wartime tape-based German radio recordings. The Berlin Philharmonic strings play well, although the brass section leaves much to be desired, especially the sour-toned trumpet solos. You also could imagine firmer control of the music’s frequent rhythmic syncopations (Copland echt-Deutsch!) and more adroitly effected transitions.
By contrast, Furtwängler and his orchestra give a superbly executed and ardent, committed reading of Heinz Schubert’s interminable-at-37-minutes Hymnisches Konzert for Organ, Soprano, Tenor, and Orchestra. The performance stems from a concert given between December 6th and 8th, 1942. Again, the sonics belie the era. The music resembles Pfitzner’s crabby polyphony merged with Bach, served up in thick, twaddlesome slabs of tedium. Soprano Erna Berger and tenor Walter Ludwig sing with vibrancy and beauty as they float over Schubert’s lardy orchestration like doves soaring over an elephant herd. The booklet notes gush on and on about the conductor but say nothing about the composers and their works, and you wonder if it had not been approved by the Nazi regime whether Furtwängler would have bothered with this music at all.
