CD Review: Stokowski Basks in Gallic Sunshine at Studio 8-H

Leopold Stokowski was certainly one of the most versatile conductors of the 20th century. His affinities matched his vast repertoire, which ranged from the centuries old to the freshly inked. Though his living composer contemporaries (and critics) may have bristled at the liberties he allowed himself, there is little doubt that his discography preserves a consistently high level of engaging interpretive commitment, not to mention sonic opulence. 

A born cosmopolitan, Stokowski was home nearly everywhere in the realm of music, but there were certain corners of the orchestral literature which were especially tailor-made for his talents. This selection of his NBC performances of Debussy, Milhaud, and Ravel, for example, finds him at his opulent best; especially in the shimmering colors of the older two composers, whose post-Wagnerian sensibilities called out to Stokowski’s own. 

The NBC Symphony, for all the excellence of its individual members, was not exactly celebrated for the beauty of its corporate sonority. Most of the blame can be laid on the powder dry acoustics of Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8-H, which Stokowski helped to mitigate during his brief tenure at the orchestra’s helm 1941 – 1944. But the ensemble’s fierce loyalty to Toscanini, which made them skeptical of ideas from other conductors, also did not help. Despite those challenges, Stokowski conjured from them playing of spellbinding gorgeousness. 

Listeners here are treated to two of his sumptuous orchestrations of Debussy’s piano music—La cathédrale engloutie and La soirée dans Grenade respectively—with the former opening this compilation, followed by the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. A Stokowski favorite, he recorded the score he praised as a “dream world of pagan loveliness” several times. They all follow the same basic interpretive outline, although each has telling details unique to them. This NBC performance from 1944 is no different, boasting a number of retouchings that, while not “faithful” to the score, are undeniably effective. Take a listen to the evocative 3-D effect achieved by the last of the horn calls that echo the opening flute motif, which Stokowski directs to play stopped. Or try his use of chime bars at the coda; very different from the fragile timbre of Debussy’s crotales, but lending a haunting glow to the work’s closing pages. 

The present performance of two “symphonic fragments” from Debussy’s incidental music to Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, on the other hand, are the only ones in Stokowski’s discography. They are quite fine, too, if a tad steelier than one would prefer in this ethereal score. 

Also making its only appearance on his programs is this New York City premiere performance of Milhaud’s brief Symphony No. 1. Although his catalog of works had already by then swollen into triple-digits—with a number of operas, oratorios, ballets, and string quartets already under his belt—he was a symphonic late-bloomer, not penning his first essay in that form until he was nearly fifty. (Perhaps his friend Honegger’s own Symphony No. 1 from ten years earlier had deterred him.) It is a sprightly, lively work alive with Milhaud’s typical harmonic and rhythmic playfulness, all of which Stokowski does proud in this zestful performance. 

Closing is this compilation is an impassioned rendition of the second suite from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, which turns urgent unto hectic in its “Danse générale.” If its finale could have benefitted from a more measured approach, the preceding “Lever du jour” and “Pantomime” are practically erotic desire itself manifested in sound. While some may prefer Stokowski’s later, more relaxed Decca recording, this performance has its own rewards which demand to be heard. 

Abetting these performances are the superb remasterings from Pristine’s Andrew Rose, who skillfully imparted the illusion of space around the NBC Symphony. One could imagine the sonic wizardry on these restorations having elicited the approval of Stokowski, himself no stranger to the possibilities afforded by the studio mixing console. Especially benefitting from this are the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Daphnis et Chloé. Stokowski’s lushly atmospheric stereo recording of the former for Capitol has been my favorite for as long as I can remember, but the sound on this Pristine issue, which markedly improves upon the sound of the Cala transfer from two decades ago, helps carry this performance to the top. 

A welcome companion for the languid summer afternoons just around the corner. 

Stoki and the NBC get steamy in all-French program from Pristine Audio.

“A Master’s Hand”: George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in Lugano

Arguably, the most lasting musical achievement of the 1960s was the elevation of the record producer to auteur. The work of Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Joe Meek among others are well known, but their use of the recording studio as an instrument in and of itself had already been thriving among the practitioners of a genre from which they drew much inspiration. By the time the Eisenhower era ended in the United States, listeners of classical music were familiar with the electronically enhanced strings of Bruno Walter’s late Columbia recordings, the shifting colors and reverb of Leopold Stokowski’s Capitol discs, and the first installment of the “theatre of the mind” that Decca promised in their epochal Ring cycle. In 1964 Glenn Gould famously and permanently forsook live performance, which he regarded as a relic of a bygone time, in favor of “acoustic orchestrations” which were realizable only via the “autocracy” of the recording studio.

It would be tempting to view the success of George Szell as merely another product of this era. Not entirely uncoincidentally, the zenith of his career happened to overlap with that of hi-fi sound recording and reproduction. The fastidious perfection he drew from the ensemble he led for the last 24 years of his life, however, was no feat of electronic sleight-of-hand. 

“The Cleveland Orchestra was a fine orchestra when I first heard it,” he recalled during his tenth anniversary as its music director. “When I took over, some of the best members had left and I made it my business to get them back. . . The orchestra today is an instrument of artistic expression ranking with the best in the world, and with certain special qualities I do not find in any other orchestra at the present moment.”

Crisp, transparent, and immaculately precise, the Szell touch proved to be rewardingly phonogenic for a growing audience of listeners, to say nothing for the record labels which profited from his art. While some conductors seemed to lose their footing before the presence of microphones, Szell came alive, understanding early on that the invention of the gramophone signified the greatest paradigm shift in musical performance and reception in history. As he would with any matter musical (and often beyond its purview), Szell was deeply involved in the recording process: From the control room right down to dictating choices for album covers. His players had become accustomed to (if not necessarily enamored with) the obsessive control of their “Papa Szell,” an appellation which not only denoted his attentiveness and even warmth for his musicians, but also the paternalistic unto quasi-omnipotent power he wielded over the Cleveland Orchestra. 

“If God wills it, I accept,” Danny Majeske responded to Szell’s offer to succeed Rafael Druian as the orchestra’s concertmaster. “God has nothing to do with it—I will it!,” the conductor shot back. 

As his eleventh season into his Cleveland tenure drew to a close, Szell prepared to show off his orchestra’s prowess to European audiences, eager to demonstrate to them the unanimity and polish which had left American critics grasping for superlatives. 

“What has developed [since Szell took over the orchestra] was a kind of empathy, an ability on the part of the players to identify so completely with the style and purpose of the music that it might almost appear as though they themselves had taken part in the composing of it,” remarked Herbert Elwell shortly before the Cleveland Orchestra’s embarked on their 1957 tour of Europe. “[They] have learned in a remarkable way to listen to one another as chamber music players do. . . The result is an enormous increase in refinement and flexibility.”

In a letter to Charlotte Flatow penned two years prior, Szell was more direct. 

“[The] Cleveland Orchestra, although a comparatively young one, is in every respect fully the equal of American orchestras heard up to now in Europe and, in some respects, even superior to them.”

Nonetheless, as the tour neared and then was underway, the conductor grew increasingly anxious. “The trip was hard on all of us but hardest on Szell,” Anshel Brusilow remembered. “In Berlin he went looking for places he remembered from his youth, when he had worked with Richard Strauss at the Berlin Opera. He found nothing he could recognize. Not just the buildings but the streets themselves were obliterated. Then he knew what World War II had done to Berlin.” His return to the continent which had nursed and developed his talents was a personally emotional experience. More importantly, however, he worried about how European audiences would judge his orchestra. With his typical sense of care and detail, he arranged for programs that highlighted the Cleveland Orchestra’s finest qualities, as well as accounting for variety. No two programs would be exactly alike. His worries would ultimately be unfounded: The European reception of the Clevelanders was rapturous. 

“Ovations without end,” reported the Spandauer Volksblatt of the orchestra’s Berlin stop. “It turned into a festival.” The New Statesman and Nation in London wrote: “It is one of the prime virtues of the Cleveland Orchestra. . . that their brilliance is entirely subordinated to musical considerations. They play with the loving spontaneity of a fine European orchestra, as well as with the discipline, blend, and unanimity characteristic of America.”

Switzerland was the tour’s pivot. From there the Cleveland Orchestra would venture to neutral Austria, then to Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland. His final Swiss concert in Lugano, preserved here on this set, is marked by a nervous tension unique in his discography. The evocative mists of Debussy’s La mer are dispelled in favor of a scrupulous clarity which properly contextualized this score as a cornerstone of musical modernity, its play of sounds sounding as if they still were freshly scored. Schumann’s Symphony No. 2—a Szell favorite—has an air of nervy energy that at moments (especially in the Scherzo) strikes the listener as an unlikely foretaste of Shostakovich. 

An anonymous critic for the Tribune de Lausanne who had attended the Lugano concert wrote that Szell “sometimes allow[ed] himself to be caught up in a frenzy of tempi which transcend the golden mean,” and had chided his selection of a work by Paul Creston (not included here). Despite that, he compared him favorably to Leopold Stokowski and Serge Koussevitzky. “What [the Lugano concert] revealed to us was that [the Cleveland Orchestra] is indisputably one of the premiere orchestras of our time,” he concluded. 

Another reviewer, this time for the Journal de Genève, added: “The technical and artistic qualities [of the orchestra] are simply extraordinary. Unnecessary to add that this judgment is partially in respect to the conductor. Extremely dynamic and colorful, animated by a fire and an irresistible pulsation, the interpretations are coordinated by a master’s hand. Szell has the gift to inflame his musicians, who are individually and collectively admirable.”

On these recordings, the careful listener will find a George Szell wholly unlike the cold and clinical stereotype that has remained stubbornly persistent among record collectors. Instead, these performances are marked by a possibly surprising sense of adventure and risk. Here is evidence, as if any more were needed, that this vertiginously daring musical high wire act, which eschewed empty virtuosic display, could thrive without the safety net of the studio; further testament of a remarkable collective partnership between orchestra and conductor whose legend seems to only burn brighter with every passing year.

(This essay will be included as liner notes in a forthcoming reissue of this concert by ATS in Japan.

George Szell going plane crazy with friends in Prague (1930s).

Monsieur Furtwängler, Debussyiste

During spare free moments over the past week I’ve been dipping into the Library of America’s omnibus of one of the grand old men of American musical criticism, Virgil Thomson. My appreciation of his work is mixed. On the one hand I admire his knowledge, his passion for the new music of his time. But on the other, his dry, one-damn-thing-after-another style of writing leaves me cold. Then there was his pettiness in print towards his rival composers; his barbaric view that the worth of a work of musical art was only commensurate with its economic value. Every now and then, however, one finds a surprising and valuable insight. 

In a review of a mostly French program with the New York Philharmonic from March 1947, Thomson takes the guest conductor to task for the “Romantic liberties” he permitted himself in interpreting the works of Debussy and Ravel. The performance of the former’s Ibéria, Thomson argued, “sacrificed color to dynamics, and metrics to accent.” 

“This was all disappointing from a conductor who has been both a first-class musician and a Frenchman long enough to know better,” the review continued. 

It is remarkable enough that the conductor coming under Thomson’s withering criticism was none other than Charles Munch, whose stylish recordings are considered models of French orchestral performance. But even more remarkable was the conductor whom Thomson praised as Munch’s superior in the rendering of French music: Wilhelm Furtwängler. 

“[Munch] certainly plays French music better than any of the German conductors now working in Germany,” Thomson opined. “Though many a German not now working in Germany, Furtwängler included*, has had a sounder understanding of the French Impressionist style.”

This opinion wasn’t an anomaly in Thomson’s critiques. Elsewhere in the collection, one finds other instances of the critic’s high regard for Furtwängler’s performances of French music; at one point ranking his excellence in this repertoire alongside that of Pierre Monteux’s, referring to them both as “magical.”

The German conductor is, of course, famous for his recordings of Austro-German music. However, his surviving discography hardly suggests the breadth of his repertoire, which even in his late years included Bartók (tapes of a Swiss broadcast of the Concerto for Orchestra existed at some point, but were destroyed), Korngold, and Shostakovich. Nor does it suggest the affinity he apparently did feel for Debussy, whom he regarded as a “modern Schumann.” This is borne out in his notebooks, even if his esteem for the composer is at times mingled with personal misgivings. 

In his blistering (and, frankly, jealous) critique of a Toscanini concert in Berlin, Furtwängler’s most passionate outburst against his rival is reserved not for his performances of Haydn and Beethoven, but for his rendering of Debussy’s La mer.

“[Toscanini’s] even, primitive, and unintellectual manner so consistently, and with such a naïve lack of awareness, ignored Debussy’s sensitive tonal language, that one could only wonder why he performed the work at all,” Furtwängler jotted down in a notebook entry from 1930. 

Unfortunately, little evidence remains of Furtwängler’s persuasiveness in the French repertoire. Yet what is extant does appear to corroborate Thomson’s opinions. 

A live Berlin Philharmonic performance in Italy of the first two movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes is among these precious few testimonials. One would think that the dark and sometimes rough blend typical of Furtwängler’s sound would have been a poor fit for Debussy. Instead, the results are startlingly revelatory. Rarely does one hear the sense of gauzy, pregnant mystery, the dazzling juxtapositions in tone color in “Nuages” and “Fêtes” that one finds here. Debussy’s smoky part writing seamlessly wends before the listener, emerging from the darkness before it nearly imperceptibly retreats into it again. The effect is almost that of a music permanently imprinted into the air, only awaiting the moment for a listener to step in momentarily to draw it in. Whereas so many contemporary orchestral performances of Debussy renders his art into staid prose, here his music is delivered as the hushed, ecstatic poetry it certainly must be. 

“The Germans are rather messy when they play their own music,” Thomson wrote in another review earlier in the 1940s. “Some are excellent with French music; Furtwängler, for instance.” Listening to this Debussy broadcast, one can only agree—and deeply regret the typecasting that the conductor was subjected to by EMI and Deutsche Grammophon. 

(*: When Thomson wrote this review in 1947, a number of Germany’s most famous conductors had still not been able to resume their public careers pending the outcomes of their respective de-Nazification tribunals.)