Naxos Historical has been doing valuable work restoring recordings
of Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony to circulation.
The Russian conductor has unfairly been largely forgotten in
the latter-day idolizing of Furtwängler and Toscanini. Worst
of all, there has been a tendency to dismiss Koussevitzky as
an inferior musician, due to the fact that he couldn’t read
an orchestral score very well and had to hire assistants to
play through the music at the piano while he practised conducting
it, until he felt that he knew it sufficiently to impose it
on the orchestra with an iron will … which he did. But the truth
is, I’d trade in quite a few musically sound conductors for
just one with the theatrical acumen of Koussevitzky. Whatever
he lacked in technical finish, he made up for in sheer panache,
even in music that wasn’t central to his repertory, such as
the Wagner featured here.
The
opening minute of the “Overture” to Der Fliegende Holländer
is easily worth the price of this super budget release. This
is exactly the kind of adrenaline that modern orchestras and
conductors can almost never capture. Granted, Koussevitzky’s
way of capturing it was through despotic behavior so severe
that the old joke used to be that the Boston Symphony had
101 players and 102 ulcers, because one man had two. But what
electricity! The whole overture is propelled with swift assurance,
leaving most modern performances behind in calmer waters.
Particularly glorious is the sheer swagger of the fanfare
around five minutes into the overture. I pulled out modern
versions by Barenboim and Sinopoli for comparison, and skillfully
played though they are, neither performance truly sits on
the edge of its seat the way the Boston/Koussevitzky performance
does. Going back a generation, Bruno Walter’s late stereo
recording captures at least some of that sense of adventure
in stereo sound, whereas the Koussevitzky recordings here,
all from the late 1940s are in mono, but Koussevitzky is more
theatrically alive than Walter.
There
is fervency, too, to Koussevitzky’s version of the “Prelude”
to Act I of Lohengrin. The brightness of the Boston
orchestra’s sound gives this music a heavenly shimmer that
seems to me a wonderful alternative to the more usual gauzy,
darkness of Germanic performances. But then again, I’ve always
enjoyed French conductor Paul Paray’s Wagner recordings on
Mercury, which certainly put a Gallic spin on the music, with
an even brighter and drier sense of color then Koussevitzky’s.
In the “Prelude” to Act I of Parsifal, Koussevitzky
is amazingly broad, but he has the sheer control to pull it
off and make it sound thoroughly convincing.
It
is interesting to go a little more in-depth and compare the
Koussevitzky with other old recordings of the following Good
Friday Spell. The earliest is very old indeed, coming
from Alfred Hertz and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1913, two
months before Nikisch’s recording of Beethoven’s Fifth
kicked off the world of recording serious concert music seriously.
Hertz’s renditions foreshadowed that bold, new approach: The
music isn’t cut, nor are the string bass parts moved to tuba
to better register in the acoustic recording process. The
main compromise is that the Berlin Philharmonic is reduced
to a band of something like 30 players. The best features
of the performance are the flowing tempo and the comfortable
application of portamento in the strings. The worst features
are that, perhaps out of fear of the new technology, the performance
is stiffer than what one would expect from a conductor closely
associated with this score. The strings also seem to have
more intonation problems than what one hears under Nikisch
in the Beethoven recorded two months later.
One
of the first electrical recordings of the Good Friday Spell
was supposed to come from Karl Muck during studio sessions
held at Bayreuth in 1927, but Muck loftily refused to cut
that particular selection up into the short sections required
for 78-r.p.m. records. Wagner’s son Siegfried, however, decided
that it would be acceptable to record it in segments, and
led the orchestra himself in the selection, with Fritz Wolff
and Igor Kipnis contributing magnificent vocals. The performance,
a touch more spacious than Hertz’s, maintains flowing speeds
while generating some real intensity. A year later, Muck decided
that it was permissible, after all, to stop and start the
sacred scene, and recorded it in Berlin with Gotthelf Pistor and Ludwig Hoffman
singing effectively, if not with the golden sound of Wolff
and Kipnis. The performance is similarly flowing, though more
self-consciously reverent. The Hertz, Siegfried Wagner, and
Muck recordings are all available on an essential two-disc
set from Naxos {Naxos Historical 8.111283), like the present release, lovingly restored
by Mark Obert-Thorn, though admittedly the sound of those
early recordings is pretty dim.
By
comparison, though, those recordings seem stiff when compared
to the incandescent Wilhelm Furtwängler caught in flight in a live concert in Cairo in 1951. In his best manner, Furtwängler leads the Berlin Philharmonic
with great flexibility and inspiration. His tempo is only
slightly broader than Hertz or Muck, but he handles phrases
in a way that make it seem much more spacious. Approaching
the work from outside the Germanic tradition, Koussevitzky
takes it decidedly more slowly in his 1946 recording, bringing
it in at 11:46,
almost a minute slower than the already spacious Furtwängler. But, though the tempo is slow, the Russian
conductor is able to sustain it with an intensity that suits
the music. In other hands, particularly those of many modern
conductors, such a tempo would sag into torpor, but whatever
Koussevitzky’s technical flaws as a musician may have been,
he was the real thing as a leader of orchestras. It is also
worth pointing out that under Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony’s
playing easily outstrips Bayreuth Festival Orchestra under
Siegfried Wagner or the Berlin State Opera Orchestra under
Muck. Frankly, they even give Furtwängler’s fabled bunch a
run for their money. Ultimately, the Berliners’ depth of tone
may win out, but the fervent shimmer of the Boston sound is beguiling.
Getting
back to the rest of the disc, it’s confession time: I’ve never
much cared for Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. I’ve always
felt about this piece rather like George Eliot felt about
music in general: “It’s a rider galloping past with an urgent
message for someone else.” Not that Wagner’s Christmas present
to his wife is all that urgent, except perhaps in the central
climax. To me, the piece just seems to go on and on, cooing
away happily. That Koussevitzky’s performance is on the swift,
flowing side is thus fine with me. Klemperer turned in a similarly
flowing performance of just over 18 minutes in his early recording
with the Staatskapelle Berlin in 1927, with more traditional
Germanic manner, though much less clear sound.
As
a little bonus to the Wagner program, Naxos includes a gloriously feisty performance of Brahms’ Academic Festival
Overture. Eclectic composer and sometime rock star Frank
Zappa used to describe characterizing musical performances
as “putting the eyebrows on it,” and there can be little doubt
that this overture is played here with eyebrows as big, bushy
and expressive as those of Koussevitzky himself.
Mark
Obert-Thorn has done a valuable service in transferring these
recordings from a number of different sources, including 78-rpm
and 45-rpm records. As always in his work, he demonstrates
a golden ear for how to extract maximum sound from old records
with minimal interference and processing. Some listeners avoid
monophonic recordings, but ones that pack this much sound
into their grooves make it easy to get swept up in the music
without dwelling on the age of the recording. Let’s hope Naxos
will continue this Koussevitzky series.
Koussevitzky was a truly
great conductor, and every fan of great conducting should
hear a wide selection of his work. The sad thing for American
fans, however, is that this and other Naxos releases of his
work are unavailable in the United States (legally, at least)
because the copyright owners neither want to license them
out to other companies, nor seem to have any plans to reissue
the recordings themselves.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
see also Review
by Rob Maynard
Boston Symphony
Orchestra/Serge Koussevitzky 
