“..this is in my opinion the best Bruckner Fourth now available.” – Deryck Cooke, Gramophone, May 1965

This is one of four LPs that EMI/Columbia released for Otto Klemperer’s 80th birthday in 1965. Bruckner’s Symphonies were relatively unknown to the record-buying public in the 1960s, when complete cycles, like Bernard Haitink’s were still in the process of being recorded. Klemperer uses the Nowak edition of 1953, based on the 1886 revision of the score and gives and idiosyncratic interpretation, with outer movements faster than you would expect from this conductor, that nonetheless preserves the architecture of symphony, captured in vintage EMI/Kingsway Hall sound.

Recorded 18-20 & 24-26 September 1963, Kingsway Hall, London. Producer: Walter Legge. Engineer: Douglas Larter

Cut at Abbey Road Studios from the original stereo analogue master tapes with the Neumann VMS82 lathe fed an analogue pre-cut signal from a specially adapted Studer A80 tape deck with additional ‘advance’ playback head, making the cut a totally analogue process. Pressed on 180g vinyl to audiophile standards using the original EMI presses by The Vinyl Factory in Hayes, England. Featuring the original album artwork.

In the review of the stereo LP in The Gramophone of may 1965, Deryck Cooke, no less, enthused: “This is one of those rare occasions when a Bruckner symphony is presented in a single span, and the blazing climaxes seem all the more inspiring because they’re revealed as growing quite naturally out of what has gone before…Klemperer’s performance has a mighty and noble objectivity throughout.”