SITTING AT AN AWARDS DINNER next to the leader of a period-instrument orchestra, we fell to talking about conductors, whom she generally disparaged. I asked what she remembered of her early years in the Philharmonia Orchestra. Suddenly, her eyes glistened. “We had Otto Klemperer,” she said. “Nobody ever made us sound like that.”I heard a similar appreciation from Sir Simon Rattle, no respecter of old lions. “Try as I might,” said Rattle when conducting the Philharmonia, “I could not get that Klemperer sound out of their fingers.”
Klemperer died 50 years ago this July, aged 88, cared, will follow in October.
