Cala’s commitment to resurrecting Stokowski’s recordings
has been of long standing. This disc dates from 1996 and therefore antedates
the subsequent consistently high quality documentation written by Edward
Johnson of the Stokowski Society that delineated performance history
in enlightening detail. But the trajectory of these mid-period recordings
is clear enough. The Strauss dates from December 1944 and his brief
time with the New York City Symphony Orchestra whilst the Tchaikovsky
from the following year when he had been invited to form the Hollywood
Bowl Orchestra – an ensemble drawn from top studio musicians. He made
many recordings of short pieces with the latter ensemble but only three
substantial sets – Manual de Falla’s Love the Magician, Brahms’
First Symphony (both in their ways contentious performances) and this
Pathetique.
More than most conductors of his generation – maybe
uniquely so in fact – Stokowski was passionately interested in the recording
process; his longevity and questing imagination often led to multiple
recordings of much of his repertoire over many decades. He recorded
the Strauss – and he was frugal when it came to Strauss – three times
in a decade with three different orchestras; Philadelphia, All American
Youth Orchestra and this one in New York. Similarly he recorded the
Pathetique thrice between 1940 and 1973. Listening to a contemporary
wartime recording of the Strauss by Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw
– another conductor whose modifications and supposed stylistic and narrative
transgressions appal and enthral equally – and one becomes aware of
a philosophical gulf between the two conductors. It’s not just that
Stokowski’s reputation as a "colourist" precedes him or that
Cardus’s view of him as a musical "embalmer" should dispose
the listener one way or the other; rather it’s the promotion of orchestral
colour at the expense, ultimately, of architectural depth in the broadest
sense which seems to me to be the problem. There is certainly animation
and velocity a-plenty in Stokowski’s reading but little of the frantic
fissures that are opened up in Amsterdam.
The Tchaikovsky is again problematic though Stokowski
could be unambiguously magnetic in this repertoire. In his 1973 traversal
with the LSO (RCA 09026626022) he led a solidly unspectacular performance;
whereas comparison with a live broadcast in the same year with the same
orchestra shows a finer control of architectural logic and considerably
more animation and emotional tension. Comparison with 1945 is not always
to the older recording’s advantage. Passionately overheated it has a
coagulatory quality that will either inspire or repel. I don’t find
in it the logical ascents to the climaxes that do exist in subsequent
recordings; too much seems wayward and imposed; and the dread word "sentimentalised"
is never far away. It’s never unmoving – Stokowski was incapable of
dullness – but its emotional graph is not matched by commensurate structural
integrity.
Jonathan Woolf
Leopold Stokowski