Stop it already! How much more live Hans Knappertsbusch material in terrible sound can the public tolerate? Here, for instance, is a 1964 concert rendition of Wagner’s Die Walküre Act 1, released for the first time. Its skewed balances and ragged execution reduce Wagner’s rich orchestration to a stodgy concerto for timpani and village band. When the voices enter, they’re uncomfortably close to the microphone, or tin can and string, as the case might well have been. The overall effect is tantamount to Claire Watson and Fritz Uhl (who portray the Walsung twins) pressing their lips to your ears before they sing. Josef Greindl’s woofy but involved Hunding is similarly miked, but not as sonically lacerating. If you can listen to this performance once all the way through, your tolerance for audio hell is better than mine. Stick to Kna’s Bayreuth Walküres or the studio Vienna Act One with Flagstad, Svanholm, and Van Mill. The Bruckner Fourth (or rather, the Schalk-Lowe Wagnerian translation of Bruckner’s original scoring) stems from Kna’s last concert in Vienna, more than a year before his death in 1965. Sonics are less constricted, but still fuzzy and harsh, while orchestral discipline is limited to beautifully pointed string phrasing in the slow movement and portions of the Scherzo. The latter’s bumptious tempi and heavy-handed articulation go down like headcheese with a buttermilk chaser. Diehard Knappertsbusch acolytes should know that the Bruckner sounds slightly better in Melodram’s Kna/Bruckner box and on a bygone Nuova Era release. If you need a Knappertsbusch Bruckner Fourth, get his wartime Berlin broadcast. Not this.
