One typically thinks of conductors from the 78 RPM era as having been conferred a halo of greatness which sometimes seem to glow brighter the worse the quality of their recordings get. But in the case of Georg Schnéevoigt, the reception of his posthumous legacy is, at best, “mixed.” If he is remembered at all, it is for his championing of the music of his compatriot Jean Sibelius, of whom he was a pioneering proponent on records. But unlike his colleague Robert Kajanus, whose recordings remain touchstones of Sibelian authenticity, posterity has been not as kind to Schnéevoigt’s shortcomings. His 1934 recording of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4, for example, was privately criticized by the composer, leading HMV to withhold its commercial release. It was not hard to hear why it remained in the vaults for so long upon its eventual release over 40 years later: Simply put, it was a sloppy and ragged performance. (Small wonder then that HMV engaged Sir Thomas Beecham and his London Philharmonic for a remake which remains a classic.) Further tarnishing his reputation was the retrospective view of his helming of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “The bland Finn,” was local critic Gilbert Brown’s pithy appraisal of Schnéevoigt’s abilities. It does not help that the conductor made few recordings.

So what to make of Pristine Classic’s latest release, comprising of an all-Sibelius program led by Schnéevoigt with the NBC Symphony? The concert was part of Finland’s contribution to the 1939 World’s Fair, the crowning moment of an entire “Sibelius Week,” with Schnéevoigt appearing in New York City as a musical ambassador. Miles Kastendieck, reviewing the concert the following day in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, proclaimed it a “virtuoso performance of striking brilliance” in which Sibelius’ genius was “revealed in all its greatness.” Schnéevoigt’s Carnegie Hall audience seemed to agree, lavishing warm applause upon the performance. Whatever his faults may have been, on this evening at least Schnéevoigt was anything but “bland.”

His readings here are direct, unaffected, controlled, and powerfully inflected. Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 opens up with an almost Stravinskian clarity and dryness, starkly prefiguring the comparatively more severe sound world of this score’s successor; although the big, muscular moments in this music (especially the recapitulation of the mighty theme in the finale) emerge all the more impressively for it. No less fine is Schnéevoigt’s interpretation of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7, which surges forward as if in a single breath. Its restraint makes for telling contrast with Serge Koussevitzky’s BBC recording from around the same period (another Sibelian classic). Only the omission of the symphony’s opening minutes—the unfortunate result of NBC needing to accord space to its announcer—mars what would otherwise be an essential recording. Preceding the symphonies are two movements from what eventually became designated as part of the Lemminkäinen Suite. The movements—“Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island” and “Lemminkäinen in Tuonela”—had only been recently published after having been withdrawn by the composer shortly after their completion. Schnéevoigt’s was their first American performance and while his reading has plenty of brawn, it is tempered by a sense of dignity. Opening the concert was a carefully proportioned and unsentimental interpretation of Finlandia.

Andrew Rose’s transfer sounds splendid over speakers. The balance of the mid-range and the definition of the treble are especially good.

Was Schnéevoigt unjustly maligned by posterity? This important release makes abundantly clear that at the very least his art deserves a second look from committed Sibelians.

Two of the most tempestuous decades of history, personal and global, had passed by the time Otto Klemperer returned to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1962. Militarism, World War II, and the resulting seismic political and cultural shifts had left the world vastly changed from the one that existed at the time of his previous visit in 1936, when he aspired to succeed Leopold Stokowski.

In 1939 Klemperer was diagnosed with a right-sided acoustic neuroma—a brain tumor the size of a small apple sitting upon the nerve that transmits hearing and balance. The operation to remove it was a success; recovery less so. He suffered a permanent facial droop on his right side, partial atrophy of his tongue, and a years long manic episode that exasperated his family and colleagues. Thomas Mann noted that he appeared “unbalanced,” “noisy,” and “rather terrible.” His behavior soon became too much to bear for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose board terminated his contract in 1941.

“In the following years things went very bad for us financially,” he recalled. “I conducted very, very little. No one invited me.”

His erratic conduct worsened to the degree that he was considered unemployable, at least in the United States. Disillusioned, he eagerly returned to Europe as soon as the war ended, settling on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain in Hungary. His increasingly vociferous anti-Americanism stoked the suspicions of the FBI; his ironic skepticism of “socialist realism” irked Russian authorities.

Finally in 1951 he earned the international breakthrough he and his family had so dearly been seeking. At the second of that year’s Festival of Britain concerts in London, Walter Legge—EMI’s producer-generalissimo—heard Klemperer’s performance of the Mozart “Jupiter” from the wings of the Royal Albert Hall. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eleven years later, Klemperer made his final appearances stateside, now as a celebrated elder statesman of the baton. To Eugene Ormandy, whom he privately excoriated over his thwarted Philadelphia ambitions in 1936, he cordially wrote that he looked forward to his forthcoming engagement with his orchestra. They almost did not come to pass.

Trouble was afoot. After a consultation, his psychiatrist in his new home in Zurich recommended that Klemperer cancel the concerts—advice that was duly ignored. He was at the beginning of a depressive spell that influenced his decision-making. Most regrettable for posterity was the collapse of recording plans with the Philadelphia Orchestra for Columbia, which hinged on not upsetting EMI in England, to whom he was contracted. Despite his initial enthusiasm for the project, as well as the personal involvement of Ormandy in its negotiations, Klemperer refused to accommodate these conditions and revise his programs of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms; he even scrapped plans to perform and record his own Symphony No. 2.

On the eve of his performances, Klemperer was suffering from an unusually bad case of stage fright. As soon as he arrived with his daughter Lotte in New York City, he sealed himself off in his rented room and refused all visitors, save for his son Werner and a select group of close friends. He experienced a precipitous drop in weight and persistent insomnia.

Nevertheless, Legge continued to believe that Klemperer’s circumstances were a “fortunate state of affairs [that] almost guaranteed him a triumph with the Philadelphia Orchestra.” This turned out to not quite be the case. As had occurred twenty-five years earlier, audiences thrilled to Klemperer, but American musical critics—still under the sway of Arturo Toscanini, who had only passed away five years before—remained dismissive.

“There has been in England recently the same excitement about Klemperer. . . as there used to be about Toscanini. . . This talk was contradicted by the performances I heard in Carnegie Hall. . . Klemperer’s disregard of Beethoven’s directions and character produced strange slow-motion performances,” opined B. H. Haggin, longtime keeper of the late Maestro’s flame, before adding with a palpable disapproving sneer that these “somnolent performances. . . excited the audience to cheers.”

Others were more circumspect, if still cool. “Tempi were a bit slower and a shade more deliberate than those to which audiences in this country are accustomed,” was the guarded appraisal of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “[His concerts] had the aura. . . of a religious rite,” said Eric Salzman of the New York Times. “The public was awe-struck, the critics mainly skeptical.”

Although his planned series of recordings for Columbia fell through, broadcasts of Klemperer’s final Philadelphia Orchestra engagements have survived, and in decent sound besides. Whatever reservations that critics of that time may have had are hard to discern now that the high tide of the Toscanini cult has ebbed. Far from being “somnolent,” Klemperer’s performances are muscular; drawing from Ormandy’s Philadelphians an uncharacteristically manly, craggy sound.

“A conductor must know how to hold attention,” Klemperer would muse near the end of his life. In these broadcasts he succeeds in that task, well after he and all those he loved in life have passed on into the eternity of history.

(This essay will be included as liner notes in a future Japanese release of Klemperer’s Philadelphia concerts.)

He did it his way: Otto Klemperer rehearsing the Philadelphia Orchestra, 1962.