GHCD 2337_38 Secure E-shop Broadcast & Review

ARTURO TOSCANINI ALL BRAHMS CD 1 Serenade No. 1 Serenade No. 2 CD 2 Academis Festival Overture Piano Concerto No. 2 - Robert Casadesus piano Four Part Songs NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA 1935-36   CD1 - Serenade No. 1 in D major, Op. 11  - I. Allegro molto Serenade No. 1 in D major, Op. 11  - VI. Rondo: Allegro Serenade No. 2 in A flat major, Op. 16 - V. Rondo: Allegro CD2 - Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83 - ROBERT CASADESUS piano Part Songs - Der Gärtner (Gardener) (Eichendorff): Wohin ich geh’ (Where e’er I go) (Op. 17, No. 3) Part Songs - Schubert arr. Brahms: Jäger, ruhe von der Jagd – Ellen’s second song (The Lady of the Lake) D.838 – sung in English (Sir Walter Scott NEW YORK LADIES' CHOIR

Contents:

This is the second release in the Guild Historical series of music by Brahms conducted by Arturo Toscanini – the first was of Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), sung in English [GHCD 2290] – and many of the comments contained in the accompanying booklet for that issue regarding Toscanini and Brahms will apply to this double-album. For music-lovers today who accept Brahms’s music without question as forming cornerstones of the orchestral, chamber and vocal repertoires, it may seem odd to realise that he was not always regarded as a popular composer. In writing of Toscanini’s performances of Brahms in 1939, Lawrence Gilman said: “One does not have to be advanced in years to remember when Brahms was looked upon as a composer for the few, for the elect, for a small group of initiates.” He continued, “The immense popularity of the symphonic Brahms is a matter of comparatively recent growth.”   

          It would appear that the vindication of Brahms’s music within the orchestral repertory was not due entirely to those of his disciples, almost thirty of them in all, who went on to make records of his music. Brahms’s vindication and ultimate establishment as a core repertory composer was achieved through the work of many conductors – Leopold Stokowski, for example, was the first to record all of the
symphonies – but it was also due in no small measure to the advocacy in concert hall and on disc of Arturo Toscanini, at a time when, as Gilman recalled, his music was widely regarded as a specialist field. It may have been that Toscanini’s fame – being probably the first great transcontinental conductor – played a part, alongside the extent of his later recordings and broadcasts, but most importantly of course the intensity and interpretative penetration of his performances, which thereby revealed the greatness of this music, for the first time in many instances, literally to a world-wide audience.  

          Arturo Toscanini had been born in 1867, and was thirty years old when Brahms died. They never met. For Toscanini, therefore, Brahms (who was himself just 33 when the maestro was born) was very much a contemporary composer, one who was to become a cornerstone of Toscanini’s art. If Toscanini was born into the Europe of Brahms’s day, it was not until much later, after he had established himself first, as an operatic conductor in his native Italy, and secondly, as an orchestral conductor (also in Italy, but somewhat later) that he encountered Brahms’s music with any degree of depth.  This was in the first decade of the 20th-century, by when Toscanini’s reputation as an operatic conductor had spread widely in German-speaking Europe, and when his friend and brother-in-law Enrico Polo (who, as a pupil of Joseph Joachim, kept fully in touch with developments in German music) encouraged him to take an interest in Brahms’s orchestral scores.

          If the two great revolutions in European history in the 20th-century did damage to the continuity of art – the Russian Revolution, and the rise and defeat of Nazism – both saw the mass emigration and severe disruption (if not collapse) of long-standing traditions of Russian and German music; the New World, in many respects, was the beneficiary. Toscanini, in the late-1930s virtually a refugee from Fascist Europe, had been an established figure in the United States from the earliest years of the century, and his taking up of permanent residence in America was cemented by the creation of the NBC Symphony Orchestra for him in 1937.

          It was with the NBC Symphony, therefore, that Toscanini appeared almost exclusively until his retirement in 1954.  His broadcasts and many of his recordings were made with them, and most of the orchestral personnel – wartime demands always excepted – stayed with Toscanini throughout this period. Other conductors certainly concretized, broadcast and recorded with the NBC Symphony during those years, but to all intents and purposes it was, so far as the general musical public was concerned, Toscanini’s orchestra. And yet, owing to commercial considerations of sponsored broadcasting, it is a curious fact that Toscanini, in his NBC years, did not bring the same breadth of repertoire that had characterised his programming when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra. So when, as in the case of much of the music on these two compact discs, we encounter broadcasts from the 1930s of music by Brahms which Toscanini rarely performed with the later NBC Symphony, and also which he never recorded commercially, there is exceptional interest in the maestro’s approach to such music.

          In this regard, the performances of Brahms’s two Serenades for Orchestra, the Second Piano Concerto (which Toscanini did record with his son-in-law Vladimir Horowitz in 1940) and the Academic Festival Overture are extremely rare examples of the maestro’s approach. It is often said, not without justification, that Toscanini’s performances stand out from those of his contemporaries for what might be called their (for the time) ‘modern’ approach, which is to say that the excesses of Romantic subjective interpretation were, generally speaking, not for him. What distinguishes his readings principally is his extraordinary command of structure, realised through the appositeness of his chosen tempi, very rarely varied, and only then to make a definite musical point, almost as a punctuation in the overall schematic plan, allied to orchestral playing of considerable concentration and commitment. Toscanini never needed to indulge in jejune ‘point-making’ as an interpretative habit – nor did he countenance it in other conductors.   

          We may certainly experience much of this for ourselves in these performances, and one of the more remarkable readings of them is of the Academic Festival Overture. Toscanini’s pre-war commercial recording for HMV of Brahms’s Tragic Overture with the BBC Symphony has always been very highly regarded, principally for the demonstration of those qualities of performance outlined above, but this broadly contemporaneous reading of the companion Academic Festival from March 1936 reveals a very different approach on the part of the conductor, yet as an interpretation it is entirely convincing. Indeed, it has – rarely for Toscanini – an ‘unbuttoned’ view of the work, the tempi always coherent but not at all symphonically driven (as in the Tragic Overture). There is an element of youthful high-spirits, not an exaggerated one, in this performance that may well come as something of a shock for those whose view of Toscanini is coloured by the intensity of his performances in his later years with the NBC Orchestra.     

          It is also certainly true that Toscanini could be a difficult conductor with whom to appear as a soloist – such was the sheer force of his recreative character that he would find it difficult to accompany a pianist, for example, with whose view of the work in question he was at some variance. Arthur Rubinstein, for example, told the present writer that the RCA recording he made in 1944 with Toscanini of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto was one of the most unhappy sessions he ever experienced – recalling that Toscanini was always wanting to press on, even at those points where Rubinstein felt the music demanded a more yielding approach (however, both in 'My Many Years', his autobiography, as in several interviews Rubinstein spoke only in flattering terms about his collaboration with the Maestro, praising specially his adapting to the pianist's romatic licenses after a first run-through rehearsal) – an approach that Toscanini brought to Brahms’s Second Concerto with the distinguished French pianist and composer Robert Casadesus eight years earlier. Even so, and with all due respect to a wonderful pianist, Casadesus does not emerge as the principal partner in this collaboration, yet in comparison with the powerful heroism which shines through the far more familiar performance with Horowitz, this earlier account with Casadesus shows that Toscanini was not the martinet with soloists with which his reputation was often coloured.

          For many students of great conducting, and for collectors of historic recordings, the disc which couples the two Serenades by Brahms has to be one of the most important additions to Toscanini’s repertoire on disc for many years. In several demonstrable respects the maestro’s approach to these works bears detailed study. Principally, of course, this stems from the fact that the music of the Serenades constitutes a very different Brahms from that of the symphonies and concertos.

          It is well-known that Brahms published well over one hundred different compositions, but also destroyed a large proportion of what he wrote. On those few occasions when his unusually strong sense of self-criticism led him either to revise or to recast his music for different forces we should treat the result with greater respect than might otherwise be the case. Brahms was never a composer to hurry over his art; there are many stories of him redrafting a work, or of rescoring it for quite different forces, refining the music time and again until he was quite satisfied with it. This quality is one that Toscanini evidently appreciated, because Brahms himself tinkered with these works on several occasions, even after first publication, until he was fully convinced. Yet the essence of both works demonstrates that already at this relatively early stage in Brahms’s career he was already a great master. Consequently these works pose problems – as well as intense challenges – to those conductors who would essay them.

          But if the nature of these orchestral Serenades remains such as to pose problems, the inherent character that they share shows the composer in delightful and friendly mood – so different from the virtually contemporaneous D minor Piano Concerto, even if the D major Serenade and Concerto begin with the same tonic ‘drone’, at the farthest possible remove from each other on the emotional scale. Never once, in either Serenade, does Toscanini push the music beyond that which it can bear, and the orchestra responds magnificently. Interestingly, both Serenades were amongst the earliest of Brahms’s works to be heard in the United States – the D major in 1882, and the A major four years later – both by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Sir George Henschel and Wilhelm Gericke respectively.

          At the time of writing the Serenades and the D minor Concerto, Brahms composed four part-songs for female voices, two horns and harp. Because of the unusual nature of their accompaniment, they are extremely rarely performed, and it is of great interest to hear Toscanini conduct three of them, followed by another rare version by Brahms as a part-song of Schubert’s song D 838 (Jäger, ruhe von der
Jagd – ‘Ellens Gesang II) the poem, ‘The Pady of the Lake’, by Sir Walter Scott.  In the nature of things, these are hardly examples of either composer or conductor at their greatest, but they demonstrate the range of Brahms – and of Toscanini, his interpreter on this occasion – in music that demands such lightness of touch as should go to disabuse those who only regard these great musicians as constantly creating music at its most solemn and dramatic.

© Robert Matthew-Walker, 2008

A Note on Toscanini’s Broadcasts and Recordings

Although Toscanini’s career embraced 68 years (1886-1954), his recordings – often achieved in hazardous and demanding circumstances, with long intervals at the outset – were made between 1919 and 1954.

          The maestro postponed his return by ship from the United States to Europe in 1917, to attend a performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. The ship was torpedoed by a German submarine and sunk. Had Toscanini been on board, his name would today be only a reference in books on music, with no sound examples to show his art, since his first recordings, a handful of 78rpm discs, were primitively recorded with the La Scala Orchestra in the Victor Company’s New Jersey Studios during their trip to America.

            After that, his next recording period was a brief one in 1927 with the New York Philharmonic (soon to be renamed the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York when the New York Philharmonic and New York Symphony merged in the late 1920s), followed by - also in the early and middle 1930s - magnificent recordings with the New York Philhaarmonic - Symphony and the BBC Symphony. It was only after 1937, and until 1954, that his recording activity became prolific through the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which had been formed especially for him.

          Nowadays, it is possible to evaluate the maestro’s art with many different orchestras, through – mainly live and faintly-recorded – performances with the orchestras of La Scala Milan, Lucerne Festival, BBC Symphony, Hague Philharmonic, Stockholm Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Philharmonic-Symphony of New York, Philadelphia and – of course – the NBC Symphony. Even what – to the present writer – is the best of more than eight surviving Beethoven Ninths stems from a performance with the Orchestra of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aries!

          Taken for granted that the incomparable maestro is best known through his NBC live and studio recordings, the period he spent with the Philharmonic-Symphony of New York is rich enough and deserves to be investigated – far beyond his commercial recordings. Original broadcast acetates are rare, and are sometimes worn-out or damaged, but stylistically they show the originality, versatility and musicianship of the most influential conductor in history. Additional interest in these recordings is given not only by the musical differences between these and later NBC recordings of the same music, but by the fact that many works he programmed with the Philharmonic-Symphony were not conducted by him later at NBC. The vast bulk of his repertoire he did restudy and maintain in later years, but certain works were never performed again: Schubert-Liszt ‘Wanderer’ Fantasie, Liszt Totentanz (with Alexander Siloti, Rachmaninoff’s first cousin and one of Liszt’s last pupils) Borodin ‘Polovetsian Dances’, Schumann Cello Concerto, portions of Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique and much more, including concerts with Lotte Lehmann and other beloved artists.

          These, it would seem, may be lost forever, either sealed hermetically within the Toscanini Legacy at Rockefeller Center in New York, or were never even broadcast.

          This new series of Toscanini recordings on the Guild Historic label will attempt to pay tribute to one of the New York Orchestra’s richer and less well-known periods, one where Toscanini’s flexibility is now legendary, destroying the clichés of him as  being a ‘rigid’ and ‘fast’ conductor – and further nonsensical claims.                                                                                                                                     © Claudio Von Foerster, 2008

Page revised Monday March 3rd  2008