When I first began
buying LPs there were "great conductors":
Stokowski, Koussevitzky, Beecham, Monteux,
Walter, Toscanini, Boult, Mengelberg
and Weingartner. When recordings by
Scherchen began appearing on an audiophile
label few critics or collectors of my
acquaintance took him seriously, figuring
he was just somebody available on the
cheap to provide an inoffensive recording
for the sound engineers to fiddle with.
Friends would mispronounce his name
and giggle. It wasn’t long, however,
before critics and collectors woke up
and showed some respect. At one time
during the late 1950s the Scherchen
recordings of the Bach Mass in b, St.
Matthew Passion, and Cantata #54; Handel’s
Messiah; the complete Beethoven and
late Haydn Symphonies; the Mozart Requiem;
Berlioz’s Requiem and Symphonie Fantastique;
Rossini’s William Tell Overture; Liszt’s
Piano Concertos and Hungarian Rhapsodies;
Mahler’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies;
Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet; Weber’s
overtures; Stravinsky’s Petrouchka and
Firebird Suite; and Honegger’s Pacific
231 were all hailed by
many critics as the best available versions
both for performance and
for recorded sound. Not one of the "Great
Conductors" had even recorded all
these works, let alone recorded them
well, let alone made landmark recordings
of them. Nobody laughed any more.
Scherchen, like Leopold
Stokowski, was very knowledgeable in
the technical area of the recording
process, but, unlike Stokowski, was
primarily concerned with clarity, detail
and realism in his recordings. Also,
unlike Stokowski, he knew when to back
out of the process and let the engineers
do their job without interference which
earned him their respect and their willingness
to collaborate creatively.
Unfortunately Westminster
made a number of bad business decisions
about this time which headed the company
towards eventual bankruptcy, one of
which decisions was to be sparing about
recording in stereo which many persons,
even many audiophiles, still thought
of as a temporary craze. The first bankruptcy
of Westminster was just before Scherchen’s
death in 1966. His name all but disappeared
from concert billings and the recording
catalogues. Over the next 20 years his
recordings would appear briefly here
and there on LP bargain reprint labels,
including a barely resuscitated Westminster
functioning successively as a division
of several other companies.
In the mid-1980s MCA,
who had eventually come to own the Westminster
tapes, reissued a number of his better
sounding recordings transferred to CDs,
and a new generation of collectors came
to know him, confronted with the astonishing
consistent quality of his artistic production.
Many of these recordings still sounded
as good as then new recordings. A new
Scherchen public began to develop creating
a market for additionally discovered
recordings and today we are as much
aware of the gaps in the Scherchen discography
than of its wide range. We are deeply
in debt to Scherchen’s daughter, Dr.
Myriam Scherchen, for establishing TAHRA
records and searching out and publishing
radio transcriptions and tapes from
minor labels and sharing with us her
family photograph album and many fascinating
recollections.
Scherchen was as admiring
of — and as well acquainted with — Mahler
as Bruno Walter was, and his interpretations,
while quite different, must be regarded
as equally authoritative. Unfortunately
we do not have a complete Mahler cycle:
number four is missing completely (Scherchen
didn’t care for it and rarely performed
it) and of number six we have only a
cut and under-rehearsed radio performance
of what would have been the most amazing
performance of the work ever done. Of
Scherchen’s long dedicated friendship
with Arnold Schoenberg we have almost
nothing recorded, but we can be grateful
for a stunning Pelléas et
Mélisande and a few shorter
works like the one in this set. Of Bach
we have an abundance — two sets of Brandenburgs,
two Masses in b, the St. Matthew and
St John Passions, three versions of
Art of Fugue, and a good selection of
cantatas — reflecting his profound admiration
and identification.
The most serious detraction
critics laid against Scherchen was use
of unconventional tempi, but like many
creative people he disliked doing anything
exactly the same way twice. Also he
was frequently forced to work with undermotivated
orchestras, and I can’t think of any
better way to wake up a complacent group
of musicians than to make them play
a piece they know too well at a tempo
faster or slower than they’d ever dreamed
of before. But many of his innovative
tempi which were considered shocking
when first heard have since become the
canon.
This selection is a
reasonable set of representative Scherchen
excellence, but they can’t please everybody.
Of his three recordings of the Haydn
Military Symphony, I feel this is the
least satisfactory, but probably was
chosen because it’s the only one in
stereo. It amply displays Scherchen
in his "surprising tempo"
persona; the finale is, by any measure,
absurdly fast. The Schoenberg work is
completely new to me, and is untypically
consonant for this composer, being at
times almost pretty; but it demonstrates
Scherchen’s missionary desire to promote
the composer’s art. The Brahms is a
superb performance, rich with detail
and drama right up to the end of the
third movement; but, disappointingly,
sections of the finale are rushed, and
at times there the orchestral ensemble
is less than perfect. For his English
recordings he had a great orchestra
to lead and apparently plenty of rehearsal
time, and these recordings show that
the best that he was capable of is the
very best there is. The Beethoven 8th
Symphony is one of the very finest performances
of this work ever done, as is the "Firebird
Suite." Few modern recordings can
match the sinister and evil violence
of the Kastchei’s Dance sequence.
These transfers are
new. Direct comparison of this Beethoven
Symphony with the transfer of the same
work on the 1988 MCAD2-9802-B issue
shows the new transfer to be more transparent
and wider ranged, even on my 3-inch
K-L-H computer speaker system. The same
comparison with the Stravinsky shows
the new transfer to have deeper perspective
and greater definition, but the older
transfer on a 1999 Japanese Victor pressing
MVCW-14033 has been differently equalized,
so it has the effect of slightly wider
range; one could actually prefer the
earlier version if one did not have
a super high-definition speaker system.
If you like what you
hear here, you might want to search
out Scherchen’s 1953 St. Matthew Passion
(monophonic and OP), his Mahler 5th
and 7th Symphonies, and the Tahra "Enregistrements
Nixa" set (TAH 413/416) of
Russian and French orchestral war-horses.
There is a wonderful VHS video rehearsal
of Bach’s Art of the Fugue on
CBC Home Video (VAI 69408 NTSC). The
stereo remakes of Handel’s Messiah and
Bach’s Mass in b which are currently
available on DG are nowhere near so
good as the original monophonic versions
(both currently OP) which are worth
any amount of trouble to find. Never
released on CD is the 1953 monophonic
English recording of Rossini’s William
Tell Overture, a performance which
stands out in a heavily crowded field
as the finest performance and recording
this work has ever received. As any
orchestral musician will tell you, to
get an orchestra to enjoy playing this
despised work and do it this well is
the achievement of the millennium.
Paul Shoemaker
Vienna Recordings made in the Mozart-Sall, Konzerthaus,
Vienna, Austria. (1952-60) 