Franck: Symphony in D minor / Khachaturian: Violin Concerto

He has been somewhat forgotten. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s, alongside his older colleagues Charles Münch and Ernest Ansermet as well as the slightly younger Jean Martinon, André Cluytens was considered one of the most significant conductors for the French repertoire. Nevertheless, he was not a "specialist." On the contrary: repertoire variety and a curiosity for the unknown were typical of Cluytens. In 1955, he became the first Frenchman to conduct at Bayreuth (long before Pierre Boulez). Between 1957 and 1960, he beat Herbert von Karajan to the punch when he realized the first complete recording of the Beethoven symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic. Two live recordings released for the first time from the International Music Festival in Lucerne (today's Lucerne Festival) commemorate the Belgian-born naturalized Frenchman. In the summer of 1954, conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra, Cluytens drew a maximum of color and mood from César Franck's Symphony in D minor, creating a gripping symphonic drama with unsentimental tempos. He also met the then 23-year-old violinist Igor Oistrakh, who interpreted one of the showpieces of his father and teacher David Oistrakh with Aram Khachaturian's Violin Concerto: with dizzying precision, a lyrical, speech-like phrasing of the themes, and his own grand solo cadenza that exceeds the technical challenges of Khachaturian's original as well as the cadenza usually played by his father. The 32-page, trilingual booklet contains a portrait of the conductor by Michael Struck-Schloen and displays previously unpublished photos from the festival archive.