Comparison recordings:
Pedro deFreitas Branco, Champs Elysées
Theatre Orch. Westminster LP WL 5297
Boléro, Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia
Orchestra Sony 509555 2
Boléro, Hermann Scherchen, VSOO
MCA MCD 80097
Boléro, Charles Dutoit, OSM Decca
"London" VHS 440 071 255-3
"Ravel Conducts Ravel" [no
artist information] Laserlight 14 201
Pavane, Rapsodie, Fritz Reiner, CSO
RCA 60179-2
Rapsodie, Charles Munch, Orchestra de
Paris EMI 7473562
Daphnis et Chloe, [complete] Charles
Munch, BSO RCA 09026-61846-2
It is especially interesting
that this disk should appear right now
as I am currently involved in digitally
restoring the granddaddy of all Ravel
high fidelity demonstration recordings,
the Westminster WL 5297 listed above,
recorded monophonically in September
of 1953 and now just out of copyright.
This recording was important in another
way in that it was the first high fidelity
recording ever made of Boléro
following the composer’s using oboe
d’amour as called for in the score,
and also recognising the composer’s
stipulation that there be NO acceleration
(the score reads "moderato assai")
a long overdue repudiation of Toscanini’s
revisionism which had dominated musical
taste for decades. Branco witnessed
Ravel accosting Toscanini after a performance
and criticising the accelerated tempo.
Toscanini said, "If I played it
any slower it would not be endurable!"
and stormed off. Ravel said, to whoever
was still listening, "but I intended
that it should be unendurable."
One of the most interesting
recordings of Bolero appeared
on a Laserlight bargain CD consisting
mostly of piano works transcribed from
78s entitled "Ravel plays Ravel."
But the Bolero on that disk is
not transferred from old disks, instead
it is a very clear modern digital recording!
Tempo is brisk but there is almost no
acceleration, the side drum is used
with snares but is kept low key, and
I’ll bet that is an oboe-d’amour.
Who performed it? There is no clue,
no mention whatever of orchestra or
conductor.
I asked a friend who
has played the oboe in orchestras to
listen to several recordings of Boléro
and tell me if they were using oboe
d’amour or not. He said first that
an oboe d’amour part is almost
always simply played on the cor anglais.
Second, he said it is all but impossible
to tell from a recording which of the
instruments is actually used since so
much depends on the individual reeds,
playing and recording technique, and
the acoustics. One reason Ravel probably
chose the oboe d’amour is that
he wanted this part played quietly,
and the oboe d’amour in this range is
quiet and lyrical whereas a regular
oboe could be loud and sharp. So, an
oboist playing quietly could probably
mimic the oboe d’amour with a little
help from the recording engineer. In
other words, he couldn’t tell me, so
I listened carefully and made my own
guesses. I say Skrowaczewski, Ormandy,
"Maurice Ravel," and Scherchen
are using oboe d’amour, and the others—no.
And that’s about what you’d expect,
so I’ll go with that.
As far as the drum
is concerned, the score calls for "2
tambours" which could be
orchestral side drums. However apparently
Ravel himself always used small hand
drums which never contributed more than
a heartbeat to the music and were all
but drowned out for most of later part
of the work. Toscanini and his followers
used a snare drum throughout. A snare
drum can make a lot of noise, and the
Toscanini canon has the snare drum getting
louder and louder (for example, Charles
Dutoit and l’Orchestre Symphonique de
Montreal) until at the finale all you
hear are the drum and the trumpets—sort
of like having sex with John Philip
Sousa. Most conductors start with a
side drum without snares and then add
snares at some point in the crescendo.
Only Scherchen followed Ravel’s wishes
exactly and used a small drum without
snares throughout. Stokowski (All American
Youth Orchestra, 1940) starts out with
a small drum, quickly switching to orchestral
side drum. But he disqualifies his recording
by using an absurdly rapid tempo—they
play as fast as they can flat out from
bar 1!
Maestro Skrowaczewski
also uses no accelerando, which
took some courage in 1974, but in the
intervening years it is Ravel and his
original conception that have survived,
to all our relief and joy. Even Scherchen
in 1958 accelerated the tempo just a
little.
In case you need a
quick check, without acceleration Boléro
should run longer than 17 minutes—whereas
with acceleration it usually finishes
in less than 15 minutes. Ravel himself
described Boléro as a "17
minutes of music."
Some of the Minnesota
solo musicians have a little fun adding
1920’s "hot-lick" phrasing
to their parts, just as Ravel would
have encouraged them to do if he were
conducting himself. All this results
in an wonderful sense of freedom and
flow.
A persistent misapprehension
also accompanies Pavane for a Dead
Princess. In French that would be
"Pavane pour une princesse morte."
Ravel’s piece is really entitled "Pavane
For a Defunct Infanta" which sounds
about as silly in French as it does
in English, and was selected, á
la Rimbaud, as much for the alliterative
word play as for any other reason. That
title, and Alborada del Gracioso,
are not intended to be taken as strictly
descriptive. They were titled under
the influence of Satie, who at that
time was sarcastically calling his pieces
things like "Preludes for a Dog"
and "Pieces Shaped Like Pears"
and "Apres-midi of a Sea
Cucumber" This is not usually a
problem with the Alborada which
should be and is generally performed
as the buffoonish ballet of a jester.
But of the Pavane Ravel said,
"It is not a funeral...for a dead
child." Ravel meant it to be performed
lightly, with irony, giving rise more
to the image of the ghost of a child
princess playing grownup in a palace
corridor than to the image of poor,
dead Juliet on her bier, which is what
we often get. The original piano version
with its left hand staccatos is easier
to interpret correctly, whereas the
orchestration by allowing greater latitude,
also allows for interpretations that
Ravel did not intend. Of course, Skrowaczewski
gets it exactly right.
If Boléro
was Ravel’s depiction of sex innocent
of love, the ballet Daphnis et Chloé
is his essay on love innocent of sex,
and the ballet scenario actually includes
on-stage sex education. Ravel said it
was his attempt to re-experience the
Ancient Greece that he longed for. The
"Suite #2" consists essentially
of Scene III of the ballet, beginning
with the sunrise section including dawn
chorus—which is on most people’s short
list for the most beautiful music ever
written—and ending with the big party
when Daphnis and Chloe show they’ve
learned their lessons by getting a little
raunchy on stage.
Ravel did not consider
Boléro a ballet, although
it has been danced, notably and notoriously
in a famous film sequence, and also
on a recent (and disappointing) Decca/CBC
video; he did write La Valse
as a ballet, but it was never performed
that way. A little bit of it also ends
up in Valses Nobles et Sentementales.
As with many parodies, La Valse
is one of the most difficult of Ravel’s
works to appreciate. Parts of it are
ugly and chaotic, and it is so difficult
to perform (either in the original orchestral
version or the later piano transcription)
that it remains a wonder that it is
so frequently programmed. It was written
two years after the end of the Great
War and is supposed to be an allegory
of the death of Nineteenth Century Vienna.
Rapsodie Espagnole
starts off mysteriously and ends with
a high energy flourish. The elderly
Charles Munch brought it off brilliantly,
as did the more elderly Leopold Stokowski,
the much younger Leonard Bernstein and
the dour Fritz Reiner, and as does Skrowaczewski.
Even Eugene Ormandy did a good job on
this one.
Skrowaczewski’s performances
are perfectly idiomatic, in case anyone
was afraid that a Pole couldn’t do French
music. But then this is allegedly Spanish
music written by a Frenchman whose mother
was Basque and whose father was a Swiss
Jew, so obviously the labels don’t apply—we
are dealing with a musical universality
that defies categorisation. And, after
all, Munch was Alsatian, and Reiner
was Hungarian, and Scherchen was Swiss.
Branco was Portuguese. Maybe instead
we should be asking why the French and
Spanish don’t play this music more often?
This disk also celebrates
the return to financial health of a
pioneering company in the quality recording
field, a company whose name was for
many years associated with state-of-the-art
LP reissues of famous analogue recordings
from many labels, produced for the high
end audio market which what we now call
the "media conglomerates"
would not bother to serve. Mobile Fidelity
served their customers well at a remarkably
low price, which may be one of the reasons
why in the long term they did not survive
financially the changeover to digital
recording and CD’s, which occurred so
quickly and so thoroughly that nobody
in his or her right mind could possibly
have foreseen it. A number of other
worthwhile enterprises were severely
damaged at that time, and it is good
to see that many of them, including,
for example, dbx,
are with us again.
Even if your religion
prohibits you from ever in the future
owning an SACD player, you will want
to buy this disk for the CD tracks which
sound better than any CD of this music
you’ve ever heard. And I should point
out that I always test play disks on
my small speaker system as well as on
my large speaker system, and even on
5 inch speakers the sonic advantages
in this disk were instantly obvious.
But, incredible, unbelievable as that
may seem, the SACD tracks sound even
better...! This is "environmental"
4 channel, except in the Daphnis
where the chorus is at the back of the
hall. The "air" around the
instruments, the dynamic sense of realism
are simply overwhelming. When you need
to convince your cynical friends that
high resolution surround sound is not
"just a gimmick" this is the
one of the best disks you can use.
Some European music
lovers might not be aware that the Minnesota
Orchestra, formerly the Minneapolis
Symphony Orchestra, has been one of
the premier American symphony orchestras
at least since the early 1940s and that
both Dimitri Mitropoulos and Eugene
Ormandy were its music directors before
the famous tenure of Antal Dorati in
the 1950’s. And by the way, in case
you weren’t sure, Skrowaczewski is pronounced
Skro-va-chef-ski.
The Pedro deFreitas
Branco recording with Champs Elysées
Theatre Orchestra, originally released
on monophonic Westminster LP WL 5297,
has been digitally restored to CD and
will soon available on my private label,
Pasigram.
Paul Shoemaker
Minnesota Orchestra/Stanislaw Skrowaczewski 