Spending more and more time in his native country Stokowski
made these exhilarating recordings with the National Philharmonic Orchestra,
an ad hoc ensemble of the type familiar to him from his time in New
York. Led by Sidney Sax it included, in the violins alone, Hugh Bean,
Desmond Bradley, Bela Dekany, John Georgiadis and Kenneth Sillito. Sometimes
recording orchestras of this type are considerably less than the sum
of their parts but this really was a virtuoso instrument, flexible,
tonally luxuriant and technically excellent. The 43-minute ballet sequence
was edited by Diaghilev from The Sleeping Beauty as a result of the
financial – not artistic – failure of its London performances in 1921
(the first outside Russia). The result was a compressed one-act work
consisting of, in the main, divertissements from Act Three. Stokowski
had recorded highlights of The Sleeping Beauty in 1947 and in 1953 he
had recorded the Diaghilev edition to which he returned here, in 1976,
at the age of 94, a year in which he made some truly splendid recordings.
He was a superb ballet music conductor and it shows here in his attentiveness,
his affectionate nudging and nuancing and his lyrical sensibility. It
is my preferred recording of any of The Sleeping Beauty music. The 1937
transcription of Clair de lune features harp arpeggios, a vibraphone
and much exotic succulence. Listen to the polished sheen of the first
violins at 2.17. A muted trumpet haunts the Night in Granada, as does
the habanera serenade. Stokowski could write a sultry and saucy transcription
like no other and here we have both – listen to the violins’ raunchy
little fillip to their line at 3.38. The important bassoon at 5’30 is
well captured in this well-balanced recording in the unlikely setting
of the West Ham Central Mission. Stokowski orchestrated Albeniz’s piece
in 1925 and laid down a carpet of strummed pizzicato cellos over which
the cor anglais rides; with muted trumpet and chimes and some stentorian
trombones Albeniz’s Granadan procession can seldom have sounded so fantastically
exciting. And loud. Novacek’s Pepetuum Mobile, showpiece for show-off
violinists, openings with a luxurious harp glissando and then digs into
what Stokowski apparently saw as a kind of etude. This is his revised
transcription – the one with added wind, brass and percussion and as
Edward Johnson’s notes point out, the extra aural frisson of hearing
Stokowski hushing the violins at the end of the raucous ride. Stokowski
sombrely orchestrates Shostakovich’s Prelude. The conductor wrote of
this Prelude that "only genius can be so eloquent and concentrated"
and his 1935 transcription of a work that was only premiered, in Moscow,
in 1932 attests to his respect and acute understanding of its status.
For good measure the conductor adds a xylophone to his Flight of the
Bumble-bee. In the two Chopin transcriptions the Mazurka is laden with
trumpet interjections and some juicy portamentos from the lower strings
at 1.35 whilst the Prelude opens like Die Walkure or the Flying Dutchman
and stays that way – frightening.
Jonathan Woolf
National Philharmonic Orchestra/Leopold
Stokowski