GHCD 2335 Secure E-shop Broadcast & Review

STOKOWSKI   PROKOFIEV The Love of Three Oranges BRAHMS Symphony No. 4 MacDOWELL Piano concerto No. 3 - Frances Nash piano DEEMS TAYLOR Ramuntcho NBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA LIVE RECORDING 1941-1943   SERGE PROKOFIEV (1891-1953) - Suite from ‘The Love of Three Oranges’ Op. 33a - III. March EDWARD MacDOWELL (1860-1908) - Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor Op. 23 - Frances Nash, piano - I. Larghetto calmato DEEMS TAYLOR (1885-1966) - Ramuntcho’ – Introduction and Ballet Music Act III

Contents:

When Johannes Brahms died on Saturday April 3^rd 1897, barely five weeks before what would have been his 64^th birthday, Leopold Stokowski, then a student at London’s Royal College of Music and who lived to be 95, was a fortnight away from his own 15^th birthday celebrations. More than twenty musicians who knew Brahms personally went on to record his music well into the twentieth century. Amongst this legacy, it is a fascinating undertaking to study the recordings of those conductors who knew the composer individually, who formed part of his circle, and later recorded Brahms’s orchestral music. With Leopold Stokowski we encounter an artist who did not know Brahms personally yet always regarded him, not as some faded figure from the past (for he would remember reading of Brahms’s death in the newspapers), but as a near-contemporary. Although Stokowski was not the only conductor who always considered the composer in this light, he lived long enough to perform Brahms’s Fourth Symphony at what was his last public appearance in London, with the New Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall on May 14^th 1974, at the age of 92, a performance titanic in its intensity and sense of irresistible forward momentum. 

Brahms had not begun to write his final Symphony when Stokowski was born, and in a very real sense therefore the conductor grew up with it. Additionally, it is surely true that Stokowski regarded the German’s music as central to his own interpretative art, wide in repertoire though that eventually became. In his first concert with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1912 at the Queen’s Hall, he conducted Brahms’s First Symphony – and for the 60^th anniversary of that self-same concert in 1972 with the LSO he repeated the programme. He included the same work for his first-ever concert as music director with the Philadelphia Orchestra on October 11^th 1912, and also for his first concert as music director of the Houston Symphony on October 31^st 1955. Stokowski was the first conductor to record all four of Brahms’s symphonies, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, in the electrical process between 1927-33, and when, on November 4^th 1941, he inaugurated a series of concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Brahms’s Third Symphony was in the programme. Two weeks later, he conducted the Fourth Symphony in the performance we hear on this disc – one that, in its driving intensity, is remarkably similar to that he gave in London thirty-three years later (a recording of this Royal Albert Hall performance exists). It is interesting to read the London critics of 1974: ‘..his tempos for the Brahms Fourth were sometimes so fast..’, said one, and ‘…one of the fastest ever of the Brahms Fourth Symphony…’ said another. Stokowski’s speeds in Brahms’s Symphony were not the consequence of wilfulness or impetuosity – claims also made by British critics for that performance and the subsequent RCA commercial recording – but, as we can hear in this broadcast of 1941, and in the earlier Philadelphia Orchestra RCA recording, this was how Stokowski always heard and interpreted the work. Interestingly, in 1941, the audience applauds after each of the first three movements, as well as after the finale, of course. In London in 1974, some who were present distinctly remember members of the audience calling out ‘Bravo!’ before the first movement was over.

Stokowski’s NBC performance of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony repays close study for a number of other reasons. The first is that the Orchestra itself had been formed in 1937 especially for Arturo Toscanini, to facilitate his return to New York, and although he had selected, trained, performed publicly and broadcast often with NBC Symphony, during the first four years of the Orchestra’s existence, by the end of 1941 relations between the maestro and NBC had become strained, other conductors being engaged to fill Toscanini’s absence. The most significant of these conductors was Stokowski.

The music of Brahms had always featured prominently in Toscanini’s programmes. Before Stokowski arrived at the end of 1941, the NBC Symphony was certainly very familiar with the score, and naturally with Toscanini’s conception of it. In comparing the Stokowski performance with that of any Toscanini extent recording, one is struck by the fact that they are very different. Such a comment may not seem surprising, but when one considers that this orchestra was created especially for Toscanini, and that he had conducted them virtually exclusively for four years, the difference in approach in this music between him and Stokowski on the one hand says much for the flexibility of the musicians and on the other for the ability of Stokowski to induce his players to adapt to his interpretation with such evident commitment. Reference has already been made to the swift tempi which characterised Stokowski’s view of the work; perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the third movement, which is taken very quickly indeed, Stokowski taking the Poco meno presto section at bar 181 markedly more slowly, effecting a remarkably dramatic return to the Tempo primo 18 bars later. The finale is equally swifter than usual, but is superbly sustained, resulting in a reading of immense integrity and dramatic intensity. At less than 36 minutes overall, this may well be the fastest performance of the work ever recorded – yet for consistency of interpretation and commitment on the part of the orchestra, the music is never compromised.

The programme on this disc begins with another work that appeared in the same NBC concert as the Brahms Symphony – the suite of three movements from Prokofiev’s opera, ‘The Love for Three Oranges’ which was first produced in Chicago in 1921. The movements are: Inferno; Prince and Princess and March, and are also prefaced by a spoken introduction by Stokowski, in which he describes the opera’s title as ‘The Love of Three Oranges’.  All three excerpts are given immensely compelling performances – especially that of the March, taken more quickly than usual – the sudden ending catching the audience unawares.   

For the broadcast on April 7^th 1942, , four months to the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which brought the United States in the Second World War, Stokowski’s programme included music by the American composer Edward MacDowell. This was his Second Piano Concerto, in D minor Opus 23, composed in 1888-89, in which the soloist for Stokowski was Frances Nash. Only two movements from this three-movement Concerto were broadcast on that occasion; it may well be that the original intention was to perform the work complete, but as the broadcast was sponsored and the music had therefore to fit the customary one hour, the finale was not given. It is a pity that this recording is not of the complete work, but we are fortunate to have the first two movements (Larghetto calmato and Presto giocoso) – also introduced by the maestro. It was a work that Stokowski was to conduct at various points throughout his career: he first conducted it in Philadelphia in 1913 with Teresa Carreno; then in 1919 with Leo Ornstein (who lived to be about 110!), later in New York with Gary Graffman in 1954 and in 1966 also in New York with Andre Watts.   

The programme on this disc ends with a work by the American Deems Taylor, a much-admired musician in his day; he was not only a composer but also a popular writer and commentator on music as well as being an effective musical administrator (as President of the American Society for Composer, Authors and Publishers). As a composer, Taylor was well-known in his day for his operas The King’s Henchman and Peter Ibbotson which were very successfully produced at the Metropolitan Opera.   Ramuntcho, the successor to Peter Ibbotson, was first heard in Philadelphia in 1942, but did not achieve the exceptional success of its predecessors. None the less, Leopold Stokowski thought sufficiently well of the attractive and colourful music to perform these orchestral extracts in the year following the opera’s premiere.                         Robert Matthew-Walker © 2007

Page revised Friday April 11  2008