These fascinating CDs raise the inevitable subject
of the conflict between spirit and letter in the interpretation
of music. Stokowski was renowned, some would say notorious, for taking
liberties with the music he conducted, though on the basis of most of
these recordings, he didn’t do as much of this as we might have been
led to believe. What is clear is that he remained to the end a conductor
with exceptionally strong communicative powers, and that he used these
in a wide range of music, often by contemporaneous or recent composers.
CD1 starts with a powerful reading of Sibelius’
First Symphony, recorded with the National Symphony Orchestra –
a British free-lance band of high quality – in West Ham Central Mission
in November 1976. This symphony, so much the weakest of the composer’s
seven, benefits greatly, to my ear, from the Stokowski treatment. The
recording is more than acceptable for its time, and conductor and players
give it all they’ve got. Stokowski is strong on detail, too; listen
to the clear bass notes from the harp at the beginning of the Andante
(CD1 track 2), or the numerous important utterances from
the tuba, an instrument which in Sibelius always seems to suggest the
appearance of some dark monster from the nether reaches of Norse mythology.
The first movement is given a very fine and controlled
performance. Stokowski emphasises not only the drama and the passion,
but also the importance of symphonic growth, which was to become Sibelius’
guiding principle. In the long development section, (track 1, around
5:18 to around 8:00), I was struck more than ever before by its resemblance
to the second part of the first movement of Symphony no.5; that sense
of disparate fragments of music being slowly drawn together and assembled.
The technique is used to far greater effect in the later work, but the
seeds are here.
The Andante is potentially more controversial,
in that Stokowski adopts a very steady tempo, arguably ignoring the
composer’s qualification of the word Andante with ma non troppo
lento, i.e. ‘but not too slow’. Many listeners will find, I think,
that the opening drags more than a little, though there is a compensating
intensification of the sense of sadness and loss which pervades this
lovely movement, and, as in the preceding track, Stokowski’s sense of
the growth of the music is very sure. The Scherzo is appropriately
vigorous, though timpani are perhaps rather too violent! Stokowski clearly
relishes the colourful scoring of the Trio, with its serenading horns
and harp glissandi spurting upwards like geysers. The finale is more
convincing than usual; again, the conductor encourages the players to
‘go for broke’, so that the occasional uncertainties of the music seem
less significant, and the ‘big’ tune – and what a great tune it is –
seems to arise inevitably out of the musical expression.
The recording of the Nielsen Second Symphony was
made live at a concert in Copenhagen in 1967. There are some rough edges
in the playing of the Danish State Symphony Orchestra, but generally
the performance is good There is a particularly impassioned version
of the third movement, the Andante malincolico, to my mind the
finest movement of the four. Overall, the symphony shows that Nielsen
was still short of the mastery he was to achieve in the Sinfonia
Espansiva. The symphony is based around the novel idea of embodying
one of the human ‘temperaments’ in each of the four movements. So we
have a ‘colleric’ first movement – angry and tempestuous – a ‘phlegmatic’
second – good-natured and humorous – a ‘melancholy’ third, as mentioned
above, and a ‘sanguine’ finale. This last was clearly the one Nielsen
found hardest to portray, and it ends in a rather vacuous triumphalism,
with a march that brings to mind some of Elgar’s less distinguished
pot-boilers!
The three little Grainger ‘lollipops’, recorded
in New York in 1950, constitute a real historic curiosity. In 1949,
Stokowski wrote to Grainger, who had been resident in the USA since
1915, by the way – to ask if he would make some new arrangements of
some of his most popular short works, making use of (in Stokowski’s
words) "…such instruments as Vibraharps, Marimbaphones, Saxophones,
Celestes…" giving the "impression of music played and danced
on the village green". Quite apart from his imperfect grasp of
organology, what on earth made Stokowski associate, even in his wildest
dreams, saxophones and "vibraharps" etc. with the village
green?! I don’t know, but the arrangements are typically delightful
and are well captured here, though some of the tuned percussion playing
is far from the standard we expect as the norm today.
CD2 is much more of a pot-pourri. Starting with the
well-known fanfare from Dukas’s ‘La Péri’, it continues
with a recording of the Brahms Tragic Overture made in
1977. This must surely be one of Stokowski’s very last studio sessions,
as he was 95 at the time, and died just five months later. No sign of
waning powers in the music, though; this is a fresh and vigorous performance,
though not one which gets to the core of this great work. The opening
brisk tempo suggests a business-like approach, so that much of the mystery
is absent, as is the crucial sense of epiphany at 8:20, where the horns
rise like a blessing.
Most of the other items are well played light pieces,
though Ibert’s fine Escales (‘Ports of Call’) is
well worth having. Odd that this piece doesn’t seem to feature in the
catalogue in a modern recording at present (there is a Naxos recording
with Takuo Yuasa and one of the Paris orchestras. Ed). Perhaps this
issue will help; the three sections evoke in turn Rome, Tunis and Valencia,
and the music is fabulously scored and full of delicious and often quite
exotic touches of melody and harmony. Perhaps ‘Tunis’ is a bit of a
cliché, with its wailing oboe snake-charming away against pizzicato
strings, but the vivacity and rhythm of ‘Valencia’ more than compensates
for this. These are charming musical post-cards in the manner of Copland’s
El Salon Mexico.
But the major item in this second CD is a good old
‘bleeding chunk’ of Wagner, in the shape of the ‘Love Music’
from Tristan und Isolde, stitched together by Stokowski from
parts of Acts II and III. The Philadelphia Orchestra plays sumptuously,
and it is quite something to hear their ’cello launching into the melody
of ‘O sink hernieder’. I’ve always felt that one of the supreme
imaginative achievements of the whole opera is Brangäne’s warning
aria from her watching-post, with the glorious irony of her words, so
full of foreboding, floating on top of the most erotic music the world
had heard up to this point in history.
So there is much to admire; but Stokowski was no true
Wagnerian, and never conducted the operas complete. The ‘symphonic poem’
created here lacks sufficient contrast, and is like eating your way
through not one but two boxes of luxury chocolates at one sitting
(do try). Despite the glories, my ear tired by the end, and I did sense
that someone at the record company was showing a mischievous sense of
humour by following all this excessive sensual indulgence with Glière’s
little Russian Sailors’ Dance. Quick, clear the bodies
off the stage – here come the corps de ballet!
Notwithstanding, these are wonderful CDs, and remind
us of the breadth of Stokowski’s musical achievements and sympathies.
He was a unique figure, incapable of turning in a boring or routine
performance, and often able to illuminate the expressive essence of
the music he loved in an inimitable way.
Gwyn Parry-Jones