It appears EMI has lost the exclusive right to release discs featuring
Wilhelm Furtwängler's epoch-making account of
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony performed on July 29, 1951, at the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival. How else can one explain the release of that performance on this disc from Archipel's Desert Island Collection? It could be argued that technically Archipel's recording is not EMI's recording since EMI's was taped using microphones, an engineer, and a producer while Archipel's seems to have been taped off of a top-heavy broadcast using a wavering handheld microphone. But with the same audience noises and orchestral flubs marring both recordings in the same places, they are manifestly the same performance. EMI's recording has been available nonstop since its first release more than half a century ago, and as anyone who has heard it already knows,
Furtwängler's performance with the
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and Chorus is one of the musical wonders of the ages, a performance of such transcendent power and sublime joy that it seems, as German philosopher Schopenhauer once said, to touch the infinite. But since EMI's recording is cleaner, deeper, and far more honest than Archipel's recording, the former is clearly preferable to the latter.