This was Toscanini’s third season as Music Director
of the NBC Orchestra and this CD is the opening concert recorded in
the autumn of 1939 before a select audience in Symphony Hall at Radio
City. The recording derives from a collection owned by Richard Blaine
Gardner, a recording engineer and editor with whom Toscanini worked
at RCA Victor. Copies of these tapes and discs were in turn passed down
to Richard Caniell between 1949 and 1983, who subjected them to restorative
processes, though retaining both the unfiltered sound and the original
acoustics. One can only commend him and his team at Guild for their
exemplary and painstaking work, for the result is very fine, and elsewhere
in their catalogue music-lovers of an operatic disposition should explore
their recent issues of Wagner, Mozart and Mussorgsky also reviewed on
this website.
When radio and recordings got into their stride in
the 1930s all sorts of prophets of doom began to be heard eliciting
hostile cries from musicians afraid of being put out of work. The American
Federation of Musicians, the American Society of Composers, Authors
and Publishers fretted and warned their members of the threat to careers
and demise of the concert. In fact the opposite occurred, for as more
homes were equipped with radios, more people listened to symphonic broadcasts,
more orchestras then took to the air, and attendance at concerts leaped
to an all-time high, especially during the war when entertainment was
more vital than ever.
The programme of this concert in many ways typifies
the Maestro’s music-making, beginning with the more predictable Schubert
and Strauss but followed by a surprising choice of a work by Haydn (though
this composer’s symphonies were often found in Toscanini’s programmes)
and concluding with Respighi’s tamperings, Stokowski-style, with Bach.
Toscanini lingers over his Schubert in a brooding interpretation, whilst
sunlight pours into his Haydn. The Sinfonia Concertante may be a comparative
rarity but it is always a good work for an orchestra to put four of
its principal players under the spotlight. Though unnamed in the booklet
they are in fact Robert Bloom (oboe), William Polesi (bassoon), Mischa
Mischakoff (violin), and Frank Miller (cello), who did indeed hold their
respective chairs as principal players in the NBC Orchestra at the time.
Toscanini’s Strauss has clarity in the orchestral playing, rhythmic
tension, concentrated sweep of phrasing, burning passion, beauty and
tenderness in the love music and power at the climaxes, in short the
finest playing that day. Respighi’s somewhat distortedly pompous and
over-pretentious, cloying view of the wonderful Passacaglia by Bach
is a curiosity, but nothing more.
Whatever one’s view of Toscanini, his podium manner
or his music-making, whether his phrasing is at times too breathless
or over-expansive, he was a supreme conductor whose concerts preserved
as this one has been (and with hopefully more to come) make essential
listening.
Christopher Fifield
Arturo Toscanini (conductor)