BEETHOVEN: (Piano) Concerto No. 4; Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic; Columbia MS 6262

During its circa 10 years of existence, roughly spanning the 1990s, the French label Dante brought out, through its sub-labels Lys and HPC (Historical Piano Collection), a unique heritage of more than 800 CDs of historical recordings. But while Dante does seem to have a fan base among buyers even today (judging from the prices at which some of their issues go on eBay, always the best place to assess the true market value), it also has a very ambivalent standing with collectors of such historical reissues. There are those who consider it to be no more than a bootleg label, pirating its reissues from other and more legitimate labels and bringing them out in inferior sonic conditions.I think the picture is more complex than that. I have numerous cases, especially with French performers, where Dante's reissues had no predecessors that I could locate, even on LP when reissues of 78 rmps, or on CD when reissues of LPs or broadcast performances, so there is no way that they could have dubbed them from anything else but the original sources.But with their reissues of the great "international" conductors, Furtwängler, Mengelberg, Toscanini, Böhm, I am more cautious, and I don't doubt that some of their reissues were indeed pirated from earlier legitimate editions. But who liveth by the sword... it is ironic that Dante's catalog should now be siphoned by labels like TIM or Membran (about that see my review of Ormandy: Maestro Brillante (Box Set)).And this, Dante Lys 070, volume 6 of their Furtwängler-Beethoven cycle, is a case in point. To make a long story short, Dante's 1996 edition of Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto performed by Conrad Hansen and the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwängler - apparently collated from various live performances given between October 31 and November 3, 1943, a recording which had wide circulation since its first appearance on a Unicorn LP in 1969 - is directly taken from Music & Arts' 1994 release, CD-839, Piano Concerti 1 & 4, where it is paired with Furtwängler's 1947 performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Adrian Aeschbacher (also on Dante Lys 199, Furtwängler Conducts Beethoven Piano Concerto No.1 & Symphony No.8, which I haven't heard, but I'm ready to bet it is Music & Arts transfer). For the long story, see my review of the Music & Arts release.That in itself may not have been a problem. After all, many buyers have the attitude "who cares if it is pirated, if it is made available cheaper". Not very ethical, but understandable in a world of limited financial resources and infinite temptations. That it risks sending the legitimate labels like Music & Arts out of business and ultimately dry up the sources of those reissues, only remotely comes into consideration.But the problem here is that Dante chose the wrong source to pirate from. The transfers of Music & Arts, I am sorry to say, were inferior in the first place. I've just had the opportunity to compare the Music & Arts transfers and those of Archipel, Beethoven Piano Concertos 1 & 4, a release from 2002, and the sonic superiority of the latter is jaw-dropping. That the Music & Arts transfer of the First Piano Concerto is by far the worst, and the superiority of Archipel's the most pronounced there, doesn't mean that Music & Arts, and hence Dante's Fourth is good: on comparison with Archipel's, it sounds like one of those overfiltered dubs better associated with bootleg labels, with a disagreeably tubby sound on both piano and orchestra, the kind of sound you might have expected to hear in a 1943 movie, but not a sound recording. Archipel's sonics aren't ideal, lacking a touch of brilliance and with some harshness in the orchestral fortes, but they are incomparably fuller and more comfortable than Music & Arts/Dante's.Now, the sad part of that story is that, after hearing Archipel's edition, I was able to establish that it too had been plundered from another edition, Tahra's, a transfer found originally on a 6-CD set (not 2 as the Amazon entry says) from 1999 devoted to Furtwängler's wartime recordings, Wilhelm Furtwaengler and Berlin Philharmonic Wartime Archives of Thr Rrg and reissued in 2010 on a single CD, Furtwängler Dirigiert Beethoven. No wonder Thara's sonics were so much better: they worked, apparently, from the original tapes of sound engineer Friedrich Schnapp, which had been given back to Germany by Gorbatchov's Soviet Union. Same thinking as above then, who cares if it's pirated, if it is cheaper? Yes, but Tahra has recently announced that they ceased producing new recordings: they sold so few copies that it wasn't worthwhile anymore. This is starting to look like Lion Kingdom after Scar and the hyenas have taken possession...For reasons expounded in my review of the Archipel release (Tahra soon to follow), the 1943 performance is a great one. But, whatever the price, Dante's or Music & Arts's edition doesn't do it justice.The interest of Dante's pairing, Beethoven's 5th Symphony, is that it is Furtwängler's very first recording of the composition, out of the 12 or 13 (one is dubious), studio (3 in all, including this one) or live, that he left of it. In his great online Furwängler discography, Youngrok Lee mis-dates it 1929. As claimed by Dante and every other Furtwängler discography, it is indeed 1926 - the performance was reviewed in The Gramophone issue of March 1927. It is also an era from which very few recordings of Furtwängler are left. Although he began his conducting career in 1906, was appointed to replace Nikisch at the helm of The Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1922 and shortly after of the Berlin Philharmonic, and was an internationally recognized conductor as early as the mid 1920s (invited by the New York Philharmonic for three seasons), his recording legacy is almost entirely concentrated in the years 1940 to his death in 1954, and this Beethoven 5th is the only large-scale work left of him from the 1920 decade (he recorded it again in 1937). So this early recording gives one the opportunity to verify if the hallmarks of Furtwängler's later conducting style - the expansive tempos, the great tempo flexibility, the immense power in the fortissimo orchestral tutti - are already present, or if they were a later development.A mixture of both, it seems, and ultimately, whatever its historical and even musical interest, this is the lesser of Furtwängler's seven recordings that I have (the three studio including the last one for EMI with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1954, and the lives from 1943, 1947 - two performances, from 25 and 27 May - and 1954 with Berlin), which further diminishes the interest of this Dante CD. I don't know where Dante pirated this one from, but their sonics are okay, with louder orchestral presence than on Koch Legacy's 2 CD-set Furtwangler: The Early Recordings 1926-1937 (invaluable for collating many - but not all - of those early recordings), but with louder surface noise also, which threatens to drown the music is some of the pianissimo passages of the second and third movements, and nine bars not just drowned but actually missing at 3:36 in the third movement - but that may be a problem with the original recording, since they are missing also from Koch's edition. Instrumental timbres, especially of woodwinds and brass, are not always realistic (I hope!) - you'd think Donald Duck had replaced the horn in the third movement at 0:27. The first movement would do many conductors proud, but it has neither the fiery and toscaninian urgency of the 1937 studio version (Furtwangler: The Complete Pre-War HMV Recordings), nor the massive power of the later versions, and lacks also the great tempo flexibility that so heightens the sense of drama in the live performances. It is also the only version where Furtwängler doesn't take the first movement repeat.Furtwängler was never one to rush the second movement, always turning Beethoven's "Andante con moto" into a stately Adagio or Largo, but 1926 is, with his studio recording of 1954 in Vienna (Beethoven: Symphonies 5 & 7), the slowest I've heard, and a vague sense of boredom derives from the very pedestrian and square pulse, although, in typical Furwängler fashion, the conductor accelerates considerably with the rise of dynamics leading to the climax around 5:25. In his live performances of the 1940s and 1950s (for product links see comments) his tempos may have been very deliberate also, but he offset any impression of sluggishness with the immense discharges of power of his orchestral outbursts. Here the grandiose concluding climax at 8:19 doesn't lack sweep and grandeur, but the combination of compressed sonics and either lesser demand of the conductor or lesser ability of the orchestra to deliver keeps the power much tamer.Likewise, the same combination of compressed sonics and very deliberate tempos, even trudging in the Finale (with an opening pace of circa 66 half-notes/mn that is far below Beethoven's already very moderate 84 and "one-downed" only by Furtwängler's final studio recording in Vienna), doesn't help generate much tension in the two last movements, although the conductor factors some back into the Finale through his typical accelerations.Bottom line: this 1926 Fifth is only for the diehard Furtwängler collector and even so, he'd better go to the much more attractive Koch twofer. As for Hansen's 4th Piano Concerto, this edition, as the Music & Arts that it pirates, is best avoided, at any price, let alone the one demanded at the time of writing by the very few marketplace sellers. But please, if you are going to buy Hansen-Furtwängler's Fourth, as a gesture of revolt against hyenas, buy it from Tahra, not Archipel. Flowers on graves have never brought the dead back to life, but they can express one's posthumous solidarity, respect... and regrets.