Why do we buy historic recordings? Usually,
I imagine, it is to listen to an artist who later went on to greater
fame and to see if we can detect, in spite of sonic limitations,
any intimations of future greatness or simply any hints of qualities
that were subsequently to make his or her artistry distinctive
and valued. The current fashion for issuing, among others, the
earliest recordings by Furtwängler - in various series on
Naxos
Historical or
Stokowski
offer many opportunities for playing that particular parlour game.
With the recordings under review we have some quite different
issues to face. Before we do so let’s fill in the generally unfamiliar
conductor’s background. German-born Alfred Hertz (1872-1942) was
once one of the best-known conductors in the USA. As, from 1902,
the chief conductor of German repertoire at New York’s Metropolitan
Opera, he conducted the American premieres of Wagner’s
Parsifal
and Richard Strauss’s
Salome and
Der Rosenkavalier and,
at the same house, was recorded experimentally in 1901-1903 on
some of the intriguing “
Mapleson
cylinders”. He was only the second music director of the San
Francisco Symphony Orchestra – in post from 1915 until his retirement
in 1929 - after which he seems to have concentrated on working
on radio where he was closely involved with the popular “Standard
Symphony Hour” broadcasts from 1932 until 1939. In fact, Standard
Oil’s contemporary promotional material placed him at the very
head of the decidedly disparate band of conductors who were associated
with the programme ... “
We know”, it boasted,
“that
the Standard Symphony Hour has a larger audience than any other
Pacific Coast sponsored program ... Among the famous conductors
who have appeared are: Hertz, Rodzinsky, Dobrowen, Cameron, van
Hoogstraten, Molinari, Sir Hamilton Harty, Klemperer, Monteux,
Piastro, Blechschmidt, Merola, Lert, Leschke, Nilson, Svedrovsky...”
[
see
more here]
Today, however, we face significant challenges in listening to
Hertz’s recordings and in trying to place them in some sort of
personal and historical perspective. In the first place, the conductor
seems to have been very unlucky in the resources allocated to
him by the Victor Talking Machine Company, with several of his
recordings stymied from the outset by outmoded equipment, poorly
selected recording venues or something that remastering guru Mark
Obert-Thorn describes as “acoustically-compromised dubbing”. Secondly,
while in the 1920s Hertz seems never to have been allowed to progress
beyond recording well-known and generally unchallenging orchestral
“pops”, his subsequent retreat from commercial recording deprives
us of any greater musical substance from which to construct a
critical analysis of his work. Clearly, then, this is not just
a case of looking for a needle in a haystack – it is a case of
having to do so when we don’t even know what sort of needle we
are actually trying to identify!
Accepting, however, the limitations of what it is now possible to learn or deduce about Hertz, it is still, thankfully, possible to comment objectively on these tracks as stand-alone entities. The Liszt
Les Préludes, for example, is very finely done and it is apparent from the outset that Hertz has his own coherent conception of a work that can very easily seem all too disjointed and fragmented. After a carefully and beautifully crafted opening that creates an air of tense expectation absent from many other accounts, Hertz unrolls a musical panorama that is at least the equal of – and in this new remastering now sounds rather better than – his contemporary Willem Mengelberg’s better known 1929 recording with his Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Hertz’s accounts of the
Parsifal extracts are of obvious historical significance and demonstrate again the atmosphere of tightly controlled power over the orchestra. The tension that he generates is quite palpable and one senses that the members of the orchestra are, throughout these accounts, in a state of rapt concentration. They play, in fact, throughout as if their very lives depended on getting every note exactly right.
Lionel Mapleson’s eponymous cylinders had included valuable 1903 accounts of Hertz directing singers Lillian Nordica, Georg Anthes and Ernestine Schumann-Heink in extracts from
Tristan und Isolde, with Madame Nordica - who became, in 1914, the only diva in operatic history to die of hypothermia and pneumonia after being shipwrecked - offering a quite stentorian performance of the
Liebestod. On the tracks under review here, recorded almost a quarter of a century later than those cylinders, the (purely orchestral) accounts of both the Prelude to Act I and the
Liebestod fully match those of
Parsifal in their intensity. Hertz’s flowing lines and finely-exercised dynamic control - not always an easy thing to achieve given the technological limitations of contemporary recording - mark him out, as one might well, after all, have expected, as a most accomplished Wagnerian.
The two Brahms Hungarian Dances are presented in colourful accounts that are full of gusto in arrangements for full orchestra by Albert Parlow (1824-1888), a German composer and conductor closely associated with Prussian military bands. Hertz could evidently let his hair down – even though most of it was, as photographs indicate, to be found on his chin – when required. The sixth dance is performed with especial flair and sly humour and brings the disc to an altogether rousing conclusion.
Our grateful thanks must be due, then, to Pristine Audio and to Mark Obert-Thorn for producing such high quality transfers of the original material and for filling in a hitherto largely blank page in the history of orchestral recording. Is it now, I wonder, too much to hope that, once all of Hertz’s slim discography has been addressed, they will be turning their attention to such other lost luminaries of the Standard Symphony Hour as Messrs. Blechschmidt, Lert and Svedrovsky?
Rob Maynard
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Alfred Hertz 
