Strauss’s dedication of Ein Heldenleben was jointly
to Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The conductor recorded
it twice, firstly in 1928 with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra
(on Pearl Gemm 008) and again for Telefunken in 1941, the subject of
this re-issue, with his own orchestra. The earlier recording has been
more generally available than this wartime set which came toward the
end of Mengelberg’s active commercial recording career. A rather poor
transfer appeared on Teldec and a rather better one is on LYS 418, coupled
with two versions of Don Juan.
The differences between the two Heldenlebens are quite
considerable. The NYPSO was, even in 1928, a much more sheerly virtuosic
orchestra than the war-sapped 1941 Concertgebouw. New York’s Guidi Scipione
was a scintillating violin soloist whereas Ferdinand Helman is plagued
by intonational worries and a vibrato that takes some getting used to.
That said Mengelberg’s notorious "changements" to Strauss’s
score are equally evident in the 1928 recording – separately bowed triplets,
a Brucknerian sized luftpausen or two, the full panoply of late romantic
interpretation. The 1941 recording features less fluent playing but
it is still an extraordinary document of the highest significance. Listen
to the lyric intensity of the violins at 2.47, the magnificent punching
trumpets and the pervasive mahogany double bass sonorities. Or listen
to the portamentos Mengelberg encourages – this is an especially compelling
example of uniformly applied portamenti that, by this decade, was supposed
to be on the wane and is a constant feature of Mengelberg’s emotional-expressive
armoury. Helman’s solos are rather tremulous, portamento-rich and tonally
unalluring but they are certainly not without either musical interest
or point; his musical line is never frivolous. The passionate conviction
of the performance and the good sound are carried over to Tod und Verklarung,
one of Mengelberg’s very last 1942 commercial discs. This is a performance
as far removed from the philosophically serene as one could wish to
hear. As sleeve note writer Ian Julier puts it, Mengelberg offers a
"witheringly poignant and pained knell of regret." The lavish
portamentos sound more than ever passionately urgent in a performance
of this kind and enormous chasms of visceral feeling are opened up.
Mengelberg has been increasingly well served recently
on CD – Q Disc and Apollo Sound have been especially active as has Pearl
itself and others – but this late Straussian disc is deserving of wide
currency.
Jonathan Woolf
Concertgebouw Orchestra