GHCD 2328 Secure E-shop Broadcast & Review

LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart Radio-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt   Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 Mussorgsky Khovanshchina - Prelude Act IV Wagner Tristan und Isolde- Prelude & Liebestod Debussy Prélude a l'après midi d'un faune   LIVE RECORDING: MAY 1955 Mussorgsky - Kohovanshchina Prelude Act IV Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5 - I Andante – Allegro con anima Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5 - IV Finale andante maestoso – Allegro vivace

Contents:

Leopold Stokowski died in 1977 – four weeks to the day after Elvis Presley - in England, the country of his birth, at the age of 95. His longevity, and the fact that he was active as a conductor well into his nineties, leaving a discography remarkable for an extraordinary range of music – from Tubby the Tuba to Schoenberg and Messiaen – means that we tend to forget the milieu into which he had been born and educated. 

At the time of Stokowski’s birth, Mussorgsky had been dead but 13 months, from alcoholism, at the age of 42; Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony was yet to be written. Richard Wagner was preparing for the Bayreuth premiere of his final music-drama Parsifal, and Claude-Achille Debussy was contemplating his second trip to Russia, to stay at the summer home of Mme Nadezhda von Meck – Tchaikovsky’s patron – where he played, amongst other works, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, which had been dedicated to her, from the composer’s manuscript. Debussy’s wholly original masterpiece, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune , lay ten years in the future.

To Stokowski therefore much of the music in this collection of his performances from the mid 1950s was not part of the historical repertoire, but virtually contemporary with him – indeed, in the music of Tchaikovsky and Debussy on this album, the young Stokowski would consider them as very modern scores.

Stokowski of course was not the only conductor of his generation to regard such music in this light, but he was the longest-living practitioner of the art of conducting of his generation, and brought to his interpretations a sense of discovery – the music remaining fresh and new in his mind – that was often mistaken as a desire on his part of impose his own personality on a wide range of compositions.

This was never the case. Rather was it the standard of the time; to attempt, in so far as it was possible, to make that which the conductor perceived as the composers’ message clearer for the audience. We would give much today to be able to hear Mahler conduct his own and other people’s music - he lived long enough to have made records, but never did – and yet we know he reorchestrated Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and cut several bars from the Scherzo of that work. Mahler also made new orchestrations of Schumann’s Symphonies, amongst other works. Today, we might regard these alterations with considerable disdain, but in reading contemporary accounts of Mahler’s performances we would still give much to be able to hear them.

Stokowski attended Mahler rehearsals and performances, as he did those of other great conductors of a century and more ago, so whilst when we hear a Stokowski performance we may demur from this or that retouching of instrumentation, we should never forget the genuine artistic impulse which led him to make such changes.

Not that they were always inauthentic. The first item in our programme, taken from Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanschina, would never have been heard had not other composers and musicians attempted to put together what Mussorgsky, in his drunken state, left to posterity. Mussorgsky wrote the libretto with Vladimir Stasov from historical sources, but left the opera unfinished and unorchestrated. Even the order of the scenes was uncertain; Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performing edition in 1886, so there was every justification for Stokowski to make his own arrangement of what has become known as the Prelude to Act IV, Scene II of the opera, in which the tragic power of the music is perfectly captured in the dark yet luminous quality of Stokowski’s orchestration. He regularly performed this version in Philadelphia during his long tenure as conductor of that city’s orchestra, and occasionally used it as an encore – as he did for a BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concert in 1966 with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, following Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

In our collection the Mussorgsky work precedes Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, which – as we have noted - was in many ways a ‘modern’ work for Stokowski. During his years at Cincinnati (1909-12) and Philadelphia (1912-1936) Stokowski performed the symphony over forty times, conducting part of it in a feature film, and eventually making three commercial recordings of it, each of which of course – as does this rare live performance from Stuttgart – uses Stokowski own edition of the Symphony, which slightly retouches the original orchestration and restores a number of cuts which other conductors customarily made.  

Stokowski’s orchestral version of the Prelude und Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was one of several such concert transcriptions he made from Wagner operas over the years. It is in many ways the most famous of them, and Stokowski made a number of commercial recordings of it.

Our selection ends with Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune . Stokowski first conducted it in Cincinnati in the 1911/12 season, barely twenty years after it had first appeared. It featured frequently in Stokowski’s programmes during his Philadelphia years.  There are several extant commercial recordings of the work conducted by him, and in each his extraordinary genius in terms of orchestral balance and tonal colour have rightly earned this great conductor legendary status

The performances on this disc emanate from broadcast concerts in Stuttgart and in Frankfurt given in May 1955. Stokowski’s performances in Germany were rare – after all, his reputation was made in the United States in the first half of the 20^th-century – yet he was the first British-born conductor to have made recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic (in 1957). Mention has already been made of Stokowski’s remarkable orchestral control and ear for detail, but what remains something of a mystery – at least, in so far as very few other conductors, if any, have the same quality – is what has been referred to on more than one occasion as the ‘Stokowski sound’; in other words, his ability to draw such refined playing from orchestras with which he had never worked before, and to achieve this musical alchemy on very few rehearsals. 

Thus, in these broadcasts from the mid-1950s, we can hear that refinement marking out these performances as ones which could only have been directed by Stokowski. That he was a great musician is beyond doubt; that he was a great conductor is self-evident; that he placed himself always at the service of the music may be more contentious to some ears, but in keeping with the established norms of the age into which he was born and musically nurtured, Stokowski remained loyal to those precepts from which we, in an era far removed from their prevalence, can still learn and draw aesthetic sustenance.                             Robert Matthew-Walker © 2007

Page revised Tuesday November 27 2007