Cesar FRANCK (1822-1890)
Psyché et Eros Symphonic Poem [8:55]
Les Éolides, Op. 26 [10:59]
Rédemption, “Poeme-symphonie” [11:20]
Symphony in D minor [38:20]
NBC Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Toscanini
rec. live broadcasts, 1940-1952, NBC Studio 8H, New York
PRISTINE AUDIO PASC635 [69:35]
Toscanini, like his contemporaries Monteux and Munch, found Franck’s 1887 symphonic poem Psyche compelling, based as it is upon the Latin novel by Lucius Apuleius. The mythic tale involves Eros, son of Venus, who inadvertently wounds himself with a golden arrow meant to cause the mortal Psyche to fall in love with an ugly rival. The Psyché et Eros episode marks the last part of this massive tone-poem, an account of the lovers’ first meeting, transitioning from shyness to erotic consummation. Eros arrives in tones realized by cellos and brass, and Psyche has her own theme in the violins. Toscanini’s performance, from January 5, 1952, explodes with passion, and even the cramped acoustics of NBC Studio 8H cannot subdue its intensity.
Franck conceived his 1877 Les Éolides after the poem by Leconte de Lisle, an idyll which celebrates the Winds of Greek myth, the “sweet breaths of the fair Spring that caress the hills and plains with fairest kisses.” Toscanini leads his NBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance from March 5, 1949, that projects a particularly alert response from his strings, high and low, and from the woodwinds. The impressive harp element has not been lost in this fine restoration from Andrew Rose. Toscanini’s persuasive evocations of lush waltz tempos will startle those who consider him “austere” in his approach. Much of the fluttering passagework finds its way into the Symphony in D minor, while the wind filigree influences the score of Psyche et Eros.
Franck’s epic Rédemption, a hybrid oratorio in two parts and ten movements for mezzo-soprano, large chorus and orchestra, suffered a fiasco at its premiere under Georges Hartmann in 1873. Franck revised the score in 1875, refining his orchestration in the manner of Berlioz and authorizing the Morceau Symphonique, purely orchestral section, to be played independently. This section, which opens the second half of the rather unwieldy composition, remains the most performed, and Toscanini leads a realization from March 3, 1947. One might, in listening to the haughty sonorities, think of the Caspar Friedrich painting, “The Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist,” and many commentators have assigned the epithet, “religious fog,” to the declamatory and urgent impulses in the music. The NBC brass have their own moment of celebration, in a not-too-subtle homage to Richard Wagner. Once more, Toscanini brings a palpable eroticism to Franck’s rich palette, which benefits from the Maestro’s delicate balance of the blasting and hortatory, and subdued intimacy.
In his accompanying note to this release, Andrew Rose comments that the original December 14, 1940 broadcast suffered a flubbed solo horn line in the first movement too glaring to permit RCA to issue the performance officially. Digital modification by Pristine has corrected the error, so no longer does the March 1946 broadcast of the first movement Lento need to suffice. While the performance boasts wonderful, deliberate control and fervently taut plateaus of sound, it avoids the rhythmic manipulations that Stokowski, Mengelberg, and Furtwangler provide in the name of “mysticism.”
Mortimer Frank, in his study, Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years, refers to the “eerie gloom” of the work, a designation I do not support fully, but rather I abstract the sensibility as “darkly, exotically chromatic.” Toscanini hurries along the middle movement Allegretto, perhaps to compensate for the tight leash he had previously exerted. The quickness merely accentuates the precision of the string and wind choirs of the NBC players. Toscanini imparts a ferocious momentum to the last movement, Allegro non troppo, reminding us of the work’s cyclic unity and its resolute sense of dramatic closure, what Olin Downes in his December 15, 1940 review for the New York Times called “its faith and triumphant tenderness.”
Gary Lemco
