Franz LISZT (1811-1886)
Les Préludes (1848) [15:37]
Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
Parsifal (1882) Prelude to Act I [13:46]
Parsifal (1882) Good Friday Spell (Act III) [11:10]
Tristan und Isolde (1865) Prelude to Act I [9:06]
Tristan und Isolde (1865) Liebestod (Act III) [6:09]
Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Hungarian Dance no.5 in G minor (orch. Parlow) (1869) [2:38]
Hungarian Dance no.6 in D major (orch. Parlow) (1869) [3:20]
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Alfred Hertz
rec. 24, 26, 31 January 1925 (Parsifal), 20-22 April 1926 (Tristan), 13 April
1927 (Brahms) and 27 February 1928 (Liszt); Scottish Rite Temple, Oakland,
California (Parsifal, Tristan, Liszt) and Columbia Theatre, San Francisco,
California (Brahms)
PRISTINE AUDIO PASC 195 [61:46]
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