Customer Reviews

The Furtwangler Record

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I think this book is useful primarily for classical CD collectors and Furtwangler's fans. It consists of a biography, recordings reviews and a discography. The biography describes Furtwangler's career using historical context. Recordings reviews are grouped by music eras and composers. Reviews cover all available recordings. You can read about performances of every opus, Furtwangler's thoughts from his books and letters concerning music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner and others. It is unique and often previously not published information. And at last you can read a comprehensive review of every recording. I found the reviews useful as it helps to decide whether to buy the recording or not. In Appendix you can find the discography by John Hunt. It covers all available CDs till 1992. LPs are mentioned only if there are no CDs for the item.

In this book, John Ardoin takes the reader on a journey through Furtwangler's recorded legacy. Instead of writing a biographical account of the conductor, he digs into his musical achievements and strings along biographical material here and there. The main focus is on the recordings and the chapters are listed by the various composers that Furtwangler specialized in.

The biggest focus is obviously on the Austo-German mainline of classical music. We get quite a lot dedicated to the recordings Furtwangler made of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, R. Strauss. We also get shorter entries dedicated to such different composers as Weber, Berlioz, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Hindemith and others. The composers are discussed chronologically of course. This book is full of insights and comprehensive in it's overview as it goes through all known Furtwangler recordings and there are quite a few of them.

I've been listening to Furtwangler for years and this book is a great supplement to understanding Furtwangler's style and artistic thought process. If you own the Beethoven and Brahms symphony sets released by Music and Arts, there are excerpts from this Ardoin book printed into the liner notes of those CD sets. That will give you an idea about what kind of writing this book contains. Ardoin is an intuitive writer and he lets Furtwangler speak for himself many times, taken directly from his notes, letters and talks.

I wish I had a book like this dedicated to Herbert von Karajan! The Karajan books I've found on the market are akin to the standard biographical model. Give me a biography of the recordings Karajan made like with this Furtwangler book. That would make my day. Of course since Karajan recorded so much, a book exclusively about every single record he ever made would be like 2000 pages long!