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.

CD Review: Mengelberg and “His” Concertgebouw’s living “lingua franca,” courtesy of Pristine audio

It has been a bit of a sentimental journey listening to Pristine Audio’s latest release. Thanks to a $20 gift certificate to The Wherehouse a friend gave me on my 18th birthday, these recordings, albeit in a now long out-of-print compilation from the defunct Pearl label, were my gateway to Willem Mengelberg and historical recordings about 20 years ago. What dazzled me then continues to now: The crisp, tart sound of the Concertgebouw Orchestra; and the marshalling of its musicians into feats of seemingly spontaneous virtuosity by their music director with the shock of red hair that matched his temper.

Of course, these recordings hardly need another recommendation. The just over 100 sides that Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra cut with English Columbia represent some of the finest things ever preserved on records. Their glittering reading of the once popular Anacréon overture by Cherubini is a capsule demonstration of the best qualities of this artistic partnership: Vibrant tone color that is skillfully blended and offset as needed, flexibility of phrasing held together by steely ensemble unanimity; all of it embodying a belief in musical performance not as ossified ritual, but as a living act of the moment. Then there is their flashy strut through Beethoven’s “Turkish March” from The Ruins of Athens, which with its sly charm and play of color gives Sir Thomas Beecham a run for his money. Best of all, arguably, is the June 1929 recording of Liszt’s Les préludes, a swashbuckling symphonic drama in miniature approached by very few other conductors and surpassed by none. 

Only the fallible (and cut) recordings of Mendelssohn and Berlioz stumble, but even giants must trip every now and again. 

Some of this repertoire was re-recorded for Telefunken (or captured in live broadcasts) a few years later, but by then interpretive bloat and a perceptible drop in the orchestra’s near-superhuman standards crept in. It is in these recordings made between 1926 – 1931 where Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw can be heard at their staggering prewar peak; a partnership which combined interpretive verve, orchestral color, precision, and flexibility of response that was equaled perhaps only by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. 

The second volume of that aforementioned Pearl set had been fetching handsome sums on the second-hand market for years, which alone makes this new and inexpensive recompilation from Pristine something to celebrate. Better still, these discs now sound better than ever thanks to fresh transfers by Mark Obert-Thorn (who also transferred that earlier set, as well as selections of this material for Naxos Historical). Much has changed since the 1990s and that era’s preferences for taming as much as possible the inevitable “bacon fry” that 78 RPM records make as the needle drags through their shellac grooves. The unavoidable trade-offs, however, were often fuzzy sounding instrumental attacks, tubby bass, and a glassy treble. Some collectors continue to have their sleep disturbed by the horrific, chalky, over-CEDARed nightmares produced by the likes of Grammofono 2000 and Iron Needle (“Rusty Needle” would have been more fitting). These present transfers are discreetly noisier than their predecessors, but gain over them considerably in depth and presence. 

Compare the opening attack of Mengelberg’s dramatic recording of Beethoven’s Coriolan with previous iterations. The articulative bite of the Dutch strings finally comes through with an arresting immediacy and sharpness, underlining the surface gloss with a sense of danger. Tuttis cut through, rather than thump; textures sound taut. Or listen to their joyous romp through Weber’s Euryanthe overture, a deceptively tricky score with overlapping and contrasting layers that shift with dizzying speed. For once, listeners hear the immaculately etched lines that Mengelberg (and Weber) surely intended, rather than runny pastels. 

“I study the score daily and continue to discover new things,” Mengelberg once admonished his orchestra who was languishing under one of his infamously intensive rehearsals of a work they knew well. Garrulous though he may have been in life, these stunning series of recordings are a poignant testament to a time when the language of Bach, Beethoven, Weber, Mendelssohn, were a living lingua franca, not dusty relics codifying rituals in a dead language. 

(A previous Pristine compilation of Mengelberg’s Tchaikovsky for Columbia and Odéon can be found here.)

Latest release from Pristine Audio: The first of a two-part compilation of maestro-auteur Willem Mengelberg and “his” Concertgebouw Orchestra’s recordings for Columbia.

CD Review: Wang and Dudamel Lost Amidst Adams’ Footnotes

If modern mainstream American academic music can seem like a never ending series of footnotes on Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical phase, then the work of John Adams are footnotes upon those footnotes; less music than it is aural commentary on the original accomplishments of more talented predecessors; descending further into the same, exhausted ready-made gestures that may have amused long ago, but now decades later seem embarrassingly twee. 

Philipp Gershkovich infamously called Dmitri Shostakovich “a hack in a trance.” Had he lived long enough to hear Adams’ blowzy Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, the former pupil of Anton Webern would have found a more fitting target for his ire.

Composed for Yuja Wang, who premiered the work in Disney Hall last year (and from where this “live” recording was patched together), the work is a three-movement concerto of the usual Adams twitch-and-shout; awkwardly subsuming reminiscences of others’ music within a basic framework of kitsch nostalgia. 

Although the opening movement is marked “Gritty, Funky,” the music is—white boy appropriation of black urban slang from half a century ago notwithstanding—anything but. It ambles about smiling wanly, goaded forward by involuntary rhythmic tics, perhaps geriatric in inspiration. It is minimalism for bluehairs, Liberace for intellectual posers. Pastiches of Bartókian “night music” (shades of the Hungarian’s Piano Concerto No. 2) in the central slow movement give way to the “Obsession/Swing” finale. Those familiar with the composer’s Century Rolls, Chamber Symphony, and Naïve and Sentimental Music (or Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto and Capriccio, for that matter) will have heard it all before. 

Sound as per usual from DG’s recent live recordings tends to be diffuse, yet spotlit (take a listen to the cello riff at the opening). Long on surface, short on substance, the music is tailored well to Wang’s glitzy style, who bangs away as compellingly as the composer presumably hoped. Her performance of Adams’ early China Gates—Terry Riley for yuppies—is fine. Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have a solid grasp of the work, but their palpable sense of eking through the score one measure at a time suggests they have yet to fully embrace this music. 

Speaking of “Mr. Showmanship,” the underrated composer Michael Daugherty accomplished a quarter century ago in his Le Tombeau de Liberace what eluded Adams here: An ironic pop-flavored tribute/eulogy to “plastic fantastic” postwar culture. Adams’ concerto hardly approaches the brittle wit and transient moments of genuine pathos (to say nothing of originality) of Daugherty’s superior score.

For those seeking a musical equivalent to the egomaniacal, navel-gazing, grand-standing bien pensant smarminess of a Shepard Fairey or Noah Baumbach look no further. Admirers of serious new music, however, would do better to seek Daugherty’s concerto instead. 

Why must Adams have all the good commissions?

"A Religious Rite": Otto Klemperer's Final Concerts in the United States

Two of the most tempestuous decades of history, personal and global, had passed by the time Otto Klemperer returned to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1962. Militarism, World War II, and the resulting seismic political and cultural shifts had left the world vastly changed from the one that existed at the time of his previous visit in 1936, when he aspired to succeed Leopold Stokowski.

In 1939 Klemperer was diagnosed with a right-sided acoustic neuroma—a brain tumor the size of a small apple sitting upon the nerve that transmits hearing and balance. The operation to remove it was a success; recovery less so. He suffered a permanent facial droop on his right side, partial atrophy of his tongue, and a years long manic episode that exasperated his family and colleagues. Thomas Mann noted that he appeared “unbalanced,” “noisy,” and “rather terrible.” His behavior soon became too much to bear for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose board terminated his contract in 1941.

“In the following years things went very bad for us financially,” he recalled. “I conducted very, very little. No one invited me.”

His erratic conduct worsened to the degree that he was considered unemployable, at least in the United States. Disillusioned, he eagerly returned to Europe as soon as the war ended, settling on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain in Hungary. His increasingly vociferous anti-Americanism stoked the suspicions of the FBI; his ironic skepticism of “socialist realism” irked Russian authorities. 

Finally in 1951 he earned the international breakthrough he and his family had so dearly been seeking. At the second of that year’s Festival of Britain concerts in London, Walter Legge—EMI’s producer-generalissimo—heard Klemperer’s performance of the Mozart “Jupiter” from the wings of the Royal Albert Hall. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eleven years later, Klemperer made his final appearances stateside, now as a celebrated elder statesman of the baton. To Eugene Ormandy, whom he privately excoriated over his thwarted Philadelphia ambitions in 1936, he cordially wrote that he looked forward to his forthcoming engagement with his orchestra. They almost did not come to pass.

Trouble was afoot. After a consultation, his psychiatrist in his new home in Zurich recommended that Klemperer cancel the concerts—advice that was duly ignored. He was at the beginning of a depressive spell that influenced his decision-making. Most regrettable for posterity was the collapse of recording plans with the Philadelphia Orchestra for Columbia, which hinged on not upsetting EMI in England, to whom he was contracted. Despite his initial enthusiasm for the project, as well as the personal involvement of Ormandy in its negotiations, Klemperer refused to accommodate these conditions and revise his programs of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms; he even scrapped plans to perform and record his own Symphony No. 2. 

On the eve of his performances, Klemperer was suffering from an unusually bad case of stage fright. As soon as he arrived with his daughter Lotte in New York City, he sealed himself off in his rented room and refused all visitors, save for his son Werner and a select group of close friends. He experienced a precipitous drop in weight and persistent insomnia.

Nevertheless, Legge continued to believe that Klemperer’s circumstances were a “fortunate state of affairs [that] almost guaranteed him a triumph with the Philadelphia Orchestra.” This turned out to not quite be the case. As had occurred twenty-five years earlier, audiences thrilled to Klemperer, but American musical critics—still under the sway of Arturo Toscanini, who had only passed away five years before—remained dismissive.

“There has been in England recently the same excitement about Klemperer. . . as there used to be about Toscanini. . . This talk was contradicted by the performances I heard in Carnegie Hall. . . Klemperer’s disregard of Beethoven’s directions and character produced strange slow-motion performances,” opined B. H. Haggin, longtime keeper of the late Maestro’s flame, before adding with a palpable disapproving sneer that these “somnolent performances. . . excited the audience to cheers.”

Others were more circumspect, if still cool. “Tempi were a bit slower and a shade more deliberate than those to which audiences in this country are accustomed,” was the guarded appraisal of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “[His concerts] had the aura. . . of a religious rite,” said Eric Salzman of the New York Times. “The public was awe-struck, the critics mainly skeptical.”

Although his planned series of recordings for Columbia fell through, broadcasts of Klemperer’s final Philadelphia Orchestra engagements have survived, and in decent sound besides. Whatever reservations that critics of that time may have had are hard to discern now that the high tide of the Toscanini cult has ebbed. Far from being “somnolent,” Klemperer’s performances are muscular; drawing from Ormandy’s Philadelphians an uncharacteristically manly, craggy sound. 

“A conductor must know how to hold attention,” Klemperer would muse near the end of his life. In these broadcasts he succeeds in that task, well after he and all those he loved in life have passed on into the eternity of history.

(This essay will be included as liner notes in a future Japanese release of Klemperer’s Philadelphia concerts.)

He did it his way: Otto Klemperer rehearsing the Philadelphia Orchestra, 1962.

Otto Klemperer’s “Philadelphia Story” In Great Depression America

A large poster of Otto Klemperer, his bespectacled face clenched with intense emotion, looms over the crowds spilling out after concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, his arms jutting out as if imploring them to turn back. This likeness conveys what Raymond V. Lopez, a musical mentor of my teen years, recalled from his boyhood at Los Angeles’ old Philharmonic Hall: “Klemperer was terrifying—a giant with eyes that burned right through you.”

Although it spanned nearly 70 years, only two periods from Klemperer’s professional career are generally remembered: His brief stint as head of the Kroll Opera in Berlin, then his final years leading the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Overlooked are the two decades in between when his life revolved, for better and worse, around the United States.

“I don’t like how the dollar always [was priority],” he said in a BBC interview in 1961. “This was not good.” Later he explained to Peter Heyworth that the preeminence of lucre in American cultural considerations chafed him, adding that while he lived in the United States he “felt in the wrong place.” He did not always think so.

“My joy, my pride, my gratitude is still stronger because it was an American university [Klemperer’s emphasis]. . . a college of my new fatherland which gave me this decoration,” he said as he accepted an honorary doctorate from Occidental College in September 1936. “You can imagine what a deep gratitude [people] like myself feel to the United States, to this great and generous country. . .” Nevertheless, foretastes of his later disenchantment emerged: “We [musicians]. . .  have to save [music] from the attacks of materialism. . . In a crude world of materialism there is, of course, no room for things making no money.” 

Klemperer’s most important position in the United States would be his six-year leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Taking the reins at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the conductor grappled with an organization that was ailing financially. Its founder William A. Clark, Jr., heir to a mining fortune, withdrew his financial support; a year later he would be dead from a heart attack. Artur Rodziński, its rising star music director, had abruptly declared that uncertainty over the orchestra’s future forced him to seek stable work with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Into this fray stepped Klemperer, whose first concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was described by Bertha McCord Knisely of local weekly Saturday Night as “nothing short of astounding.” Despite this success, Klemperer had no intention of staying in Southern California. He complained to family and friends about a city which seemed to him more “an enormous village. . . an intellectual desert such as we do not know in our Europe.” His real ambitions were set on the great orchestras of the East. In 1935 Leopold Stokowski announced his resignation from the Philadelphia Orchestra. By that December, Klemperer embarked on a guest engagement to lead a series of concerts with Stoki’s band in the hopes of succeeding him. 

Initially he disliked the glossy, immaculately manicured sound that the orchestra had cultivated under its music director, though he eventually came to appreciate their virtuosic responsiveness. (Near the end of his life, Klemperer expressed great admiration for his colleague: “The Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski was really a giant.”) 

Edna Phillips, the orchestra’s harpist, remembered well the conductor’s “strange temperament.” She described a New Year’s Day rehearsal for one of his Beethoven concerts as a “war of wills” between recalcitrant orchestra and “imperious maestro,” with oboist Marcel Tabuteau becoming especially flustered.

“Klemperer. . . bent over to speak to the illustrious oboist. . . Tabuteau’s face turned bright red. Afterward, [principal flautist William] Kincaid [said] that throughout the first half of rehearsal Tabuteau had been making derogatory comments in French; and since Klemperer didn’t use a podium, he was close enough to hear him. Worse still, Klemperer had spoken to Tabuteau in French, letting him know that everything he said had been overheard and understood.”

Programs of Beethoven, Mahler, and Bruckner were met with acclaim by the public, if a touch of skepticism from critics. Nevertheless, polls favored him to succeed Stokowski; even his relations with the musicians had become remarkably cordial. It would come to naught—Stokowski ultimately rescinded his resignation. In 1936 he once again announced his abdication. This time it was permanent and there was more: Eugene Ormandy, then with the Minneapolis Symphony, was appointed his successor. Klemperer was livid.

“After the decision in Philadelphia, nothing will come unexpected and nothing will astonish me,” he vented to businessman Ira Hirschmann. “The superficial music will be en vogue (was and will be always).”

A quarter of a century would pass until Klemperer would again appear on the podium of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.

(This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming Japanese reissue of Klemperer’s Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts.)

Otto Klemperer in rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl (circa 1933).

Hans Knappertsbusch, Maverick Maestro

Hans Knappertsbusch has always stood apart from other great German conductors of the 20th century, a dark horse among his more glamorous (and consistent) colleagues. Non-conformist by nature, he preferred to cut his own path, even when doing so risked making matters more difficult for himself. “Kna,” as he is affectionately called by his admirers, was an unrepentant monarchist in the midst of Weimar democracy, an open skeptic of the Nazis during the Third Reich, a stubbornly persistent adherent of the bowdlerized Bruckner of Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe; his surface bearing concealing an inner courtly gentlemanliness. 

In 1975, a decade after the conductor’s death, the German music critic Karl Schumann said of him: “I have never come across an artist who so impressed, so fascinated me as Hans Knappertsbusch.” Had his studio discography been all that was bequeathed to posterity, there would be little there to corroborate this generous assessment. Like others of his time and place, Knappertsbusch trusted the instincts of the moment to guide him through a performance. “Gentlemen, you know the piece, I know the piece—see you tonight,” became something of his signature phrase to orchestras before shrugging off the rehearsals he notoriously disdained. Such a spontaneous approach could potentially ignite fireworks in the concert hall. In the recording studio, however, which requires at least a degree of calculation and planning, his carefree attitude of Bavarian gemütlichkeit often worked against him. His listless Meistersinger on Decca, which would cost him the honor of leading the label’s flagship stereo Ring cycle, immediately comes to mind.

Fortunately for his posthumous legacy, a significant and seemingly ever-growing discography of live performances have survived as a bracing rejoinder to his studio work. With the gritty, sonorous power Knappertsbusch drew from orchestras being particularly well suited to Wagner, it is natural that his work in Bayreuth’s orchestra pit has become his best known. Two officially approved traversals of Parsifal have become milestones for any serious record collecting Wagnerite, but perhaps even more remarkable is his Götterdämmerung from Bayreuth’s postwar inauguration; a rendering of such volcanic impetuosity that it leaves the listener second guessing John Culshaw’s later decision to ditch Knappertsbusch in favor of the young Georg Solti.

He could be no less compelling on the concert podium, even when startlingly fallible. Eyebrows may find themselves twitching at Henri Büsser’s review of a Knappertsbusch engagement in Paris from 1956 wherein his “sobriety and precision”—neither of them qualities typically associated with this conductor—are singled out for praise. Germany, where Virgil Thomson noted conductors had traditionally cultivated a “rough” sound that contrasted markedly with American expectations of ensemble synchronization, had its tastes reshaped after World War II by the ascendance of younger conductors such as Rudolf Kempe and Herbert von Karajan (with Erich Kleiber as spiritual godfather) whose sleek exactitude owed more to Arturo Toscanini than to their own elder compatriots. Borne from an aesthetic outlook steeped in the waning, twilit Romanticism of late Wilhelmine Germany, Knappertsbusch’s postwar recordings—especially his late ones for Westminster—can sound as though the shadow of the 20th century had never darkened his existence, so thoroughly and comparatively remote did his style remain against the rapid changes of the 1950s and 1960s. 

In his overview of the Salzburg Festival during the NSDAP period, Andreas Novak pithily captured the essence of Knapperstbusch’s character when he referred to him as a “gruff humanist.” As tends to occur with strong-willed individualists, their singular vision can clash against the narrow concerns of more mundane folk. As Arthur Vogel, the music section chief of the American occupation government in Bavaria noted, “the same character of independence and pride” which had kept him aloof from the Nazis also made him difficult to work with and “reluctant to give up even a small part of his Teutonic, heavily Wagnerian bias.” Solti, who took the reins of the Bavarian State Opera from Knappertsbusch in 1946, would long chafe with resentment over the “hysterical screams of approval” that greeted his elder colleague whenever he approached the podium. “Coexisting with him was terribly difficult for me,” he recalled nearly half a century later.

A few years before, Knappertsbusch ran afoul of a detractor with far more capacity to derail his career than any young conducting upstart. 

“He with his blond hair and blue eyes was certainly a German, but unfortunately he believed that even with no ear he could with his temperament still produce good music,” Adolf Hitler privately opined. “To attend the [Bavarian State] Opera when he was conducting was a real punishment.” (Despite this and a temporary ban on performance, Knappertsbusch’s name was included among those exempt from compulsory military mobilization in the Gottbegnadeten-Liste.)

Just a little over a decade after the war’s end, Knappertsbusch drifted into his Indian summer, with he and the Munich Philharmonic (whom he maintained a close relationship with in his final decade) each settling into comfortable conservatism. On October 18, 1956 they stood before an audience in Ascona, Switzerland, which sits along the shores of Lake Maggiore, less than 5 miles from the Italian border. Whatever expectations the audience in the Aule delle Scuole may have had for conductor and orchestra on that date were likely confounded by the ruggedly idiosyncratic performances on this disc. 

In his treatise on conducting, Wagner bemoaned the condescension which musicians of his time took towards Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8: “[They] came to regard the entire symphony as a sort of accidental hors d’oeuvre of [the composer’s] muse—who after the exertions of the [Symphony No. 7] had chosen ‘to take things rather easily.’” As befits a noted Bayreuthian, Knappertsbusch’s interpretation carefully heeds the advice Wagner dispenses for conductors tackling the score. Far from being the lightweight “silly symphony” it often is depicted as, he dispatches the humor of the Beethoven Eighth with savage delivery, investing it with a sardonic tone that pointedly heightens the score’s deceptive sophistication. His pacing is deliberate; the cumulative effect massive, weighty, nearly crushing. 

Cut from the same cloth is his expansive reading of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2. Its pastoral opening movement, which emerges as if drawn out in a single breath, stands as one of the most remarkable performances in Knappertsbusch’s discography. Each note, played for its full value, tells. A bewitching illusion of having vanished the music’s pulse is cast over the listener, with the conductor coaxing a stream of Wagnerian unendliche Melodie unfettered by bar lines. Momentary instrumental lapses—and there are a number of them—are conquered by the sheer charisma of Knappertsbusch’s direction. 

Another officer (and musical academic) attached with the postwar Allied occupation of Bavaria, John Evarts, ruefully noted in his diary the “outrageous liberties” that Knappertsbusch took upon his return to the podium after a brief ban imposed by the Military Government. “[His] admirers were wildly enthusiastic about the eye-and-ear-full [sic] which they received.” Judging from the results on display in this recording at least, Kna’s supporters had ample reason for their unrestrained acclaim.

(This essay was commissioned by ATS in Japan for inclusion as liner notes in a forthcoming Knappertsbusch release.)

Uncompromising, occasionally uncouth: Hans Knappertsbusch at the podium (circa late 1950s).

“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).

The Lion's Swan Song: Arturo Toscanini's Final Concert

It is one of those curious twists of cosmic fate that Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler, arguably the two most famous orchestral conductors of their time, both had the curtains unwillingly pulled upon their careers in the same year. The latter would die in Baden-Baden in November 1954 after a brief bout of pneumonia. Just a few months prior across the Atlantic, his rival (and grudging admirer) stood before an orchestra for the final time. Though he would live on for another few years, the frailty of the octogenarian Toscanini’s faculties could no longer bear the stresses of a career that had lasted nearly seven decades: Longer than the entire lifespans of a number of his contemporaries and rivals. 

He had, in fact, been convinced to return from retirement to head the then newly formed NBC Symphony—a formidable task at any age, but especially for a man nearing 70. Toscanini met the challenge with his characteristic drive and determination; and, as recordings gratefully preserve, the musical results evinced a vigor that betray nothing of his age. 

As the early 1950s wore on, however, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the partnership between conductor and orchestra could not go on much longer. For one thing, there was the increasing unprofitability of maintaining a full-size symphony orchestra year after year, not to mention the dwindling of the radio audience at the dawn of mass television—although David Sarnoff’s personal admiration for Toscanini staved off the machinations of NBC’s board of directors. More dire was the physical state of Toscanini himself. 

Though he was capable of summoning reserves of willpower that steeled him through increasing frailty for the sake of music, there was no escaping mortality’s inexorable grasp. Toscanini had already suffered the devastating blow of his wife Carla’s death in 1951. In those final months of his career, the remorseless grinding of time upon his body was becoming impossible to ignore. 

“I am not well, and nobody believes me, the asses, but I’m not the same as I was. . .,” he wrote to a friend in 1953. “All in all, a poor unhappy man—and [NBC has] had the bad taste to force me to accept another year of concerts. . . I’m old, very old, and can’t stand it anymore!”

More than “bad taste,” it was Toscanini’s concern for the well-being of his musicians, who would certainly be (and were) disbanded upon his retirement that goaded him into conducting one more season. 

A few months later in January 1954 while rehearsing Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera for broadcast performances, the conductor was terrified to discover that the words of this opera he had loved since boyhood were suddenly eluding his memory. Age forced him to act decisively. 

On the morning of March 25, 1954—his 87th birthday—Toscanini affixed his shaky signature to his letter of resignation from the NBC Symphony (likely drafted by his son Walter): “And now the sad time has come when I must reluctantly lay aside my baton and say goodbye to my orchestra.”

His final concert—all Wagner—shortly thereafter on April 4 was of a piece with the somewhat ramshackle mood of the occasion, the program being a relatively late switch for the Brahms Ein Deutsches Requeim which Toscanini had originally intended as his farewell. Given the events that transpired during this performance and its rehearsals, it is not surprising that it has become one of the most talked about in Toscanini’s career. 

The rehearsals themselves were marked by several lapses in the conductor’s memory, stoking the fire of his infamous temper. Things soon came to a head and he finally stormed off in a rage. The situation was concerning enough to NBC that they had clandestinely notified Erich Leinsdorf, then music director of the Rochester Philharmonic, to stand ready in the event of a Toscanini no-show at the concert. It proved a false alarm—the Maestro would show up to his final concert after all. 

Confusion was in the air on that Sunday. While the audience filled into Carnegie Hall, NBC distributed leaflets with copies of Toscanini’s resignation letter (and network general manager Sarnoff’s reply) to members of the press, listeners in attendance and tuned into the radio were not informed. Finally the curtain rose. Toscanini and the NBC Symphony began with the Act I prelude to Lohengrin, followed by the “Waldweben” from Siegfried. The conductor failed to indicate changes in meter, but the orchestra stayed on its toes, expertly navigating through the score on its own. Continuing were the “Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt” and “Trauermarsch” from Götterdämmerung, which were dispatched smoothly. Then came the Paris version of the overture to Tannhäuser—a performance which has since become the stuff of legends. 

During the “Bacchanale,” Toscanini momentarily lost track of what he was conducting. He turned pale, stopped conducting, and covered his eyes with his left hand. For a moment the ensemble slipped, unsure of what was occurring, until cellist Frank Miller began cueing entrances for his fellow players, restoring unanimity, and guiding Toscanini back into the performance. But in the moments while this was being sorted out, panic had ensued in the NBC control room. Aghast at what was happening, Guido Cantelli insisted to the radio personnel to take the concert off the air, which they promptly did. While the announcer feigned technical difficulties, the opening of the Brahms First Symphony had incongruously been interpolated. 

Despite the rough seas, both orchestra and conductor had made it to shore, finishing the piece together. Toscanini was furious with himself, nearly stomping off until Miller reminded him that there was still the prelude to Meistersinger left to play. He nodded wordlessly, motioned the upbeat, and launched into the work, only to abruptly leave while the orchestra was in mid-tutti at the coda, ignoring the clamoring of his audience to return for a bow. 

Hearing the concert today nearly 70 years later, one can hardly hear anything of the black legend that has since swirled around it. Toscanini’s late recordings can sometimes sound dry, unyielding, much too tight. None of that is discernible in this performance. Instead one finds here a sense of measure and poise, of shaping each phrase breath by breath that is often missing in the conductor’s contemporaneous recordings. Even the notorious Tannhäuser performance has a chamber-like intimacy and beguiling luminescence which reveals little of the troubles which had nearly unraveled it. Samuel Chotzinoff would later relate that “the men stopped playing and the house was engulfed in terrible silence” when Toscanini suffered his memory lapse. Aside from a brief spell of ensemble unease, the recording evinces nothing of that. What comes through instead is the NBC Symphony’s professionalism (as well as sincere affection for their conductor) in ensuring the maintenance of order. 

The fact that the broadcast has been preserved in decent early stereo only adds to the value of this document. Perhaps nowhere else can a listener more vividly hear the spectrum of color that Toscanini could draw from an orchestra. 

It is a performance that in many ways is unique in Toscanini’s discography. At times it even prefigures the much later work of Carlo Maria Giulini and Claudio Abbado. With typical self-deprecation Toscanini would later remark of it: “I conducted as if it had been a dream. It almost seemed to me that I wasn’t there.” Whether humility or humiliation provoked these words, his presence is unmistakable throughout this performance. We hear not the infallible musical demigod of American consumer mythologizing, but the vulnerable, imperfect man and artist who in his final years struggled against the dying of the light; and drew from within himself one last time to fashion beauty that defies the tragic impermanence of our existence. 

(This essay was commissioned by ATS in Japan for inclusion in their reissue of this broadcast.)

Toscanini, a few weeks before his death, speaking to (from left to right) Daniel Guilet, Emanuel Vardi, Wilfrid Pelletier.

“He will live on in the hearts of all of us”: Bruno Walter’s final tribute to Arturo Toscanini

Late in life, Bruno Walter would muse upon the didactic value of sound recordings to Columbia Records’ Arnold Michaelis. Tellingly, he singled out the recorded legacy of one conductor as being particularly valuable to future generations: 

“I am really very happy about this idea that the disappearance of all the traces of our lives as performing musicians is not anymore to be feared. That we really. . . can live on in our best efforts. . . It is a kind of school. So it is for young conductors who can hear how Toscanini conducted this or that.”

The conducting profession has never been conducive to the forging of warm friendships among its most famous practitioners, especially during the golden age of the maestro-auteur in the early 20th century. Walter himself was aware that his mentor, Gustav Mahler, had been a fierce rival of Arturo Toscanini’s when happenstance brought both conductors to New York City during the same period. The disparity of their respective backgrounds and ages notwithstanding, a firm friendship based on mutual respect would be forged between these two conductors which would endure their entire lives. 

They first crossed paths in 1926 when Walter, then among the leading lights of the German musical world, was invited as a guest conductor to La Scala. Writing about the occasion in his memoirs, Theme and Variations, Walter recalled: “The meeting, casual though it was, made a deep and lasting impression upon me. I wished I would come to know the man better and fathom the secret of so exponential a being.”

Toscanini, though sometimes grumbling disapprovingly over his colleague’s interpretations, was nonetheless appreciative of Walter as both friend and musician

“When I see the good Bruno Walter,” he confided to his mistress, Ada Colleone Mainardi, “I really feel that I’m ten years younger than he!”

Within less than a decade of their first meeting, the lives of both conductors would be tossed asunder by the epochal winds of history about to blow through Europe. Toscanini, by the late 1930s permanently residing in America, emerged from retirement to assume the role as music director of NBC’s newly created flagship orchestra. Though prone to professional jealousies, he extended guest invitations to conductors fleeing the Old World in search of refuge and a chance to restart their careers in the New World. Among those whom he helped was Walter, who had fled the Anschluss and the imminent invasion of France, and was mourning the murder of his daughter Gretel besides. He made his first post-exile American appearance in March and April 1939 with the NBC Symphony in a five-concert series—a generous engagement reflective of Toscanini’s admiration. This was followed next season with another five-concert guest series which included, among other things, an electrifying reading of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony which, gratefully, has been preserved. 

Curiously, Walter would not be invited to conduct the NBC Symphony again until February 1951, when he replaced Toscanini, then recovering from a knee injury. 

After Toscanini’s final retirement in April 1954, NBC disbanded what had by then essentially become “his” orchestra. Instead of walking away, the ensemble independently reconstituted as the Symphony of the Air, promoting itself as “the orchestra that refused to die.” Don Gillis, composer and former producer for the NBC Symphony’s broadcasts, cabled the ensemble’s former music director an invitation to lead their first concert. He politely, but firmly rejected the orchestra’s “touching and kind [message],” stating that his advanced age and frail health precluded any possibility of considering any conducting engagements. 

If not presiding in person, Toscanini’s spirit at least hovered over the orchestra as strong as ever, even while the man himself rapidly wasted away. By the time his former orchestra was planning its elaborate concert commemorating his ninetieth birthday, Toscanini mental faculties had deteriorated to such a degree that one wonders whether he was even aware of the forthcoming occasion. Early in the morning of January 1, 1957, Toscanini would suffer a debilitating stroke—two weeks later he was dead. 

 “I am too deeply shocked by the passing of my dear and revered friend,” Walter wrote in a memorial tribute. “In him was greatness and I am sure the memories of his glorious activities. . . will live on in the hearts of all of us.”

Walter, himself an octogenarian and not in robust health, was moved to make out his last will and testament during this time. A few weeks later, his fragile physical state forced him to decline being a pallbearer for Toscanini at his funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. 

Already from the year before, when he was approaching his eightieth birthday, Walter was beginning to curtail his conducting engagements. In a letter to the New York Philharmonic’s manager, Bruno Zirato, he announced that he would not renew his regular guest appearances with the orchestra after the 1956 – 1957 season. 

“I feel the hour has struck for me to discontinue an activity which has meant so much to me,” he wrote. 

In his final years, he would cease performing live altogether, instead venturing from his Beverly Hills home only as far as a relatively short drive to Hollywood and Eagle Rock in order to conduct the pick-up Columbia Symphony Orchestra. These final recording sessions—covering repertoire ranging from Mozart to Mahler—have remained Walter’s best known, with the fire and verve of his early years mellowed (some would argue “dulled”) into agreeable geniality. 

But on February 3, 1957, as he (along with Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch) stepped before Toscanini’s old orchestra for the last time, much of that old fire returned in a triumphantly blazing performance of the Beethoven Eroica that is perhaps the finest of all Walter’s extant recordings of the symphony. 

Unsurprisingly given the occasion and ensemble, the performance has a Toscanini-like grip quite unlike Walter’s contemporary performances, be they in the studio or the concert hall. It also is a reminder of the orchestra’s reluctance to play according to Walter’s preferences. Violinist Felix Galimir remarked that members of the NBC Symphony would often “not even watch whatever [the guest conductor] was doing.” 

Replying to an admirer who had also commented on this unique aspect of this performance, Walter wrote: “I presume your impression may be explained by the fact that it was an orchestra which had played the same work under Toscanini for many years.”

The performance does not suffer in the least for all that, which is markedly superior to the stereo commercial recording he would make shortly afterwards. From the moment those twin E-flat chords pound forth, Walter’s interpretation surges with an irresistible sense of momentum tempered by subtle flexibility of line and sonority. It is tempting to wonder whether Walter’s traversal would have earned the admiration of Toscanini had he lived to hear it. Certainly it proves to not only be a fitting tribute to his recently deceased friend, but an inadvertently touching memento of the elemental power that Walter still managed to rouse from himself on occasion. 

Just over a month later, on March 7, 1957, he suffered a heart attack, the first of two that year, leaving a permanent mark on his career and performance style. The final curtain upon Bruno Walter’s career had begun to be drawn. 

Walter and Toscanini, unlikely friends, looking cozy in Leipzig during the latter’s 1930 European tour with the New York Philharmonic.

Richard Strauss, Alpha and Omega, At Disney Hall

Richard Strauss’ late music was many things—geriatric reverie, eloquent lamentation, a hero’s retreat from the world—but foremost among them was pointed, if wounded riposte to what he regarded as the excesses of the modernist “note-placers” of the 1920s against which he often inveighed. In his twilight years, amidst the still smouldering ashes of a ruined nation, Strauss would muse that he was likely the final chapter in the history of German music. In a sense, he was right. The postwar generations, spiritual successors of the Weimar avant-garde, turned outwards for inspiration, the legacy of German music in their eyes having become compromised by its association with the horrors of World War II. 

Maybe that was why the timing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic program of Strauss’ chamber music felt a bit off. With their Weimar Republic retrospective around the corner, this would have been more fitting as a ruminative postlude. 

The Serenade, Op. 7 for winds was the only work on the program that did not come from the composer’s final years (obliquely though it did forecast his much later “workshop” sonatinas). “Mozart’s melody is the incarnation of the Platonic ideal,” Strauss would reflect towards the end of his life. “Sought after by all the philosophers, the ideal of Eros hovering between earth and heaven.” His youthful score’s sunny glint, with its lithe yet sensual strands of song, already bear witness to this lifelong adoration of his forebear, to say nothing of establishing Strauss’ own credentials for songcraft. The group consisting of members from the orchestra’s woodwinds and brass played with appropriate control, careful to balance the ardor of its still teenage composer’s lyricism with a sobriety that would have marveled his older self. 

A lifetime later he would pen his Metamorphosen; the mature master’s melodic and contrapuntal craft channeled into the fathomless heartbreak of this elegy for the passing of the entire world he had ever known, now utterly and definitively vanquished; for the very death of culture itself. It is also marked by defiant anger rare in Strauss’ music, reflective of his embitterment with the Third Reich, then later with the Allied occupiers. “Another glorious achievement of the Nazi regime,” he fulminated in his diary weeks before the premiere of Metamorphosen. “Artists are no longer judged by their abilities, but by what Americans think of their political opinions.” 

In its guise for string septet, the tragedy takes on an intimacy which becomes almost unbearable, though the Philharmonic’s string group maintained a frosty distance from its disconsolate sorrow. Polished and precise though it was, there also was a discernible sense of unease with the deeper implications of its endless melody, the ambiguous object of its memorial. Perhaps their coolness of touch bespoke of a sense of diplomacy which preferred to leave such matters unaddressed. 

In its way, the curious arrangement of the Vier Letzte Lieder that was the program’s centerpiece was of a piece; its re-coloring keeping Straussian sentiment at arm’s length from the audience. 

Spanish composer Amparo Edo Biol wrought a version of the work that compacted it into a string quintet with solo trombone substituting for the soprano. It was (possibly despite itself) a backhanded tribute to Strauss, stripping him of his say through Eichendorff and Hesse, and imbuing an unexpected clumsiness to its soaring vocal part. 

David Rejano Cantero was the excellent soloist, but no matter how fine his playing was, nothing could disguise the fact that inserting a trombone in place of a soprano was like watching an elephant attempting to mimic the delicate flight of a hummingbird. Michael Kennedy once remarked that these songs were Strauss’ final hommages to his wife, Pauline: “His long love affair with the soprano voice, her voice, is consummated in this final masterpiece.” In its stead, the trombone blustered through its flowing and florid melodies, lending an unfortunate comic tone which was bitingly accented by a handful of flubs in the opening of “Frühling.” Bereft of its shimmering orchestral raiment and even the ability to speak for itself, the result was a kind of high-brow and exceedingly pretty gebrauchsmusik. Call it a “Weimarization” of this valedictory, if you prefer.  

With typical self-deprecation, Strauss deemed his late music as having “no significance whatever for the history of music.” Judging from the outcome of her ill-fitting arrangement, it seems that Edo took his ironic quip at face value. 

The stoic “gai-tare”: James DePreist’s Bruckner in Japan

The first—and last—time I heard James DePreist conduct in person was in December 2000, an opportunity which occurred by pure chance. Franz Welser-Möst had originally been scheduled to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on that date, but as had become his habit during this period (at least with his Southern California engagements), he abruptly cancelled. With relatively short notice, James DePreist was called upon to replace him and, additionally, made a surprising switch in the scheduled program: The Mahler Seventh would be swapped out for the Tenth (in the Cooke II version).

DePreist lead a performance which remains imprinted upon my memory for its serenity, at odds with the post-Bernsteinian morbidity then often heard in late Mahler. Far from being the creation of a man living in the shadow of death, DePreist seemed to find the work’s inspiration in the defiance of death proclaimed in Mahler’s Second: “O Tod! Du Allbezwinger! Nun bist du bezwungen!”

Afterwards, I ventured over to the backstage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to have him autograph a CD. Though his movement was impaired by the polio that he contracted while on tour in Thailand in 1962, it only served to enhance the man’s aura of dignity emerging triumphant through adversity; his imposing figure lending him a quality of a hero wearied by the passing of time. He was kind enough to spare a few moments to speak to me, a tongue-tied eighteen-year-old, briefly. When I timidly remarked to him how the life-affirming quality of his interpretation of the Mahler Tenth had impressed me, he smiled, then took a breath. “That’s how it ought to be, young man,” DePreist replied to me. “This is a symphony about death, about love, by a man who still believed he had a lot of life to express it all.”

DePreist carved out a notable career in his homeland, gaining admiration for his longtime tenure as music director of the Oregon Symphony, as well as his teaching at The Juilliard School; and by 2005, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush. Yet his name never soared as high as that of some of his contemporaries in America’s classical music circles. Instead, it was in Europe and especially Japan where he found recognition commensurate with his artistry. It is tempting, but perhaps misleading (to say nothing of futile) to speculate over why this may have been so. He himself seemed unconcerned. “I would never want to be denied the opportunity to conduct because I'm black,” he once stated. “But neither would I want to be engaged because I'm black.”

In Scandinavia he made a number of well-received recordings of varied repertoire for the BIS and Ondine labels. Together with the several recordings he made in Oregon for Delos, DePreist left behind a sizable and distinguished legacy which continues to be admired by music-lovers. Overlooked, however, is his period at the helm of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra (colloquially known by locals as the “To-kyō,” an abbreviation of the ensemble’s formal Japanese name) in the mid-2000s, a brief moment which could lay fair claim to being the most glamourous in his entire career. Not that he had an easy time of it by any means.

Though he had enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the orchestra as a guest, his engagement as music director came during difficult times for the organization. It had suffered from then Governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintarō’s program of administrative reforms; which, among other things, sought to consolidate cultural organizations, and shutter others deemed to be redundant or financially untenable. The resulting budget cuts hit the To-kyō hard, leading to shifts in personnel, and according to some music critics, a perceptible drop in its musical standards. Compounding the orchestra’s stress was the recent loss of its music director Gary Bertini, who had died in Israel in March 2005 a few weeks after his last performances in Russia. DePreist himself was not in the best of health. Among other challenges he faced were the after-effects of a kidney transplant, which had freed him from the onerous necessity of dialysis treatment, but forced him to conduct from a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. If he was fazed by any of this, he never let on publicly. On April 20, 2005 when the To-kyō held a press conference at the ANA Intercontinental Hotel announcing DePreist as its next director, he appeared the very image of confidence and security that the organization sorely needed during this delicate time.

Over the next three seasons, DePreist enthusiastically set into his new role: Delivering highly regarded performances of Beethoven and Shostakovich symphonies, shoring up the orchestra’s technical polish, visiting local schools for To-kyō’s community outreach program, and even becoming a sort of highbrow gaitare—a person from abroad whose exotic foreignness is crucial to their celebrity appeal. In that capacity DePreist appeared as an important supporting character in the manga Nodame Cantabile, where his parts were rendered in katakana, heavily emphasizing the evocative exoticism of the other which Japanese audiences often find appealing in their resident gaikokujin. In Japan he accomplished that feat increasingly rare in classical music: Extending one’s renown beyond the boundaries of their art. Unfortunately, despite these successes, his health was becoming an increasing and significant impediment to the continuation of his work, eventually ruling out a prolonged tenure with the To-kyō. So it was with profound mutual regret that he announced his retirement in 2007, effective at the end of the orchestra’s season the following year. The reins would be handed over to Eliahu Inbal, while Koizumi Kazuhiro would step up from Principal Guest Conductor to Resident Conductor.

Echoing the Mahler that I had encountered in my youth under his command, this set of To-kyō broadcasts of DePreist’s Bruckner is marked by an embrace of life readily discernible to the listener. If not the heaven-storming symphonic essays typically heard, the moving vulnerability of these performances have their own virtues. They are long on lyrical flow and textural blend. Conductor and orchestra cajoles, caresses the music, but never forces anything from it. Music pours from these scores with the inevitability, with all the natural ease of water bubbling from a hot spring. The performances manage to be self-effacing without being faceless; distinguished without brazen ostentatiousness. It was a quality reflective of DePreist’s own hard-won worldview.

“We bring our brick to the edifice,” Antal Doráti had once told him at the start of his career. “Don't worry about putting it in front or up high." These words from his mentor, which bespoke of their mutual frustrated ambitions, resonated with DePreist for the rest of his life. “I always, always think of that,” he recalled decades later.

In these recordings, DePreist brings Bruckner down from his habitual forbidding peaks. With grace and care, he makes of these symphonies human-scaled portraits of doubts and hopes, daubed in flesh and blood; its colors tempered by the quiet stoicism which, by turns, consoled and fueled the life and art of this still underappreciated American artist.

This essay will be included in a future Tobu release of Bruckner’s Second and Ninth with the To-kyō under James DePreist.

“Nice to meet you!”: Highbrow tarento James DePreist takes the spotlight in Nodame Cantabile.

“Everything Black”: Toscanini’s Final Performance of Verdi’s Requiem

“[Arturo] Toscanini. . . is a natural musician,” opined composer-critic Virgil Thomson in a 1947 essay saluting the Italian conductor on his 80th birthday. “[The] music that he makes is the plainest, the most straightforward music now available in public performance. There is little of historical evocation in it and even less of deliberate emotional appeal. It is purely auditory, just ordered sound and very little else. There is not even very much Toscanini in it.”

Slyly back-handed though Thomson’s observations were, they bear the ring of truth. Toscanini’s simplification of the musical experience, which dispensed with politico-cultural allusions, and put forward the belief that “Allegro con brio” meant only that and nothing more was an epochal revelation in America, wherein the mantra of “less is more” was already deeply ingrained in the national character long before Mies van der Rohe had even dreamed of coining the concept. No surprise, then, that Toscanini triumphed over his Wagnerian rivals who arrived on American shores, whose metaphysical mists provoked distrust in a society already wary (if often in awe) of Teutonic influence. Gustav Mahler, Willem Mengelberg, and Wilhelm Furtwängler (and by extension the cultural universe from which they emerged) all would be trod underfoot by the Italian juggernaut. 

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Toscanini as a one-dimensional musician who applied the same formula to any score he conducted. His live recordings of repertoire as disparate as Bruckner, Elgar, and Shostakovich are sufficient and eloquent proof of his nuanced artistry. Whether the listener agrees with its results or not, his performance practice was born from a highly disciplined sense of willpower; a self-imposed need to restrain his personal fancies, which paradoxically were channelled into the highly-charged performances that he was rightly famous for. Yet in a select few works, that rigid self-denial would with infinitesimal subtlety yield to something more personal, verging upon the Romantic. Toscanini’s performances of Verdi’s Requiem, undoubtedly, fall into this category. 

Across the span of nearly half a century, Toscanini would conduct the Requiem twenty-nine times. The first time was at La Scala on January 27, 1902 to mark the one-year anniversary of Verdi’s death. By the occasion of his last performance, 49 years later to the day, Toscanini was living in a nation and world altogether different; and the toll of his 83 years had become impossible to ignore. He was plagued with circulation problems, tooth decay, worsening vision; and was deeply concerned for his wife, Carla, who was recovering from a recent stroke. Perhaps most pressing of all in those weeks preceding his last performance of the Requiem, he was also enduring chronic leg pain that had become so acute, he was forced to cancel all his appearances during the first half of the 1950 – 1951 season of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. 

“I’m quite a mess,” he wrote to his wife while he was in Philadelphia awaiting treatment, “. . . I hope I’ll be well enough [to conduct the Requiem], but in the meantime the weeks go by and I’m forever agitated and I haven’t tried to conduct.” Later he poured out his despair over the frightening state of the postwar world to her: “My God, so much sadness! And the [Korean War]! And the atomic bomb. . . ! I see black, everything black. . . I’m very agitated, my brain is full of nasty thoughts and my heart is full of bitterness.”

Another irritant was the NBC Symphony’s ejection from its longtime home at Studio 8-H. They eventually made Carnegie Hall their new home, though Toscanini remained worried about the slashing of the Peacock Network’s investment in classical music, to say nothing of the depreciation in his prestige that would occur as a result. 

Despite these personal and professional concerns, he prepared himself mentally and physically for the Requiem. By the time of the first rehearsal on January 10, 1951, Toscanini betrayed little of the aforementioned vulnerabilities. With a splendid vocal quartet composed of Herva Nelli, Fedora Barbieri, Giuseppe di Stefano, Cesare Siepi, and an augmented Robert Shaw Chorale, Toscanini led on January 27, 1951 his final performance of Verdi’s Requiem; an event which RCA Victor was documenting for posterity. Nevertheless, he was profoundly dissatisfied with the performance. Although the orchestra had a few minor lapses in ensemble coordination and unanimity of pitch, the most glaring problems were with di Stefano and especially Nelli, who suffered a meltdown in mid-“Libera Me.”

“I did my best in order to reach a good performance worthy of the circumstance,” he wrote to an admirer who thanked him for the concert. “[Instead] I failed entirely. . . the performance of both [Requiem] and [Te Deum] failed to be as good as I hoped. . . I felt unhappy and ashamed of myself.”

Reviewing the tapes of the performance, Toscanini initially rejected them for commercial release. He later relented once RCA Victor demonstrated that faulty sections in the live performance could be patched up with sections recorded from the rehearsals. It was this modified recording that has become the best-known of Toscanini’s several recordings of the Requiem. 

Yet the story of this recording does not end there. Years after the conductor’s death, tapes began to circulate among collectors of the unedited live performance from 1951. Still more revelatory was the fact that another microphone aside from NBC’s had captured the performance onto a seperate set of tapes, which also had survived. It was, therefore, theoretically possible to assemble both sets of recordings into “accidental stereo.” 

Some important allowances on the part of the listener must be conceded. “Accidental stereo” is not the same as the real thing, as a cursory listening of this recording will immediately reveal. The sound can be simultaneously diffuse and congested, with the sonic perspective randomly swerving from left to right and back at various intervals. Each tape is treated to divergent production methods, resulting in a sometimes uncomfortable synchronization. Nonetheless, the opportunity vouchsafed here to gain a truer sense of what Toscanini sounded like in the flesh cannot be underestimated. 

Then there are the technical shortcomings of the performance itself. 

All of these things, ultimately, pale before the essential might of Toscanini’s—and Verdi’s—vision here. Numerous flaws notwithstanding, what remains is a performance of remarkable emotional power. Although he harbored an anti-clerical bent, Toscanini was not quite the agnostic that Verdi had been, as he confessed to intimates. He was perhaps what would much later be referred to as a “cultural Catholic”: An individual who no longer practices the religion, but remains in the sway of its imagery and traditions. Some of the residue of that deep-seated belief can possibly be heard here on this recording, especially in the terrifying din that he rouses in the “Dies Irae” and “Tuba Mirum;” which in his hands accrue, ironically, a Mahlerian grandeur. The comparative inflexibility of his phrasing and tempi in this performance imbue it with a nervy drive that approaches the unbearable. Death by this point had considerably singed the edges of Toscanini’s existential horizons. It was no longer the thing of youthful fantasy and romanticization. It was a real, dull, and onerous thing that made its presence known to him in any number of ever-increasing physical ailments, as well as in the passing of colleagues and friends. Only a few months after this performance, he would be mourning the passing of his ailing wife. 

“There’s a sadness that can’t be healed,” he wrote to his daughter Wally a short time after. 

An intimate awareness of death, as if he had come face-to-face with it, permeates this performance. Not to say that it lacks energy for all that. There is defiance, there is lamentation. But in the end, by the time the listener arrives at the final “Libera Me” there is, if not quite acceptance, then at least resignation of the inevitable by a man who understood that he was narrowing towards the end of a long road. 

A moving and humbling document from an artist who, at least in this recording, imparted very much of himself into it. 

(This essay will be included as the liner notes for a future release by ATS of Toscanini’s live 1951 Verdi Requiem.)

From 1953: A rare shot of a grandfatherly Toscanini wearing spectacles. [Wikimedia Commons]

The best Recordings and Reissues of 2019

(This list arrives a trifle late as I was feeling a bit under-the-weather at last year’s close.)

We’re down to the last few days of 2019 and as often happens at this time of year, many of us enjoy reflecting upon our favorite records of the past year. 

For listeners like myself, devoted to digging about in the past, 2019 was yet another boom year for inexpensive and handsomely produced reissues and hitherto unheard archival revelations. For example, here in my hands is the entirety of Bruno Walter’s American Columbia discography—all of it available for less than $200. And this is only one among many such sets.

While the “major” labels have largely abdicated their commitment to serious music, the so-called “minor” labels have been spoiling us with splendid new recordings of repertoire well-trod and arcane. 

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are my favorite reissues and new recordings of the past year. 

 Favorite reissues:

• Raymond Lewenthal: The Complete RCA and Columbia Recordings [Sony]: Eccentric and erudite, a figure as much a creation of Carnegie Hall as it was of Hollywood, Lewenthal carved a niche for himself among the most unique and fascinating in music. A pianistic late bloomer, he pushed his technique to its very limits. The sheer force of will he was capable of summoning is immediately palpable in these recordings from that brief moment when his career was in the ascendent. Throughout this set one encounters the flashing color, bold rhythmic projection, and messianic zeal that keeps the listener at the edge of their seat. He was also that great rarity in a musician: A genuinely articulate, insightful, and engaging speaker on music. Like the man himself, this set demands your attention. 

• Bruno Walter: The Complete Columbia Recordings [Sony]: Twenty-five years ago, Sony reissued about ⅔ of this material in their Bruno Walter: The Edition. Now here is the entirety of the conductor’s output for Columbia, handsomely produced and remastered, and priced cheaper than ever. His recordings from the 1940s and early 1950s, many previously unavailable on CD, with their fire and rhythmic tautness, have long been praised as being his finest work. But the final studio sessions in Los Angeles, which have their many detractors, sparkle afresh here; their warmth and generosity of spirit compelling on their own terms. 

• Dinu Lipatti: The Last Recital [FY Solstice]: The tale of Lipatti’s final performance, eloquently retold in the liner notes by Mark Ainley, to say nothing of the performance itself is well-known to collectors. Lovingly restored in full for the first time as it is here from the original tapes, complete with the pianist’s evocative preluding, this reissue is a revelation nevertheless. A poignant tribute to an artist whose star was dimmed much too soon. 

• Debussy’s Traces (recordings by Marius-François Gaillard, Irén Marik, Mieczysław Horszowski, Mary Garden, Claude Debussy, and Marie-Thérèse Fourneau) [Arbiter]: Debussy’s sound webs, woven together from strands as disparate as Wagner and gamelan music, are often turned soggy by many a pianist, incapable of the deft hand needed to render these delicate tapestries. Marius-François Gaillard, a champion of this music while it was still considered modern, presents here a nuanced, multifaceted Debussy wholly unlike the bland saccharine pastel often presented today. From these freshly-scrubbed shellac grooves the music sings, declaims, laughs, sobs, dreams; all of it faintly bristling with a sense of danger. Performances of Debussy by other pianistic greats fill out this compilation, but make no mistake: Gaillard is the star of the show. Superb notes by producer Allan Evans. 

• New Music String Quartet: The Complete Columbia Album Collection [Sony]: A surprise reissue. The NMSQ didn’t have the fame of their contemporaries such as the Budapest, Amadeus, and Juilliard String Quartets, but their astonishing articulation, colorful phrasing, and adventurous programming make this a vital memento of this long overlooked ensemble.

• Wilhelm Furtwängler: The Radio Recordings, 1939 – 1945 [Berlin Philharmonic]: These recordings are by now so famous (infamous?) that yet another reissue seems hardly warranted. But these new remasterings from the original tapes—a considerable improvement on their tinny-sounding predecessors—and the informative liner notes accompanying them will draw the eye of even the most fatigued Furtwänglerite. At their best, they capture the sort of frenzied, single-minded orchestral execution that was rare even in the conducting golden age from which these sprang forth from. Everything teems with vitality and necessity. Nothing sags, not a moment is wasted. Whether one is a neophyte or a seasoned follower of this conductor, no single set most persuasively demonstrates the spellbinding power of Furtwängler’s art better than this. 

• Artur Rodziński: The Complete CSO Recordings [Pristine Audio]: Conductors can often be mercurial characters, but Rodziński was something else altogether. Fanatic, superstitious, and increasingly paranoid as his years wore ingloriously on, he became his own worst enemy. These recordings from his short-lived tenure at the helm of the Chicago Symphony, then, are a poignant reminder of a high-flying career that would soon crash with a thud. Not that any of that is discernible here. The energy, clarity, and edge that had made him a sought-after conductor in the 1930s and 1940s is amply evident. In a better world, a more even-tempered Rodziński would have kept on leading and recording with Chicago, perhaps avoiding driving himself into a premature death. As it is, we have only these few, but fascinating testaments of a musical partnership as artistically brilliant as it was acrimonious; plenty enough to contemplate what might have been. 

• Mahler: Symphony No. 5 (London Symphony Orchestra/Jascha Horenstein) [Pristine Audio]: Until recently, there were no recordings of this symphony by this great Mahlerian. Now we have two, with this most recent one being the finest. Presented in fine sound, Horenstein, as usual, delivers a Mahler that is both structurally sound and dramatically incisive, illuminating this score’s dense textures with seeming effortlessness. Excellent notes by the conductor’s cousin, Misha Horenstein. 

• Rudolf Firkušný: Bern Recital; March 16, 1976 [Weitblick]: The Czech pianist was never a glamorous A-list pianistic star. Elegant and self-effacing, he instead became something of a pianist’s pianist. The music-making on this set from Weitblick beguiles, charms, even seduces. Like his great compatriot, Ivan Moravec, Firkušný seemed incapable of playing anything less than stunningly gorgeous. This Swiss recital from the late 1970s captures him at his very best. 

• Ustvolskaya: Young Pioneers’ Suite, Children’s Suite, Sports’ Suite, Poem (Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra/Yevgeny Mravinsky, Arvid Jansons, Igor Borisoglebsky, Vladislav Lavrik): The enigmatic and brutal music of this withdrawn, one-time student of Shostakovich has steadily been garnering attention over the past quarter century. This budget reissue from Brilliant compiles a number of excellent recordings of her early music. Bright and boisterous, these colorful scores burn with an inner conviction that augur the uncompromising tone poet she would eventually become. 

Favorite new recordings:

• Dupont: Complete Symphonic Works (Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège/Patrick Devin) [Fuga Libera]: The shadow of death looms over this music which also glows defiantly with life, with the resolve to create, to leave a mark upon existence against all odds. Part Franck, part Debussy, the short-lived French composer Gabriel Dupont took the various strands that influenced his work and fashioned an art that was original and deeply expressive. This gorgeous music is matched to equally gorgeous performances that captivate, leaving one admiring the force of will that wrought such beauty against the decay of illness. 

• Ravel: Piano Concerto in G, Le Tombeau de Couperin, Alborada del gracioso (Javier Perianes; Orchestre de Paris/Josep Pons) [Harmonia Mundi]: While most pianists today seem bent on out-Horowitzing and out-Argeriching each other, the Spanish pianist Javier Perianes prefers to be himself, sensitively honing his subtle art. In this Ravel album, he conjures as much gossamer as he does glitter, daubing the sparkle with a warming glow that invites. His sound—bronze, not brass—is a joy for the ear always. 

• Feldman: Patterns in a Chromatic Field (Mathis Mayr/Antonis Anissegos) [Wergo]: Feldman’s hypnotic and unapologetically beautiful music is among the glories of the late 20th century. This late score from 1981 finds Feldman less gauzy and more galvanized than usual. Mayr and Anissegos interact with almost conversational casualness, imbuing an earthiness into this often ethereal score, belying their feat of intense focus needed to bring off this score. Its slight technical imperfections impart a human face upon this rarefied music; this creation of an abstract Romantic, the unlikely musical grandchild of Bruckner and Sibelius, baptized by Cage. 

• Henze: Heliogabalus Imperator, Los caprichos, Ouvertüre zu einem Theater (Anssi Karttunen; BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oliver Knussen) [Wergo]: The knotty, thorny music of Henze finds here sympathetic friends in the guise of cellist Karttunen and the late conductor Knussen. Often venomously ironic and delighting in its own invention, Henze could also be disarmingly sincere. Both soloist and conductor, with the excellent support of the BBC Symphony, cut through the music, exposing to the listener a body of work which deserves ranking among the greatest composed. 

• Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas (Igor Levit) [Sony]: Levit, despite being only in his early 30s, has much to say about these works that are better than they can ever be performed. Even at his interpretively most imperfect, Levit’s fingers restlessly search out this music’s meanings, consider carefully their manifold implications. This is bracing Beethoven alive and surging with purpose, nervy, daring the listener to come to grips with it. 

• Zimmermann: Violin Concerto, Photoptosis, Die Soldaten (Vokal-Sinfonie) (Leila Josefowicz; Anu Komsi, Jeni Packalen, Hilary Summers, Peter Tantsits, Ville Rusanen, Juha Uusitalo; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Hannu Linttu) [Finlandia]: Atonal music, so it’s often claimed, is “cerebral” art bereft of emotion, better left behind in the ash heap of the 20th century. The music of Zimmermann is a living refutation of that lame stereotype, proof positive that expressive music isn’t dependent on traditional tonality to move the listener. The “vocal symphony” he extracted from his magnum opus, Die Soldaten, is like the opera it’s based a febrile and intense thing; a writhing waking nightmare among the most potent musical statements of the last century. Joined by two other important Zimmermann scores, these performances under Hannu Lintu convey this music to the listener with superhuman virtuosity and intensity of expression that highlight its debt to Beethoven and Mahler. 

• Ives: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4 (San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Michael Tilson Thomas) [SFS Media]: Over 30 years ago, Tilson Thomas made fine, if somewhat flawed recordings of these scores. Today perhaps no other living conductor better understands the crazy quilt audacity of Ives. These recordings, documenting a lifetime’s love and devotion to this music, convincingly presents their explosive balancing act between the rural and cosmopolitan, the homespun and cosmic. Tilson Thomas doesn’t smooth the roughness—like the coarse shapes of a homemade woodcut—of this music. Instead, he celebrates it; he celebrates Ives in all the inconsistency and awesomeness of his originality. In his hands, the composer is revealed as perhaps the most accurate reflection of the nation from which he emerged: Taciturn, petty, ambitious, heroic, and sentimental. 

• Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 (Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Mariss Jansons) [BR Klassik]: The late conductor’s final recording of Shostakovich’s wartime colossus proves to be his finest. The splendid Bavarian brass—rich-toned, but with a touch of tartness—are superb, carrying through with graceful power in the first and third movements. Jansons’ sense of pacing is natural, allowing the music room to unfurl without detriment to its drama, toning down this score’s jingoistic swagger into something Beethovenianly noble. 

• Roussel: Le festin d’Araignée; Dukas: L'Apprenti sorcier (Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire/Pascal Rophé) [BIS]: Roussel’s late ballet, like much of his music, tends to be overlooked. A shame because as these pert and subtly colored performances demonstrate, his music—alight with mesmerizing rhythms—is among the 20th century’s finest. The fine performance of Dukas’ deathless tone poem is the icing on the cake. 

• Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 (Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck) [Reference Recordings]: The partnership of Pittsburgh and Honeck seems to fly under the radar of the mainstream classical music press. Heaven knows why. Their recordings—initially with Exton, now with Reference—demonstrate the kind of hefty sound and daring sense of interpretive risk all too rare nowadays. Their conception of Bruckner’s final symphony is appropriately apocalyptic: The cyclopean opening movement thunders, the Scherzo roils with anger, and the crushing climax of the “Adagio” opens up like an awful cosmic revelation of utmost terror. 

Concert Review: Mehta leads Mahler 2 at Disney Hall

When I watched Zubin Mehta make his way across the Disney Hall stage last Friday night—his precarious, careful shuffling lending him an air of dignity, of wounded nobility—the question suddenly rose: Has there ever been a more dichotomous conductor than he? 

With that brash confidence bestowed only upon arrogant youth, Mehta streaked across the musical firmament of the mid-20th century. His early recordings for Decca, his appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the still tender age of 26 augured the arrival of a talent of earthshaking proportions. 

Then—the brilliant comet Mehta somehow, despite its once celestial trajectory, landed on the ground with a dull, resounding, disappointing thud. 

Once dazzling Southern California audiences (and others beyond the Sierra Nevada who kept a watchful, hopeful eye) with his bracing programs—Beethoven and Brahms rubbing shoulders with Varèse, Kraft, and Frank Zappa—he suddenly turned timid in middle age; a champion diver who got cold feet when he became aware of the dizzying height from which he had once plunged so fearlessly. 

His appointments to the head of the New York Philharmonic, then later the Israel Philharmonic witnessed him in comfortable retreat. The insouciant edge that had once defined the best of his work turned bland; he turned his back on aesthetic candor, embracing instead the commercial. Also-ran recordings of tired warhorses; overblown and questionable stagings of Turandot and Tosca long on spectacle, short on musical integrity; and the three-ring Three Tenors circus act which tossed out the remaining shreds of that integrity in exchange for an easy payday. 

At age 83 he remains among the last stragglers of a generation that had followed the passing of the Mengelbergs, the Furtwänglers, the Klemperers; sometimes receiving their mantle with alacrity, at other times chafing reluctantly beneath its weight. Claudio Abbado is gone, Mariss Jansons breathed his last just as 2019 dimmed to a close, Bernard Haitink finally hung up his coat and tails weeks ago, and Daniel Barenboim chugs along—sometimes indifferently, sometimes brilliantly—but who knows for how much longer? Of all of them, Mehta is arguably the most representative, for better or worse. 

And yet the heart of the old Mehta—that is to say the young Mehta—still beats within his chest, defying time’s remorseless tread. A few seasons ago he challenged jaded ears here in Los Angeles with a Schubert Ninth so lovingly phrased, so engagingly paced that he made one sit up at attention for once through this often heavenly bore of a work. Then on Friday night, as the din of applause that greeted him at Disney Hall had yet to recede, he launched into Mahler’s “Resurrection,” its growling opening string tremolo instantly searing off the decades that had weighed upon him only moments before. 

For the next 80 minutes, the youthful Mehta—and the youthful Mahler who conceived this epic score—returned. The funereal dithyramb of the “Todtenfeier” movement moved along solemnly, passionately, without a moment of slack. Lamentation without sentimentality, tearless grief. Mehta observed the composer’s luftpausen at its hair-raising climax, imparting to the proceedings a sense of wild desperation like that of a caged animal howling against its destiny. The middle movements swayed firm—sweet, sarcastic, and sacred by turns—even if one wished at times that the Los Angeles Philharmonic strings weren’t so seemingly allergic to the expressive vulnerability conveyed by the string portamenti that Mahler demands. In the final movement, a symphonic fresco depicting Judgment Day, the orchestra was roused to heights of virtuosity that outstripped its already world-beating standards. 

In recent years, Mahler’s music itself has become a bit shopworn; its originality and power dimmed by mediocre and perfunctory run-throughs; and by too many, much too many performances that have dulled the listener’s senses to its might. But on this night, both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its former music director lived out Mahler’s credo that a score is only the blueprint and that a performer must search beyond it for its music. Together with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, soloists Chen Reiss (soprano), and Mihoko Fujimura (mezzo-soprano) they grasped towards it, found it, and evangelized its otherworldly gospel to their audience with the zeal of an apocalyptic prophet. 

The listener was humbled; reminded that behind Zubin Mehta the global brand, so often the herald of the mediocre and perfunctory itself, is a musician of genuine class. For moments like those visited upon the audience in Downtown last Friday, Mehta’s usual schlock and awe is quickly forgiven and gratefully forgotten. 

A “blonde-crowned star” in West Germany: Lola Bobesco at WDR Köln

Listening to her recordings, one would find it difficult to believe that the unmistakably original artistry of Lola Bobesco did not set the world afire. Her lushness of tone, intensity of expression, rich phrasing, and the seemingly natural ease with which she commanded her instrument—as if it were an extension of her physical self—all would seem to augur a career that would have at least been every bit as starry and glamorous as that of any of the 20th century’s greatest masters of the violin. Instead, when she died in 2003 at the age of 82 in her adopted home of Belgium, her name by then had mostly become faded from international recognition (save for her home country of Romania and also in Japan, where interest in her art had bloomed late in her life).

Tutored first by her father, Bobesco eventually entered the Paris Conservatory where she counted Ginette Neveu among her classmates. After graduation she made the rounds of the competition circuits, avoiding the Wieniawski Competition, but making distinguished efforts at the Queen Elizabeth and Ysaÿe Competitions. In 1939 she made her concerto debut by performing the Beethoven under Paul Paray, then soon followed that up with collaborations with conductors such as Willem Mengelberg and Ernest Ansermet. She also performed as a member of a short-lived, but star-studded trio with Antonio Janigro and Dinu Lipatti.

When hostilities broke out between France and Germany in 1939, Bobesco decided to stay in what by then had become her second homeland; when it was subsequently occupied, she served as a courier for the French Resistance. In 1944 she married Jacques Genty, pianist, chamber partner, and fellow Resistance member. After the war, Bobesco turned her focus onto Belgium, where she would permanently settle by the late 1950s. During this period, she and Genty would divorce. Nevertheless, they remained good friends and continued performing together long afterwards.

She was in many respects a citizen of the world, not only because of the wide distances she traveled during the height of her career, but also because of the sophisticated and cosmopolitan blend of influences which had shaped her as an artist. Georges Enescu and Jacques Thibaud both had been among her teachers, with each being the embodiment of what their respective national backgrounds imparted to the mature Bobesco: Romanian emotive power on the one hand, Gallic flexibility on the other. Of course, Romania itself has been fertile soil for artists; a gateway land where Latin, Slavic, and Ottoman civilizations all met, fought, and left their permanent imprint.

By the time these Cologne broadcasts from the late 1950s and early 1960s were made, Bobesco had established herself among the top practitioners of her instrument. The impression she made upon audiences in her German concerto debut was dramatic and immediate. One reviewer who was, evidently impressed as much by the violinist’s presence—heralding as a “mannequin slender, blonde-crowned star”—as much by her artistry, was luxurious in his praise.

“The bejeweled lace of sound, the honeyed sweetness of her singing line, the trills, double-stops, the entire effort of this violinist of art for the sake of art… here is the sparkling play of a fabulous violinist,” reported Hermann Lindlar of the Deutsche Zeitung. “The beauty of her glow, swept under the quivering hand of Bobesco, who sobbed on her Guarneri del Gesù.”*

Another critic behaved more circumspect, but nonetheless permitted himself to compare her to Heifetz and Menuhin. “Terrifying dexterity, musical sensitivity, and an endearingly beautiful, limpid, and warm tone,” lauded yet another.^

The repertoire she chose for these two broadcast sessions for WDR Köln demonstrate her lifelong affection for Franco-Belgian repertoire, much of which was rarely played during the mid-20th century, and remain on the fringes of the repertory today. 

There is also on this compilation a touching tip of the hat to a friend who himself endured—and survived—the German occupation of his adopted homeland.

Ignace Lilien’s music begins the second disc of this set in the guise of a score which hardly betrays the darkness of the times from which it emerged. Originally from the Ukraine, Lilien settled after World War I in Holland. After the German invasion of the Netherlands in World War II, the composer was permitted to live a normal life, and was left unmolested despite his Jewish parentage. He also had developed a warm friendship with Bobesco and Genty; in 1955 he dedicated to them his Concerto for Violin, Piano, and Orchestra. His slim and elegant Violin Sonata No. 2 from 1945 glows with gentle light and whimsy, with only a moment or two in the central “Larghetto” darkening its otherwise cheerful countenance. 

Bobesco and Genty handle it gracefully, allowing it to float overhead, where it charms the listener as does a passing flock of birds across a sunlit morning sky.

Play and sparkle, too, mark Albert Roussel’s Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 11—an “early” score despite the fact that its composer was nearly 40 when he penned it. Later renowned for the sharp rhythms, biting harmonies, and bracing juxtapositions of instrumental color in his four symphonies, this early chamber work is suffused with a tender sensuality modeled on Cesar Franck and Vincent d’Indy. Yet already emerging is the mature composer that in time would erupt into the passionate roar of Bacchus et Ariane and the last two symphonies.

Also tending towards the mild and agreeable is Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 2; although like the Lilien score it, too, is the product of war and its resulting chaos. It was originally composed for the flute in 1942 when Prokofiev was being evacuated from Moscow to Almaty because of the German offensive on the Soviet Union. Two years later the composer arranged it for violin upon the suggestion of David Oistrakh. (Bobesco herself had competed against the Soviet violinist in the 1937 Queen Elizabeth Competition. They both lost out to her classmate, Neveu.)

It is not surprising to find on this collection her teacher Georges Enescu’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 6. During his life and even beyond, Enescu had defined the modern school of Romanian violin playing. Less appreciated, at least outside of the land of his birth, was his no less estimable genius as a composer. The opening theme of the work came to composer at the age of 14 while he wandered in the gardens of Prince George Mourousi. However, it took him another three years to finally devise the structure of the work that eventually became the Violin Sonata No. 2, whereupon he dashed it off in a matter of two weeks. Enescu was proud of the score and the stylistic breakthrough he felt it achieved. “I became myself,” he exclaimed. 

The brief, evocative Cinco comentarios for violin and piano by Joaquín Nin round out this recital. Like Roussel, he counted d’Indy among his teachers. Later in life Maurice Ravel would be an admirer of his music, as well as a personal friend. During his lifetime, his art had been highly esteemed in Spain and Latin America. Posthumously, he is best remembered for the incestuous relationship he carried on with his daughter, the writer Anaïs Nin.

The partnership between Bobesco and Genty is here, perhaps, at its refined best here, beguiling the listener with teasing charm, polishing these miniatures to a lustrous gleam. It is often in the seemingly small works that the essential quality of a musician is sometimes revealed: One is left no doubt here that in the golden-lined clouds of violin paradise, Bobesco holds her own among in a place of honor.

*: Deutsche Zeitung; April 9, 1963

^: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger; April 10, 1963

This essay will appear in a forthcoming Weitblick collection of Lola Bobesco’s chamber music broadcasts in Cologne. The author would like to cordially thank the Unternehmensarchiv des WDR for graciously permitting access to documents and reviews pertaining to Lola Bobesco.

Of Lise Davidsen, Lily Pons, and the Decline of Opera

As this year’s days dwindle down to a precious few, a music critic can dependably count on being asked by their editors to submit various journalistic round-ups summarizing their experiences over the past 12 months: Best recordings, most memorable concerts, and so on. Things are no different for me. The sun peeked out briefly, then slipped away beyond the horizon while my fingers busily typed away at drafts for two such articles to be published later in the week. In many respects, 2019 has been an unforgettable year for me personally; defining within it all the myriad connotations of the term “interesting times.” Like a popcorn kernel defiantly wedged in one’s molar, some experiences linger longer in the dusty and dimly lit corridors of memory despite themselves. 

Take the ghastly production of The Magic Flute at Los Angeles Opera which I attended last month. A good friend and devoted lover of opera asked me shortly after this performance if I believed that the level of singing in this art form had declined in the last half century. A tricky question with predictably even trickier answers. On the whole, the calibre of singing today is probably higher than it has ever been. Conservatory and university-trained singers today in general have a holistic grasp of varied genres of their art—their instruments being able to turn on a dime with constant professionalism from Puccini, to Penderecki, to pop—that would have been unimaginable to an Urlus or Galli-Curci. It is enough to consider that there are probably more superlative classical singers active today in Southern California than there probably ever were in all of Central Europe during the heyday of Mozart and da Ponte. 

So why the uncomfortable guilty conscience which dogs me after attending most operatic performances today? Is there something amiss today after all?

Next month, I’ll be walking down the street a few blocks from my home to see the Metropolitan Opera’s January production of Berg’s Wozzeck. Looking through the company’s website, I’m startled by the sight of all the performers, from the title lead down to the conductor: They are nearly all so glossily photogenic. Luigi Dallapiccola was already griping in the 1960s that opera had become something that people went to see rather than hear. Recalling the aforementioned Magic Flute, it was interesting to note that the vast majority of critical noise swirled around the visuals. Even the city’s de facto big boss of music criticdom was mostly agog over the sight of the thing, expending comparatively little space on the singing, and virtually nothing on the conducting and orchestral performance. Perhaps this was a polite omission. The Dorothy Chandler’s acoustics are notoriously awful, presenting a formidable challenge for any singer to surmount. That said, with the exceptions of the superb Tamino and Sarastro, the singing was mostly mediocre; one unfortunate singer was audibly being pushed beyond what her modest instrument was capable of. In such a situation, common today even in the most exalted opera companies, a regieoper production can arrive like a hero to the rescue, salvaging a middling musical performance with the trappings of dazzling visual distractions; the less relevant to the composer’s intentions, the better. It was quickly apparent at The Magic Flute, at any rate, that neither the singers, orchestra, conductor, nor even the composer were the stars of the show. Like junking a painting in order to admire the frame, the producers treated the opera as a prop to self-indulgently mug the spotlight for themselves. Not that the audience ever cares about such trifling details—they apparently loved it. Maybe it was best this way. In their own garish way, the producers may have felt that discretion was the better part of valor. 

My thoughts also turned to Lise Davidsen, who lately has had the opera world at her feet. Comparisons to Flagstad and Nilsson, two of the mightiest voices that ever drew breath, run thick in print. Opera Now described her as being “a once in a generation Wagnerian.” Which makes me wonder whether these same critics have ever actually heard Flagstad and Nilsson—or even Davidsen for that matter. Receiving a copy of her Decca recording of Strauss’ Four Last Songs earlier this year, I was surprised to hear a fine, but ordinary voice which, moreover, is persistently hooty and wooly. If such a thing as “once in a generation Wagnerian” even is possible, then the few Millennials that care about such things may be made to wait just a little longer for the Isolde of their dreams. At least to my tin ears, Frida Leider she ain’t. 

Way back in high school, I recall watching a Classic Arts Showcase clip of Jussi Björling and Renata Tebaldi singing through the great duet in La bohème. She was pleasantly matronly in appearance, if not quite the delicate young girl envisioned by the opera’s creators; Björling looked like Bob’s Big Boy. But what singing! Despite the cheap sets, their ages, and their bulging waistlines, they two suspended reality with every breath they took. This was no “performance”—in those few minutes before those ancient kinescope cameras, both of them melting underneath the blistering heat of the studio lamps, they simply were Mimì and Rodolfo. 

Before going to bed last night, I thumbed through the pages of Lily Pons: A Centennial Portrait that my friend had gifted to me the day before. It could be argued that in some less than obvious (and flattering) ways, she was among the progenitors of today’s professional and drab style of singing. As even her admirers confessed, she earned her role at the Metropolitan Opera as much as for her singing as for her physical appeal. In her prime she was a remarkably beautiful woman, a quality which Pons shrewdly capitalized upon. Indeed, she won the Metropolitan job over another coloratura in great part because her competitor’s figure was “considered impossible for the standards of such a sophisticated audience.” Pons’ voice was nimble and sweet, if chalky white above the staff, with shallow low notes; she had neither the girlish color and evenness of production of Erna Berger, nor the stunning top notes which Erna Sack enjoyed. Nevertheless, a great singer she was all the same. Not only did Pons preserve her voice until well into her late years, but she also had made a careful study of her talents, taking close measure of its virtues and faults. “Actually, because I treasured and protected what God had entrusted to me,” she confided to a friend, “the silver flute in my throat lasted much longer than I could ever have hoped or anticipated.” There was something else, too, something which no conservatory training, no matter how thorough can teach: Natural charm in performance and sincere affection for music in general. Before embarking upon her career as a singer, she had been a formidable enough pianist in her teens to have earned a first prize at the Paris Conservatory. The totality of contextual thinking that the piano fosters—to consider not one, but multiple threads of musical thought, and weave them together into a cohesive whole—stayed with Pons her whole life, allowing her to become an ideal ensemble player who humbly understood that hers was simply another texture, however important, in the fabric that makes up an opera. In spite of her reticent musicianship, she adroitly manipulated the press to her advantage, becoming that which few opera singers even in those golden years were able to achieve—a genuine public figure, a star, and deservedly so. 

A few years before her sudden death from pancreatic cancer in 1976, Pons reflected on the fading of the artistic values that had shaped her craft, as well as those who came before her: “You and I know that the best is behind us. We are fortunate to have lived when there was still a certain amount of style and manners, and people still had a heart. Now it’s all so cheap, tawdry, shoddy, and people do not seem to have any feelings left. As for the world of opera, I cringe.” It would be tempting to dismiss these as the thoughts of an exhausted geriatric whose gaze is turning away from this world and peering into the next. Yet our contemporary preoccupation with visual spectacle, the diminishing and even cold-hearted mockery of musical integrity would appear to suggest otherwise. That guilty conscience is nipping at my heels once more…

For all the sensation that Pons’ physique once inspired, all we have left now is her voice—as fresh as it ever was. Miles Kastendieck of the New York Journal-American wrote on the day after she celebrated her 25th season at the Metropolitan that she was “perhaps the last of a long line of coloraturas who made their singing the be-all and end-all of their art.” A timeless lesson for aspirants to operatic greatness: The beauty which Lily Pons, her singing contemporaries, and their forebears embodied was more than just skin-deep. 

Lily Pons (right) with Bidú Sayão in New York City, spring 1972.

A Brief Overview of The Most Recent Carl Nielsen Cycles

I first encountered Carl Nielsen’s music at the age of 13, courtesy of Paavo Berglund’s masterly recording of the composer’s Symphony No. 6. It was love at first hearing. Since then a lot of things have changed. Quite a few composers I loved then are barely tolerable to me now; my enthusiasm for others has since been tempered by a more soberly critical spirit. But my adoration of Carl Nielsen’s music has remained steadfast for the past quarter of a century. If anything, my appreciation for his genius, for the humanity of his art only increases with each passing year.

What is it about Nielsen’s music that is so special? It is the restlessness of the man’s spirit, his eagerness to explore, his readiness to roam ever further beyond the horizon. Whereas his great Scandinavian contemporary Jean Sibelius seemed to have spent his entire career retracing his steps with each symphony and tone poem in the hope of making the ascent towards the summit of his elusive perfection better still, Nielsen sought to venture through different paths with each new score, tearing up the maps from prior journeys, and guided by his unquenchable thirst for aesthetic wanderlust. “Give us something else, give us something new,” he once stated, “and let us feel that we are still alive, instead of constantly going around in deedless admiration for the conventional.”

His body of work contains a multitude of genres—concerti, chamber music, songs, solo instrumental works, and brilliant operas which rank with the best of the 20th century’s—but his six symphonies are perhaps the backbone of his kaleidoscopic art. Each one documents a remarkable stylistic leap from the last; taken cumulatively, the evolution from the youthful buoyancy of Nielsen’s Symphony No. 1 to the unsettlingly dark, embittered grotesquerie of his final “Sinfonia semplice” is dramatic to behold.

Because of the wide disparities in texture, mood, and form, his symphonic cycle are a formidable challenge for any single conductor to render. That has not stopped them from trying. Beginning in the 1970s with his fellow countryman Ole Schmidt, many conductors have attempted to wrangle together these multifaceted scores. (A couple—Leonard Bernstein and Chung Myung-Whun—attempted to do so, but left their cycles incomplete for varying reasons.) But unlike Sibelius, who counted on the support of a network of powerful admirers, critics, and conductors in England and America, appreciation of Nielsen remained largely confined to Scandinavia. Consequently, his symphonies arrived relatively late to records and international recognition of his importance continues to lag behind other composers of his generation. At least here in Los Angeles, his music—save for the Wind Quintet—is rarely performed.

Fortunately, despite all that, Nielsen’s symphonies do not lack for excellent recordings. Schmidt’s aforementioned cycle comes to mind. But two of the finest cycles of his symphonies came along during the sesquicentennial of his birth in 2015. While the pioneering recordings by Danish conductors such as Thomas Jensen, Erik Tuxen, and Launy Grøndahl ring with an authenticity that demand the attention of dedicated Nielsenites, these newest recordings not only interpretively hold up on their own, but the sheer polish of their orchestral execution would have dazzled the composer had he lived to hear them. Nielsen is a first-class composer whose music demands to be played by first-class orchestras.

The following is a brief overview of these recordings from 2015, ranked in order of personal preference.

• BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds [Chandos]: The Icelandic conductor’s set is perhaps the most consistently satisfying with respect to persuasiveness of interpretation and excellence in sound. Storgårds’ Nielsen is brawny, square-jawed, and muscular, leaping from height to height. He is at his best in the first three symphonies, where his clear-eyed approach fits well with the unbuttoned, open air mood of the composer’s pre-World War I music. His recording of the Symphony No. 1 is a delight, one of the best since André Previn’s; while the surging power of his “The Four Temperaments” ranks comfortably with Morton Gould’s. In the final two symphonies, however, Storgårds tends towards the prosaic. Though still very fine recordings, his rendering of the Symphony No. 5 lacks that last spark of wildness, of primal energy that fuels the best performances by Bernstein, Tuxen, and Kondrashin, among others. Additionally, the cavalcade of unsettling ironies in the Symphony No. 6 are presented at times with poker-faced plainness, their incongruous edges smoothed out. Nevertheless, both recordings are still quite good. The Chandos sound, as usual, is bold and splashy, with a sonic perspective that seems to sit the listener face-to-face with the orchestra. Insightful and informative liner notes by David Fanning round out this superb set.

• Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo [BIS]: Oramo, on the other hand, is at his best in the last three Nielsen symphonies. His Symphony No. 6 might be the very best ever committed to records; more than earning its favorable rank alongside the splendid recordings of this tricky work by Schmidt, Berglund, Jensen, Jascha Horenstein, and Tor Mann. Like Berglund, Oramo seems to regard the composer’s final symphony as proto-Shostakovichian, highlighting the streak of disillusionment and anger that courses throughout. The Royal Stockholm brass are superb as are its winds, which chatter vividly in the “Humoreske.” Oramo’s “Inextinguishable” and Symphony No. 5 would be among the very best if not for the somewhat shallow, boxy sound that BIS unfortunately imposed upon these performances (and which was subsequently much improved in this cycle’s later installments). Nevertheless, Oramo’s razor-sharp dynamic contrasts and general sympathy for Nielsen’s late idiom shine through despite these drawbacks. The early symphonies are also excellent, but it is in the late scores where Oramo is most in his element.

• Various soloists; New York Philharmonic Orchestra/Alan Gilbert [Danacord]: It is sad to report that the New York Philharmonic’s first complete Nielsen cycle ended up being a bit of a bungled opportunity. The orchestra, to be sure, is gorgeous: Powerful and noble brass, characterful winds, sleek strings, all of them blended into a rich, oaken tone that amply highlight Nielsen’s debt to Beethoven and Brahms. Danacord’s production is as good as one can find these days, with a spacious sonic perspective that balances ensemble blend with telling individual textural detail. The problem, however, is the cipher helming the podium. Gilbert, at least in my personal experience and estimation, is one of the blandest, most boring conductors alive today. His autopilot cruise through Nielsen’s symphonies is especially woeful in the last three. Simply put, Gilbert’s anonymous run-through of these scores, which demand a level of interpretive verve and direction that is simply missing here, can often be a cheerless slog for the listener to endure. Fortunately, he is not all bad. Gilbert’s hands-off approach is less of an impediment in the early symphonies, where at least the orchestra is allowed to sing out beautifully. Shockingly, the “Sinfonia espansiva” somehow manages to rouse him out from his usual somnambulism, drawing from him a performance which unfurls with a majestic, unforced brilliance and a natural sense of pacing that places it among the very best recordings of that work. He also proves to be a sensitive partner for his soloists in the Nielsen concerti, all of which are excellent; the Violin Concerto with Nikolaj Znaider might be my favorite recording of all.

• Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Paavo Järvi [RCA/Sony]: Decent, but somewhat faceless performances in OK sound. Especially disappointing given that his father Neeme recorded a very fine cycle for DG some 30 years ago. Admittedly, I have not listened to this set again since early 2016, so if given another listening to today I may, perhaps, feel differently enough to revise my opinion. Suffice to say that Oramo and Storgårds keep me coming back. Even Gilbert does once in awhile (especially for the concerti). But not Järvi fils. [EDIT 12/12/19: Sometimes I’m just full of it. Having reacquainted myself with this set over the past few days, I’m struggling to understand why these recordings failed to move me back in 2016. Aside from the graininess and occasional garishness of the production, the performances themselves are masterly. Paavo Järvi’s Nielsen is some of the most gripping I’ve ever heard, with especially splendid recordings of Symphonies Nos. 2, 4, and 5. The latter is easily one of the finest on records, its last movement bounding dynamically from the inertness of its predecessor. (The only quibble I have is one that crops up in even the best recordings of the work: A much too reticent snare drummer at the end of the first movement. For a truly terrifyingly wild take on that solo, listen to the classic Jascha Horenstein recording on Unicorn, or the otherwise forgettable reading by Adrian Leaper on Naxos.) From now on this cycle will be ranked alongside Schmidt, Storgårds, and Oramo among my personal favorites.]

• London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Colin Davis [LSO Live]: Davis’ Nielsen is a dry, loveless affair. The sound from the Barbican is expectedly horrid. With his utter lack of aptitude or sympathy for these works, you have to wonder why the conductor even bothered to perform, much less record them.

A Nielsen cycle for our time: A photograph of my personal copy of John Storgårds’ excellent Nielsen symphony cycle for Chandos.

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.)

Feeling The Spirit: Toscanini’s 1939 Beethoven Cycle

If ever there was a single figure of whom it could be said was the representation in music of what Henry Luce had famously dubbed the “American Century,” then no better example could be found than the Italian-born conductor Arturo Toscanini. Throughout the last decades of his life‍, and even years after his death in 1957, the diminutive, mustachioed, white-haired man was in the United States practically the embodiment of the art over which he ruled virtually unchallenged. Even in a time and place where men like Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, and many others were not only active, but commanded their own wide legions of admirers, Toscanini stood apart. His purported ideal of com’e scritto—fidelity to the score, eschewing of personal idiosyncrasies, consistency of tempi—became the defining paradigm of musical performance in the postwar era, with its echo continuing to resound into our present day. 

While this remarkable achievement was owed primarily to Toscanini’s blend of musicianship and sheer tenacity in achieving his artistic objectives, there is no doubt that he was also aided enormously by the American press machine. Practically from the time of his arrival in the United States, Toscanini was spoken of by the nation’s critical establishment mostly in tones of adulatory praise that verged on the hysterical, some of it embarrassing by contemporary standards. 

“Only American audacity would dare to approach the god of all conductors; and having won, proceed to build an orchestra worthy of him‍,” gushed Marcia Davenport in a 1937 issue of Stage magazine wherein she reported on the orchestra that David Sarnoff had created for Toscanini. While it would be tempting to dismiss this as merely an example of NBC’s marketing, the American cult of Toscanini worship was thriving years before the advent of the Peacock Network’s flagship orchestra. In the late 1920s, Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald-Tribune declared the conductor to be the “custodian of holy things” and “vicar of the immortals.” Meanwhile his counterpart at the New York Times, Olin Downes, rhapsodized: “If ever there was a man who justified the theory of aristocracy built upon the fundamental conception that men are not born free and equal, that some are immeasurably superior to others, and that their superiority is justification for their control of others’ acts and destinies, that man is Arturo Toscanini.” Not for nothing did an anonymous Musical Times author sarcastically roll his eyes when commenting upon the conductor’s recent appearance at the London Music Festival for the June 1939 issue of the periodical: “Can the king do no wrong?” 

As we approach the third decade of the 21st century, the luster of Toscanini’s legacy has dimmed concurrently with the dramatic reappraisal of conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg, rivals who were each in their respective ways the antithesis of the Toscaninian ideal. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the fact that the most widely available of Toscanini’s recordings, his RCA sessions from the 1950s, can sometimes not quite match the hype that surrounded them long ago. One must regret the timing of the conductor’s retirement, which occurred at the very dawn of the hi-fi era. How his posthumous legacy would have been enriched had he been given the chance to record in “Living Stereo” can only be guessed at. Suffice to say that though his late recordings reward the careful listener with their own hard-won beauties and insights, the Apollonian brilliance and energy, the near Technicolor panoply of sound that had so excited his admirers is rarely found there. To find that Toscanini, one must turn to his earlier recordings from the 1930s. Among these, perhaps nowhere else is his art displayed at its consistent finest than in this 1939 Beethoven cycle for NBC which, gratefully, has been preserved. 

Expectations for the cycle ran high at the time. Many anticipated it to be the most important showcase to date of this musical partnership, while others hoped it would symbolize the fulfillment of Sarnoff’s stated hope that the orchestra would “further stimulate and enrich musical appreciation” in America. 

Writing to his mistress, Ada Colleoni Mainardi, Toscanini expressed his wonder over this already virtuoso ensemble’s development: “Impossible though it seems, I can tell you that the orchestra has improved even more.” 

By this point, the composer’s symphonies and orchestral works had become long-recognized specialties of the conductor’s, and he was much in demand to perform them. In fact, this NBC cycle had been preceded by another that he had led across the Atlantic only months earlier with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Notably, this 1939 cycle was also one of the rare occasions in which Toscanini led his own arrangement of the Septet, and was possibly the only time he performed the Choral Fantasy. (Vladimir Horowitz had recommended to his father-in-law the engagement of his friend, Ania Dorfmann, as soloist for the latter work.)

The hectoring inflexibility and dullness of tone that sometimes mars his late recordings is nowhere to be found on this cycle. Nevertheless, the listener must permit certain allowances, such as the powder-dry acoustic of Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8-H. Even after the acoustic modifications performed upon it in 1939, its cramped sound could hardly mislead anybody into thinking that it was the Musikvereinsaal or Concertgebouw. 

Caveats notwithstanding, the melodic suppleness, rhythmic flexibility, and variety of nuance on display here have few equals in Toscanini’s discography. 

Critical and popular reactions were predictably rapturous, with NBC’s marketing team ever ready to capitalize on the occasion. 

“Toscanini’s Beethoven ‘heard’ by Helen Keller,” blared a New York Times headline from November 1939, which described in breathless prose the deaf-mute author-activist’s attendance of one of the Beethoven cycle concerts. “You are just as I always pictured you,” she was quoted saying of Toscanini, adding that his conducting had left her “overcome with joy” for allowing her to “feel the spirit of Beethoven.” 

The enthusiasm of American musical critics was only slightly less euphoric. Olin Downes led the way, remarking in a review of the cycle’s final concert: “Every element in the score took its place as part of one thought and design. Every idea glowed with life and beauty…. Each element was merged in the conception of a single despotic spirit—that of Toscanini—and, together with Toscanini, glorified Beethoven.”

Even at the time, this 1939 Beethoven cycle was considered one of the peaks of Toscanini’s already storied career. Posterity has only confirmed this verdict. He himself had accorded tremendous importance to the cycle, sparing no effort in its preparation. 

“Oh, how hard it is to repeat the same music after a short lapse and to find a way to make new life flow into all of it!,” he wrote on the eve of the first concert in the cycle. “I can still bring off this miracle! At least I think so!!!” 

Eighty years later, the miracle he pulled off in this series of six concerts continues to burn as brightly as ever, a vivid testimonial to the truth and vitality of Toscanini’s art. 

This essay will be included in the liner notes for a forthcoming reissue by ATS of Toscanini’s 1939 NBC Beethoven cycle.

Review: Regieoper Vs. Mozart/Schikaneder at LA Opera

Five hundred years ago, artists and thinkers of the Renaissance revived and examined the works of the distant Greco-Roman past with a respect that bespoke not only of their sensitivity to its beauty and wealth of feeling, but also of their gratitude that these things had somehow managed to survive centuries of neglect and intellectual ruin. Naturally, we in 2019 know better than all that now. Because if the inexplicable and seemingly unstoppable triumph of regieoper—illustrated hereabouts last Saturday by the revival of Barrie Kosky’s and Suzanne Andrade’s production of The Magic Flute for Los Angeles Opera—has taught us anything, it’s that the accumulation of toils, struggles, labors, joys, and sorrows that comprise our past exists today only for us enlightened moderns to laugh and sneer at. 

Mozart and Schikaneder’s singspiel—like a lot of products of the German late 18th century; those twilight hours of the Enlightenment, before the night of Napoleon and Metternich cast the whole of it in darkness—is simultaneously silly and profound: A dashing prince and a girl-crazy guy in a bird suit are commanded by the king of some vaguely Egyptian land to submit themselves to a host of trials in order to gain the wisdom to love. Thus from these unlikely roots does one of Mozart’s most human creations spring forth. But instead of allowing this Rasselas-meets-Soupy Sales spectacle to stand on its own strange feet, Kosky and Andrade straightjacketed it into an ill-fitting vision of confused F. W. Murnau and Tim Burton tropes which latched parasitically off the score, feeding off of it zombie-like.

Masking their evident embarrassment and chagrin at the sincerity, loveliness, and even weirdness of Mozart and Schikaneder’s original vision, Kosky’s and Andrade’s hypercapitalist irony also drew with sheepish self-consciousness a veil over the comparative emptiness of their own. Los Angeles Opera’s previous production by Gerald Scarfe, a vivid technicolor riot which rendered The Magic Flute into an enchanting, living children’s storybook was sorely missed.

The musical performance itself was better, if not without its own significant problems. 

Music Director James Conlon lead a performance of admirable moderation and proportion, even if the score’s earthy bounciness came off a little flat-footed at times. Bogdan Volkov, as the sweet-toned and expressive Tamino, and Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, the imposing and fatherly Sarastro whose voice radiated like a column of pure light that cut through the production’s ironic fog were by far the best of a mixed singing cast. Zuzana Marková’s Pamina was good, if a tad matronly and wooly; while the unidiomatic grit in Theo Hoffman’s Papageno was more suggestive of Baron Scarpia than bumbling bird-wrangler. Miscast altogether as Queen of the Night was So Young Park, whose vocal resources were audibly strained to its limits by her challenging role. Unable to cope with the crystalline etching of Mozart’s coloratura writing, she settled for blurring through it, and only managed to punctuate its top Fs by sheer dint of screaming. 

In her prefatory notes for the production, Andrade tellingly described the device she contrived to replace the score’s dialogues—silent film-style intertitles accompanied by stylistically anachronistic music by Mozart, along with an inexplicable bit of the infamous “Oriental riff” for another dash of (bad) taste—as a “gimmick.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word as: “Something invented especially for the purpose of attracting attention and that has no other purpose or value.” I couldn’t have described this production of The Magic Flute better myself.