GHCD 2324 Secure E-shop Broadcast & Review

KOUSSEVITZKY (1874-1951) BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Vaughan Williams symphony No. 5 in D Tchaikovsky Frencesca da Rimini Musorgsky A Night on the Bare Mountain Khovanshchina – Prelude (Dawn over the Moscow River) RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1883–1953) Symphony No. 5 in D [recorded: 4 March 1947] II.Scherzo (Presto misterioso) MODEST MUSSORGSKY (1839–1881) Khovanshchina – Prelude (Dawn over the Moscow River) Orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840–1893) Francesca da Rimini, op. 32, Symphonic Fantasy after Dante Andante lugubre—Allegro vivo—Andante cantabile non troppo—Allegro vivo

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Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitsky was born in July 1874 at Vishny-Volochok in Russia.  Coming from a relatively poor but intensely musical family, he took up the double-bass when little more than a boy, but his progress was so remarkable that he became a double-bass virtuoso in his teens, and at 20 he led the basses of the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, meeting many notable musicians.  Above all, however, he wanted to conduct and two years after marrying the daughter of a wealthy Russian tea merchant in 1905, he made his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and in 1908-09 he founded a publishing house and a symphony orchestra in Moscow.

Koussevitsky left Russia in 1920, and settled in Paris before becoming conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a post he held for 25 seasons (1924-49), championing young composers alongside the classical repertoire.  When he took over the Boston Symphony it was already a good orchestra (Pierre Monteux was his immediate predecessor) but Koussevitsky fashioned it into a truly world-class orchestra, and, from 1929, making many outstanding recordings for RCA. Amongst his conducting pupils was Leonard Bernstein.  Koussevitsky died in Boston, aged 75.

Although remaining true to his personal Russian musical heritage, Koussevitsky championed and commissioned much new music, especially by American composers, including Copland, Roy Harris and Leonard Bernstein especially, and in addition Koussevitsky’s interest in British music was quite exceptional – given the circumstances of nationality, era and geography.   But the Boston Symphony Orchestra had been founded by a British musician – the German-born but naturalised Sir George Henschel – and had commissioned music from British composers for the 50^th anniversary of the Orchestra in 1930. Koussevitsky himself had given the American premiere of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast in 1932, as well as other of Walton’s works, and amongst the older generation of British composers, symphonies by Bax and Vaughan Williams (including the latter’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis) were by no means infrequently heard in Koussevitsky’s Boston concerts. It was Koussevitsky who commissioned Peter Grimes and the Spring Symphony from Benjamin Britten.

Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony appeared in 1943, in great contrast to the powerful and indeed violent Fourth Symphony of 1935. It is “dedicated without permission to Jean Sibelius” (another composer of whose music Koussevitsky was a noted interpreter) and calls for the smallest orchestra of any Vaughan Williams symphony. The first performance took place on June 24^th 1943 at a Promenade Concert in the Royal Albert Hall, London, given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by the composer. 

At that time, of course, the Second World War was at its zenith, and following victories at Stalingrad, Midway and El Alamein, the tide was slowly turning in the Allies favour.  British, Russian, French and American music were often featured on programmes by orchestras across the free world, and Vaughan Williams’s new symphony surely spoke for many through its inherent vision of musical pacification and reconciliation.  The symphony had been heard twice before in America, in New York and Chicago, before Koussevitsky led two splendid performances in the 1946-47 Boston season.  By then, the war was over completely, and the Fifth Symphony drew from this great conductor and his orchestra a performance of considerable depth of feeling and of architectural understanding.   

As well as becoming personally acquainted with many leading Russian composers, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Scriabin amongst others, Koussevitsky knew Tchaikovsky (who had died when the young man was 19) and, like all Russians, he revered the master’s compositions. Koussevitsky championed Russian music frequently, in Moscow, Paris and in Boston and the conductor’s Russian origins (together with his personal connexions with composers) have lent added interest to those interpretations of his which have been preserved.  In such vivid late-Romantic repertoire, Koussevitsky’s occasionally subjective approach along with a superb orchestral control brings rich dividends, as we can hear in the three Russian works which follow the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams.         

The two shorter works by Mussorgsky, in editions by Rimsky-Korsakov, were favourites of this conductor. Koussevitsky conducted A Night on the Bare Mountainon on no fewer than eight occasions during his tenure in Boston, and the Khovanschina prelude on as many as fourteen.   We ought also to remember that it was Sergie Koussevitsky who commissioned from Ravel his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in 1922.   In listening to this live recording of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini (the tenth (and final) performance of the work Koussevitsky was to give in Boston) it is difficult not to feel that, clothed in the dark-hued richness of the great orchestra Koussevitsky created in Boston, we are witnessing a recreation of the score that emanates almost directly from the composer himself, played by the orchestra that had a closer association with Tchaikovsky than any other in the United States. For Tchaikovsky’s First and Second Piano Concertos were given their world premieres, no less, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra - before they were heard in Russia – and the second American performance of Francesca da Rimini took place in Boston in 1895.                                                                                 Robert Matthew-Walker

Page Revised Thursday September 20 2007