David
Patmore’s excellent accompanying essay stresses Ansermet’s firm
belief in the importance of his own particular style. This was
something he could only fully obtain from an orchestra which
he himself had carefully nurtured. For this reason he persuaded
Decca to let him record “Petrushka” again only three years after
his well-regarded 1946 version with the London Philharmonic.
It
is this question of style which ensures that what, on the face
of it, could be considered an excessively literal, if buoyant
and well-prepared, performance, is worth so much more than the
sum of its parts. It is a question of everybody knowing just
how the conductor sees the work. From the outset the flautist
(André Pepin?) throws a shaft of sunlight into the Shrovetide
fair scene and this is throughout a very happy sounding interpretation.
While Monteux, the work’s first interpreter (his recording of
this coupling is an essential document – see
my review), characterizes vividly the contenders of the
puppet show, Ansermet seems to be viewing their play from a
place in the crowd. As early as the hurdy-gurdy theme we note
that Ansermet, unlike Monteux, does not point the new episodes
but rather lets them run into each other like dream-sequences.
He shows a sense of wonder but not direct involvement, rather
like Alice’s bemused contemplation of
the strange, even violent, goings-on she meets in Wonderland.
“Petrushka”
has never previously suggested to me a parallel with Alice, so I wondered if there is some reason why Ansermet’s performance
put this thought in my head. I think there is, for Ansermet,
like Carroll/Dodgson, was a mathematician, and has maybe grasped
intuitively the relationship between the parts in a way that
eludes most of the rest of us, just as Alice’s strange journey through Wonderland
had a logical basis behind it for its author’s mathematical
mind. I am reminded of Ansermet’s version of Beethoven’s 9th,
which was my introduction to the work. In spite of apparent
shortcomings, it proceeds with such an inevitability and justness
that it remains the version I always go back to; I might yet
come to feel the same way about this “Petrushka”, still sounding
remarkably well for its age.
About
the “Rite” I’m not so sure. A critic once described Ansermet
as “plodding along hopefully” and certainly the “Dances of the
Adolescents” are extremely slow, though there is no actual slackness
to the playing. Having got through this, not all the later tempi
are slower than usual and some are quite brisk. But it’s not
the tempi that concern me so much as the way Ansermet seems
so unsurprised by it all. To continue with the Alice
metaphor, the “Rite” is one of those unfathomable creations
of the human genius that, as Alice
said of “Jabberwocky”, fill our heads with ideas even if we
don’t know what they are. Some have suggested that Stravinsky
had somehow made contact with primitive experiences hidden deep
in the collective memory, not normally accessible to us, though
our own hidden memories are invariably stirred by a hearing
of this work. Stravinsky himself, we should recall, said that
it had written itself and he was not sure where it had come
from.
Perhaps
to Ansermet’s mathematical mind it all seemed quite normal,
for the truth is that having Ansermet conduct “The Rite of Spring”
is a bit like having Humpty Dumpty explain “Jabberwocky”; to
take a concept from elsewhere in Alice, it may be useful, sometimes,
to have such a clear explanation of what the notes mean,
but what the music means, or what it is, is something
else again. Of the work’s early interpreters, Monteux, with
the marvellous Boston orchestra, created a thrilling post-Rimsky
tone poem while Igor Markevitch revelled in the cool savagery
of the writing. Both seem to me to have had something more essential
to say about the piece. Stravinsky’s own versions are obviously
separate cases.
In
view of Ansermet’s association and friendship with Stravinsky
– until he felt unable to follow him into his last period –
all his recordings of this composer’s music are historical documents,
but “The Rite” is arguably less so than “Petrushka” and Ansermet’s
particular gifts of cool structural logic were invaluable above
all in the neo-classical Stravinsky that followed. It’s good
to see Ansermet being reassessed – it’s hard to realize, now,
how his Suisse Romande discs dominated the catalogue for at
least two decades – but this was not necessarily the best place
to start.
I
presume these CD transfers derive from commercial pressings,
and very impressive they sound for their age. I suppose Decca
themselves, with the original tapes, could do better still,
but in view of the strident sound they have tended to impose
on their historical material over the years, it is to be doubted
whether they actually would do better.
Christopher
Howell
Suisse Romande Orchestra/Ernest
Ansermet
