A number of Virgin Classics reissues have come my way recently
and of them a few were by the Liverpool/Pešek team. Whether it’s
the nature of the repertoire or his having been associated with
it for so long I find the conductor more electric in repertoire
he doesn’t usually conduct. This, for me, means Suk and sometimes
Novak. But I wish someone would get him in the recording studio
and allow him to explore the contemporary Czech repertoire as
he did when he was a young man and as he did so conspicuously
well. Or even to tackle the kind of works that Ančerl did
in his later years - Miloslav Kabeláč say or Jan Hanuš.
Well for now it’s
a reissue of a hoary old favourite, one that he re-recorded
in Prague six years or so after this Liverpool traversal of
Má Vlast. When I reviewed his last three Dvořák symphonies,
also taped in Liverpool, I felt no more than lukewarm about
them. I feel more positive about this cycle but not really enough
to make a meaningful recommendation.
For one thing the
Virgin recording team still had a tendency to a certain cloudiness,
a rather opaque sound stage which blunts the tuttis somewhat.
Greater clarity wouldn’t have hindered things. True the harp
is nicely forward in Vyšehrad and the trumpets play with
well-sprung attacks. But things do hang fire just a little,
something becalmed in the rhythmic profile of the music making
that afflicted those Dvořák performances. In Vltava
the rapids are genuinely exciting but again things tend to sag
along the river journey. The wedding is pleasing but as we approach
the climax there’s a want of adrenalin, a lack of real rhythmic
pointing, of inner brio. It’s all a little sanguine. I needn’t
cite Kubelík, Talich, Ančerl, Jeremias and all the rest.
Bohemia’s Woods
and Forests could also do with the kind of heart stopping
beauty that Talich brought to it, in his different ways, on
each of his three recorded performances. I’ve always loved the
playing of it in the immediate post-war but sadly incomplete
Czech Philharmonic cycle on 78 from Kubelík, though this is
a niche point I admit. Tábor and Blaník, the two
most difficult and problematic movements come across well –
unsurprising when one considers that they are the least often
played and never separately.
All this duly noted
there will still be only a rather limited market for this 1989
Má Vlast.
Jonathan Woolf
see also Review
by Simon Thompson
Royal Liverpool
Philharmonic Orchestra/Libor Pešek
