This is the second volume of Otto Klemperer’s ‘live’ authorized broadcasts from 1955 and 1958. None has ever been published before. When comparing the conductor’s studio accounts, Rob Cowan in Gramophone magazine said of the first set: ‘Viewed overall, what we have here is the Klemperer we already know and love, but granted wings and, trust me, you can tell the difference almost straight away’. Klemperer had a great affection for Mozart’s Symphony No.25, here almost a minute faster than his 1956 account. In his booklet note, Richard Osborne describes the performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 from the 1958 Edinburgh Festival as “a performance that genuinely gathers itself to greatness.” Klemperer’s performances of the Brahms Requiem were justly famous, and this 1955 ‘live’ account precedes his acclaimed 1961 studio recording and is almost five minutes faster. Gramophone described the latter as follows: “Klemperer’s reading of this mighty work has long been famous: rugged, at times surprisingly fleet with a juggernaut power.” In this ‘live’ performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Klemperer is joined by the baritone Hans Wilbrink from the Munich State Opera and the German lyric soprano Elfride Trötschel, a protégée of Karl Böhm. The Mozart and Brahms recordings have been sourced from the Lyrita Recorded Edition Trust, while the authorised BBC broadcast of Beethoven Symphony No.5 is from another collection.

Recorded at Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, on 1 December 1959 (Symphony No. 3), 4 February 1958 (Symphony No. 4) and 7 April 1959 (Mozart)

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: Ambient Mastering
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Subtitles: English, French, German
Running time: 70 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

There should be really a collective noun for the plethora of WGBH telecasts featuring Charles Munch now emerging on ICA Classics. The series, covering the years 1958-60 and largely taped at Harvard, has proved highly impressive, albeit sometimes interpretatively inconsistent – and occasionally unreliable in filmic terms.
 
This one focuses on two Mendelssohn Symphonies. The Scottish was taped in December 1959 and is of good quality. As is often the case in this series the camera panning shots are sometimes jerky – I wonder what kind of mount was used, as there is occasionally slippage during shots. Clearly editorial work went into the chosen shots but again things didn’t always go right on the night; it’s fine to concentrate on the hard working percussionist, but only if he’s actually playing – and then playing something of significance. As often in this series sectional shots are favoured, though sometimes they are apt to be cumbersome. But when one sees Munch one observes the rapt concentration that so often produced an extra quotient of excitement during these performances. The proximity of the audience must have helped spark something of that added level of adrenalin. It’s only late in the symphony that I noticed that, presumably because of space shortages at the hall, the piano is visible actually in the body of the orchestra. What was the concerto, one wonders, and who was the soloist? I commend retrospectively the director, David M Davis, for managing (almost) to obscure this detail.
 
The Italian Symphony suffers from a much grainier picture, though it was recorded only a couple of years or so earlier in February 1958. This is another feature of the series – varying quality of footage within discs. It results in some lines running across the screen. The sound is decent enough mono, but the visual element lacks the clarity of the Scottish. Shame though this is, it doesn’t obscure Munch’s vigorous take, almost Toscaninian in places. The director for this was Whitney Thompson and he preferred more static shots, bedding the image solidly, reluctant to keep things moving too much - he was less of a visual contrapuntalist than Davis. When there are panning shots, the image degrades somewhat. There are also a couple of poor edits. Personally, I find this doesn’t matter to me. These are artefacts of their time. I did wonder, though, if the ‘hair on the lens’ problem could have been mitigated in post-production and remastering. Maybe not. It doesn’t last too long, nor do the smudge marks on the print. I mention these things not to suggest that you are in for a disastrous viewing, but to make you aware of the imperfections inherent, or seemingly inherent, in the production.
 
We also have a ‘bonus’ of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music, from April 1959. It too is rather grainy. And yet again I wonder rhetorically how a DVD that lasts 73 minutes can include a ‘bonus’. Is anyone fooled?
 
That apart, and with the spirit of caveat emptor in the air for those unfamiliar with these telecasts, I ought to end by saying that these Mendelssohn performances are terrific.
 
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

This set of ‘live’ authorized recordings featuring the highly distinguished conductor Bruno Walter with the BBC Symphony Orchestra comes from the BBC’s annual May Festival, held in London in 1955. None of these recordings has been published before, and in the case of Wagner’s Faust Overture, this is Walter’s only post-war account. The mid-1950s saw Walter at the height of his powers, and the ‘live’ recordings here are very focused, having a great sense of forward movement and excitement – most notably in Haydn’s Symphony No.96 and Mahler’s Symphony No.1 – compared to some of the studio accounts in the early 1960s when Walter was well into his 80s. The set also contains Walter with the great German soprano Irmgard Seefried in ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which illustrates both her superb artistry and his genius as a Mahler conductor. Brahms’s Song of Destiny (Schicksalslied), a Walter favorite, completes the set. All recordings have been sourced from the Richard Itter archive, as Beecham caught ‘live’ often showed the mercurial side of his character, and no performance was the same either in the studio or in the concert hall. All the performances included here from the Edinburgh Festival, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall and the BBC Studios are from Beecham’s final years, from 1954 when he had fully established the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and himself as central figures in England’s musical life, to 1959 when he conducted an extraordinarily memorable account of Brahms’s Symphony No.2. Every broadcast is captured here in exemplary sound for the time.

This outstanding performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony formed part of Hartmut Haenchen’s Mahler Cycle with the La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra. Haenchen is renowned and respected for his interpretations of Mahler and Wagner and has had a significant presence in many of the world’s leading opera houses. An expressive and dramatic rendition of the Tragische, Haenchen’s high intellect and musical integrity are apparent. The recording also benefits from DTS 5.1 surround sound.

The ICA Classics Live series features performances from ICA’s own artists recorded in prestigious venues around the world. The majority of the recordings are enjoying their first commercial release.

TENNSTEDT CONDUCTS MAHLER AND MOZART

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G major

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, “Haffner”

Phyllis Bryn-Julson, soprano
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Klaus Tennstedt, conductor

Recorded at Symphony Hall, Boston, 15 January 1977

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: Enhanced Mono
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Running time: 77 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

R E V I E W:



MAHLER Symphony No. 4. MOZART Symphony No. 35, “Haffner” • Klaus Tennstedt, cond; Boston SO; Phyllis Bryn-Julson (sop) • ICA 5072 (DVD: 77:56) Live: Boston 1/15/1977


I wonder how many readers recall Klaus Tennstedt’s early years in the U.S. … how exciting they were, how he upset the balance of acknowledged great conductors, the brilliance of his interpretations, his wonderful imagination in phrasing and accents. He was like no one else then performing; even a critic with as narrow tastes as B. H. Haggin came under his spell. A group of well-off concertgoers banded together, called themselves “The Klausketeers,” and followed him around the country, going to his performances in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.


This DVD returns us to those wonderful days of yesteryear. The Lone Tennstedt rides again!


All kidding aside, it’s so wonderful to see Tennstedt on the podium again. His expressive and somewhat strange movements, often likened to a marionette on acid, were natural extensions of his personality. As with Carlos Kleiber, there was no artifice, no pretense, no “look at me I’m wonderful” in Tennstedt’s makeup. He was so much what Toscanini would have called “an honest musician.” I was privileged to meet and interview him in the early 1980s, and was so much in awe of him that I almost choked up asking him questions. But he was gracious, and warm, and talked less about himself than about his recent discovery that the final dynamic mark on the last note of Schubert’s great C-Major symphony was really a diminuendo and not a con forza . He was that true rarity, a modest genius, and in the end the pressures of international fame were not for him. He began to measure his present performances against his great successes of the past, and eventually this form of competing with himself, in addition to his battle with cancer, ate him up from the inside out.


Tennstedt’s Mahler Fourth is completely typical of his style: Incorporating a great many contrasts, not only of dynamics but also of phrasing, he begins the symphony with a languorous tempo and a rallentando in the upward portamento string passage, then suddenly increases the tempo when the clarinets enter. The rest of the movement is played in much the same unexpected way, with that wonderful undercurrent of intensity that only Tennstedt could bring to bear on Mahler in his time (and which only Francis Xavier Roth brings to it nowadays).


Oddly, the visual quality of this release seems a little out of focus, or at least in soft focus. The sound quality is also unexpectedly roomy, or boomy, compared to the BSO telecasts with Munch and Steinberg, and in this symphony director David Atwood apparently wanted to show off his multiple camera angles. Every time the sleigh bells are heard, one sees the percussionist—who looks like a CPA on loan from H & R Block—prosaically tapping them. There are other split-screen effects showing the violins in the lower left quadrant, the clarinets in the upper right, another with the strings on the left and a solo horn on the right. Sometimes it works; other times (as in repeated shots of the same boring percussionist) it seems perfunctory.


But there is nothing perfunctory about this performance. Like so many Tennstedt concerts of this period it takes wing and flies—levitates at times—and there was no one who could touch him when he was “on,” not in Mahler, not in Beethoven, not even in Mozart. After his Saturday afternoon radio broadcast of Fidelio from the Metropolitan Opera in 1980, I spoke to two of the cast members whose general impression was one of immense respect and awe. “He really knows his stuff,” one of the principal basses told me. For all his self-effacing modesty, Tennstedt in rehearsal could be quite as demanding as Rodzinski or Toscanini—when he desperately wanted a certain effect, he was not above yelling at the players until he got it—but it was always to serve the music, never to serve Klaus Tennstedt.


The soprano soloist here, Phyllis Bryn-Julson, comes out on stage just before the third movement. I’ve seen it done like that before, but it breaks up the mood a bit. Luckily, Tennstedt in those years could pick up his mood from where he left off, so that the long third movement (which he takes more than 20 minutes to play) is simply heavenly in its lyric expressiveness. It’s disconcerting to see the musicians playing as if they were bored while the listening experience reveals so much feeling, nuance, and detail. Only a few of the musicians, usually those in the back rows, appear to be wrapped up in the performance, but the proof is in the playing, and there’s nothing prosaic about it. (In this movement, director Atwood really outdoes himself in silliness, giving us a split-screen image of Tennstedt from two different angles, front-and-center on the left, on an angle facing the orchestra on the right. We also get the winds playing “around” the solo horn, who is filmed separately and set off by a diamond-shaped inset. Give me a break!)


At the conclusion of the third movement, the earlier arrival of the soprano becomes clear, since the fourth movement begins without pause. Bryn-Julson was a favorite singer in Boston in those years; she had a good voice, if not a particularly distinctive one; she doesn’t sound as young or light-voiced as the music demands, but within her limitations she sings it very well with a finer legato than Judith Blegen (on the classic James Levine recording). Tennstedt has the right measure of the music: light and airy in the lyric sections, almost frantic in the wind outbursts. Strangely, the applause is not terribly enthusiastic. Perhaps this particular audience didn’t “get” Mahler, or was disappointed for some strange reason.


As mentioned in the liner notes, Tennstedt’s Mozart is “slightly old-school but never heavy.” Listeners must perhaps be reminded that the innovations of Roger Norrington, Trevor Pinnock, and Jaap ter Linden were all far in the future; even Nikolaus Harnoncourt was conducting Mozart, into the early 1980s, with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and with much slower tempos than Tennstedt takes here. This was the vanguard of Mozart performances in his time. Tennstedt eschews the more pronounced rubato that Toscanini used in the first movement during the 1930s; in fact, this performance has some of the same drive and forward momentum as Toscanini’s NBC Symphony performance, only with much finer sound. Here we also have a different TV director, Russ Fortier (why would the BSO use two different directors for the same concert?). Some of the same split-screen effects are used, but not as overdone as in the Mahler. As I rather suspected, the applause for the Mozart is far more enthusiastic than for the Mahler, almost deafening in fact.


If you are a fan of Tennstedt, you cannot be without this DVD. If you want to see and hear what was so wonderful about Tennstedt, this is also the place to start. This man, like a handful of conductors before him, was one in a thousand. We shall not see his like again.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

The first official release of Mitropoulos’s mighty vision of Mahler’s Third.

This release is an extremely important one for admirers of Dimitri Mitropoulos. It contains, released officially for the first time, his only recording of the complete Mahler Third Symphony. There is another recording, made in New York in 1956 and that has just reappeared in a fascinating boxed set of Mahler performances by this conductor - reviewed by me recently. Unfortunately, that New York reading is compromised by cuts in the first and last movements and by some eccentrically fast speeds. As I said in commenting on that box, the New York performance shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand; however this Cologne performance surely gives us the best representation of Mitropoulos’s view of the symphony.

The Cologne performance is notable in several ways, one of which is the overall distinction of the interpretation. In addition it is the conductor’s very last performance: just two days later, while rehearsing the same symphony in Milan, Mitropoulos collapsed, felled by a massive heart attack, and died. But, it seems, we are even more fortunate to have this recording because, incredible though it seems, according to Michael Schwalb’s booklet note, the conductor actually suffered a heart attack during the performance of the first movement. There was a scheduled interval after that movement and Mitropoulos insisted on returning to the podium and completing the concert. This was news to me: in his authoritative biography, Priest of Music. The life of Dimitri Mitropoulos (1995) William R Trotter merely states that the conductor’s “physical state was so alarming” at the interval that he was begged to curtail the performance. If Mr Schwalb’s account is accurate it is truly amazing that a conductor could direct such a full-on performance of so taxing and lengthy a work under such circumstances.

No allowances need be made for Mitropoulos’s health when you listen to this performance for it carries all the hallmarks of his conducting, not least the intensity and energy that invariably marked his music making. William Trotter asserts that this Cologne performance is “much superior” to the New York reading. I’m not sure I entirely agree. There are flaws in the playing on both recordings – after all, these are both live readings – but it seems to me that the Cologne orchestra, though they give of their considerable best for Mitropoulos, can’t quite match the overall standard of the New Yorkers. That said, no one buying this set is going to feel seriously short changed by the quality of the playing, I think one can forgive fluffs and the inevitable technical shortcomings of a radio recording made over fifty years ago, when confronted by an interpretation of such intensity and one in which the conductor so evidently believes in the score.

One notices the greater sense of space in the Cologne performance right at the start where I calculate the beat in the great horn call at about 102 beats per minute – by contrast, the New York performance is at about 122 beats per minute. This sets the tone for a really gripping reading of the great first movement. One might quibble with the odd interpretative detail here and there but overall the vision that Mitropoulos has of the music is powerfully conveyed. I’d describe quite a lot of the music as sturdy in Mitropoulos’s hands – there’s never quite the hedonistic rush that one gets at times in Bernstein’s 1961 New York recording, still one of my favourites. But I found myself thoroughly convinced.

Though the many dramatic passages in the first movement make the full effect that you’d expect with this conductor he’s good too in the more delicate passages. In the second movement, where delicacy is called for to a much greater extent, I felt there were too many instances where the tempo either surges a little or is slowed momentarily. The effect is fussy and it rather marred my enjoyment. Much of III has a good, earthy feel but I was rather disappointed by the treatment of the nostalgic post horn passages, where I didn’t feel Mitropoulos gave the music sufficient space; these episodes sound rather perfunctory, almost as if the conductor found them embarrassing.

Lucretia West is a rich-toned, expressive soloist in IV. However, the exposed quiet passages for the brass find the players a little bit over-exposed. I felt that V was rather serious in tone, though the music is lively enough. I missed a touch of lightness but this may not be a problem for other listeners. ICA get something of a black mark for the layout of the discs, I’m afraid. The last three movements should follow each other seamlessly but, instead, you have to change discs for the finale. It would have been perfectly possible to have had La Mer and the first movement of the symphony on disc one with the remaining five movements of the symphony comfortably accommodated on disc two. The way the symphony is split by ICA is nothing short of crass.

Actually, the reading of the finale is the big disappointment for me. In the first place it starts off far too loud – mf, I’d guess. The start of the finale in the New York reading is much more subdued. The last time I heard this music was in a live performance at the Three Choirs Festival just a few days before auditioning this disc. There Susanna Mälkki and the Philharmonia achieved just the hushed intensity that this present performance lacks. In addition the tempo is too swift. I calculate that Mitropoulos takes the opening at about 56 beats per minute. Actually, that’s not much swifter than the pace in New York in 1956 – ca 51 bpm – but it feels fast. As the movement unfolds one feels there’s not quite the same gravity and mystery that one experiences in the very best accounts. And, for my money, the Cologne players, though they play well, aren’t in the same league as the New York Philharmonic or several other orchestras that have featured in recordings of this symphony. The booklet notes reveal that around this time Mitropoulos had agreed in principle to become chief conductor of this orchestra and one wonders how much he might have improved them, given time to work with them on an extended basis, if that appointment had ever come about.

So this account of the finale of the Third isn’t as spacious as I’d like. One might call the reading urgent – or, perhaps apply Tony Duggan’s description, elsewhere, of this conductor’s ‘edgy’ style.

This, then, is a flawed reading of Mahler’s Third but it’s still one that commands – nay, demands – attention for throughout the ninety-five minute span of the piece one constantly has the sense of a great conductor at work and nothing about this reading is routine.

The reading of La Mer is somewhat unconventional in that you will look in vain here for washes of impressionist colouring or for Mediterranean warmth. This is a taut, urgent and dramatic reading. Sometimes, as in the short, quicker passage in ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’ (from 4:22), the very urgency of Mitropoulos’s interpretation seems to have the orchestra audibly scrambling to keep up. At times, the end of this same movement being one example, the sound is rather fierce. In ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’ one feels that the wind blows rather fiercely and it’s something of a chill wind. Often, during the piece as a whole, one senses that the sea which Mitropoulos is depicting is pretty foam flecked. None of the foregoing should be interpreted as an implicit verdict that the interpretation is an unsatisfactory one. I find it bracing but it may startle some listeners used to the approach of other conductors.

At the end of the second disc we hear a few short remarks made by Mitropoulos during a rehearsal with this orchestra sometime in the 1950s. He speaks in German so I can’t tell you what he says but it’s evident from the orchestra’s reaction both before and after he speaks that he was highly regarded by them.

The recorded sound can be a bit boxy at times and the balances aren’t always ideal – the percussion is too prominent on several occasions. However, these are fifty-year-old recordings so one must make allowances. They’ve been transferred pretty well and there’s nothing to mar ones appreciation of the performances.

This is an important set and I’m thrilled in particular that ICA have brought about the first official release of Mitropoulos’s mighty vision of Mahler’s Third. This is an essential appendix to the Music & Arts box of New York performances and all admirers of this great conductor should snap it up as a matter of urgency.

-- John Quinn, MusicWeb International

This performance isn't perfect technically: the chorus gets a little bit off the beat in its first stanza, there are a couple of unimportant brass flubs, and alto Anny Delorie has issues with her memory and with an extra wide vibrato. However, purely as an essay in great Mahler conducting, William Steinberg turns in a performance as powerful, both in its parts and as a totality, as anyone ever has. He gets a superb response from the orchestra, and there are moments here that really do set a new standard in this music: the second movement, for example, is the best yet recorded--the string playing is simply miraculously sensual and romantic. The scherzo, at a measured tempo, offers a clinic in characterful woodwind detail. Indeed, the prominent winds recall Klemperer and add a thrilling rush to moments such as the big choral in the finale, with its trilling piccolos.

More importantly, Steinberg captures the emotional intensity of this work as have few others. The climax of the first movement, the scherzo's "scream of despair", and the "dead march" in the finale express genuine rage and terror. Steinberg's control of tempo is absolute; he manages transitions with effortless mastery. The symphony's closing chorus, with the organ particularly well-balanced, seldom has been delivered more convincingly. Off-stage perspectives are unusually effective; indeed, given that this is a 1965 live performance, the stereo sonics are far better than any studio versions of the same period. In short, this is a "must" for all serious Mahlerians, as well as a worthy memento of a seriously underrated conductor.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This material represents some of the earliest televised concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and three of their eminent music directors, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf and William Steinberg. This historical footage has been restored using the greatest care and state-of-the-art techniques. It is of exceptional musical interest and historical value, and has been described by critics as a "rare treat" (Gramophone) and "welcome documentations" (BBC Music Magazine).

Picture format: NTSC 4:3 Sound format: LPCM Mono (DVD 1) / LPCM Stereo (DVD 2) / Enhanced Mono (DVD 3, 4, 5) Region code: 0 (worldwide) Menu language: English Running time: 6 hours 14 mins No. of DVDs: 5

This set contains the following 5 DVDs:

CHARLES MUNCH
RAVEL Ma Mère l’Oye – Suite; DEBUSSY Ibéria, La Mer (1958 & 1961)

ERICH LEINSDORF
SCHUBERT Symphony No. 9 "Great"; SCHUMANN Symphony No. 4; WAGNER Parsifal – Good Friday Music (1962, 1963 & 1964)

BEETHOVEN Egmont Overture; TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 5; MOZART Serenade No.9 "Posthorn" – Minuet I (1963 & 1969)

WILLIAM STEINBERG
HAYDN Symphony No. 55; BEETHOVEN Symphonies Nos. 7 & 8 (1962, 1969 & 1970)

BRUCKNER Symphony No. 8 (2nd revised edition) (1962)

TILSON THOMAS CONDUCTS IVES, SIBELIUS AND WAGNER

Charles Ives: Orchestral Set No. 1, “3 Places in New England”

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 4 in A Minor, Op. 63

Richard Wagner: Götterdämmerung: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor

Recorded live at the Symphony Hall, Boston, 1970

Bonus:
- Interview with Michael Tilson Thomas, 1970 & 2013

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: Enhanced Mono
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Booklet notes: English, French, German
Running time: 104 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

R E V I E W:
IVES Three Places in New England1. SIBELIUS Symphony No. 42. WAGNER Götterdämmerung: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey2 & • Michael Tilson Thomas, cond; Boston SO • ICA 5111 (DVD: 104:08+31:00) Live: Boston 11/13/1970, 23/10/1970

& Tilson Thomas interviews (1970 and 2013)

It’s a shock to see what might pass for a teenaged Michael Tilson Thomas bounding to the podium in Boston’s Symphony Hall. Actually, he was an old man of 25 at the time of these broadcasts, and already an experienced conductor. He obviously had definite ideas about what he wanted to do with these works, and the skills to go ahead and do it.

Tilson Thomas made a terrific recording of the Ives in Boston, also in 1970, and this live performance is very similar. What strikes me about Tilson Thomas’s approach to this score is how sharp he keeps its rhythmic and harmonic outlines. He conducts it like chamber music, and no detail is allowed to vanish into an Impressionist haze. The whiffs of African-American spirituals in the first movement are more noticeable than in any other recording I know, and the second movement, if it lacks something of the boyish joy that Ormandy (for example) brought to it, never sounds congested. Tilson Thomas also makes much of the eerie, flickering colors with which Ives painted “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” Overall, this performance has a strong impact, both musically and emotionally.

A few months later Tilson Thomas conducted Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, which the BSO had not played in 30 years. Because Tilson Thomas never recorded this Symphony—has he recorded any Sibelius at all, other than the Violin Concerto?—I was very curious to hear it. My curiosity was rewarded with one of the strangest yet, in its way, most compelling performances of this work that I have heard so far. Especially in the second and fourth movements, the music zips along with incredible impetuousness. The second movement really does sound like a Scherzo, and the fourth movement moves forward with inexorable kinetic energy. Even the forbidding first movement is made to seem less stark than usual. A Symphony commonly regarded as dark and brooding seems much less so in Tilson Thomas’s reading. This won’t be a reading for everyone, but the only detail I really questioned was the use of both tubular bells and glockenspiel in the last movement. The former are so loud than I kept running to my front door and asking, “Who is it?” It’s wonderful, though, to hear the characteristic Boston sound being applied to this work.

Similarly, Wagner is not a composer generally associated with Tilson Thomas, but in fact he spent the summer of 1966 as an assistant conductor at the Bayreuth Festival at the invitation of Wagner’s granddaughter. (As he relates in his interview from 2013, it was this “gig” that resulted, by a series of fortunate circumstances, in his eventually becoming the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s assistant director.) Wagner is even less a prominent in the conductor’s discography than Sibelius. Even so, this “Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” is completely convincing, even if it doesn’t follow the status quo. (The opening pages are almost static, but as Siegfried journeys further and further down the Rhine, it blossoms into an exciting, joyous ride, and one in which bombast has no place.) Here and in the Sibelius, there are some moments of imperfect ensemble and intonation, but otherwise, the standard of playing is very high.

I believe that Boston’s WGBH originally broadcast these programs. The colors look a little washed out, but apart from that, it is surprising how well everything has held up, including the sound. Even though it is monaural (“enhanced,” according to ICA Classics), it still has plenty of juice and depth.

The earlier interview, with Andrew Raeburn, is short, lasting just over four minutes, and is devoted almost entirely to the Sibelius. In the later interview (27:00), recorded last June, Tilson Thomas talks about his early career, and recalls the many fine conductors and orchestral musicians he worked with in Boston. Both are fun to watch, but it’s the music-making that counts, of course, and there’s much here to attract admirers of the conductor and the repertoire.

FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle

HÉROLD-HAYDN-MARTINI-ROSSINI-DONIZETTI-HERTEL La fille mal gardée (arr. Lanchbery with additional music) • John Lanchbery, cond; Nadia Nerina, David Blair, Stanley Holden, Alexander Grant, Leslie Edwards (dancers); Royal Ballet Covent Garden O • ICA CLASSICS 5088, mono (90:37)

This is not an actual performance of La fille mal gardée but a film version made for the BBC between September 7 and 9 of 1962. The images are sepia and white, and at times the old style TV cameras can scarcely keep up with the speed of the dancers’ feet, but one thing that shines through like a beacon in this, as in so many ballets under the direct supervision of Frederick Ashton, is its marvelous combination of characterization and humor. I’ve long felt that Ashton always wanted to present characters up there on stage, not just decorous dancers showing off their techniques, and he was capable of slipping some humor into even the most serious works. In this piece of fluff, he was in his element, and as much as one can do so on a ballet stage, he created a silent film combining love story with comedy.


Although this derives from one of the oldest surviving ballets—its premiere was in 1789 at Bordeaux—both the choreography and the music morphed considerably through the next century and a half. The first step towards confusion occurred at the 1828 Paris revival, where Hérold was asked to adapt his score to include themes from other composers’ operas—among them Haydn, Martini, and Donizetti. In 1837 Paris Opéra ballerina Fanny Elssler insisted on a new tailored version of the pas de deux using her favorite melodies from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (specifically, the tune of the finale and the middle portion of “Udite, o rustici”). Somewhere along the line, the opening scene music of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia crept in as the introductory music to Lise and Colas in act I, while in Berlin in 1864, a completely new score by Peter Ludwig Hertel appeared. Ashton, being a bit confused as to which form of the music to use, was partly guided in this respect by Tamara Karsavina, who had danced Lise at the Mariinsky Theatre. She suggested a return, more or less, to the 1837 version (which he found in the library) but using musical inserts of his own choice. Since Ashton created Widow Simone’s clog dance, he incorporated a piece of folk music into the score. Originally he was aided in the project by noted composer Malcolm Arnold, but for some reason Arnold quit, so Ashton turned to his conductor, John Lanchbery, to piece the music together. The two of them worked together for two months, meeting at least three times a week to match music to action. Lanchbery would play some of the music to get Ashton’s feedback. This eventually led to his writing interpolated passages to blend Hérold’s, Donizetti’s, Rossini’s, and Hertel’s music together, as well as composing Leitmotifs for Widow Simone and Colas and the “disaster” music in the last act.


The principal dancers—Nerina as Lise, Blair as Colas, Holden as Widow Simone and Grant as the “rich dweeb” Alain—were undoubtedly the cream of his then-current crop. By comparison with today’s dancers, only Blair suffers ever so slightly. He can do tremendous jetées and his elevation is superb, but he only occasionally creates the same kind of continuous flow with his motions that the amazing Carlos Acosta can achieve nowadays. Otherwise, however, this is the superior production. Pride of place goes to Nerina, whose series of rapid entrechats in the pas de deux have the rapidity and pointed grace of a cat; moreover, in all of her dancing one continually gets the impression that she’s having a ball, even though it must have been extremely demanding work. See my review elsewhere of An Evening with the Royal Ballet, and you will note my disappointment in the technically fine but somewhat staid dancing of the same scene by Marianela Nuñez.


I was also very impressed by the dancing of the two comic roles. Holden certainly can’t hold a patch technically on William Tuckett, who does the clog dance in the later video, but he doesn’t have to. His highly practiced “stumbling” looks more real, as if he’s about to trip over his own ankles and fall on the floor. Indeed, while watching him perform this dance I couldn’t help thinking that Ashton may have gotten the idea for some of these steps from watching Ray Bolger as the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, so similar were his motions. Alexander Grant, playing the role of the dim-witted Alain, conversely put me in mind of someone who came much later—Martin Short as Ed Grimley. Several of the steps Short used in doing his Grimley character were right there onscreen, being danced by Grant…not to mention a cowlick (but in the back rather than the front). I wonder if Short ever saw a production of this ballet?


I was particularly impressed by several of the little touches that Ashton put into certain scenes, for instance the intricacy of the dance in which Cola and Lise form a cat’s cradle out of her ribbon while dancing, or the maypole dance for the corps in which they twisted and untwisted the ribbons with deceptively simple but actually quite complex movements. And then there were the scenes involving Alain, of which I will give you two: During his first scene he inadvertently opens his umbrella and falls to the ground behind it. Colas and Lise push it aside to find him, but he has slid between the legs of his father and pops up behind him! Also, in the act I finale, a sudden thunderstorm, Alain and the Widow swerve back and forth across the stage—umbrella opened—as if they were actually being windswept, and do so in a really funny, skewered way.


If anything, act II is even funnier, more clever and well staged than the first, particularly in the modified morris dance for the male corps (no bells on their shins but they did dance with sticks held at shoulder height). Their dancing in this scene is simply spectacular. There’s also a marvelous scene where Colas (Blair) lifts Lise (Nerina) at the top of a double-door to give her a kiss, and she literally seems to be floating up to him; but this is one of Nerina’s special qualities, the ability to appear as if she is floating. Once again in this act, her work on pointe appears completely effortless—you never once see or sense the physical tension that goes into these moves.


Lise hides Colas in her bedroom before Mom (Widow Simone) comes back, but shortly after her return Thomas, the notary, the notary’s assistant, and Alain return to have her sign the marriage contract and wed her daughter to the dimwit. When Alain goes to open Lise’s bedroom door and finds her in her wedding dress, kissing Colas, he falls backwards down the stairs and everyone is in a tizzy, but Lise explains everything and begs forgiveness. Happily, even the notary realizes that they are a better match and encourages Simone to forgive Lise and accept Colas as a son-in-law, following which the latter celebrates his good luck with a series of excellent fast turns. Only Thomas seems to be taking it badly as he ushers his son out. And there are two surprise postludes: first, when Alain returns to the now-empty farmhouse and furtively moves around…until he retrieves his beloved umbrella, and the second when everyone is walking down the country path. Thomas makes a move to “come on,” which you assume is a gesture to Alain, but instead it’s the chickens who follow him first—trailed, finally and inevitably, by Alain.


The only complaint I have of this DVD is that the numbering sequence of the various “chapters” is off by one, because the booklet lists an “Introduction to the ICA Classics Series” as No. 1, but you only get this if you select “play all.” Otherwise, if you choose to select chapters of the ballet, you will be off by one number—in other words, the act I pas de deux is actually chapter 16, not 17 as listed in the booklet. But this is an absolutely delightful ballet and a classic performance. Despite the sepia-and-white print, I would even recommend this to young girls who are interested in ballet. It’s a funny enough story and has an excellent level of difficulty in it that will captivate and delight them. As for anyone else who enjoys ballet, this is a must.

FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Ferdinand Herold
LA FILLE MAL GARDÉE

Lise – Nadia Nerina
Colas – David Blair
Widow Simone – Stanley Holden
Alain – Alexander Grant
Thomas – Leslie Edwards
A Notary – Franklin White

The Royal Ballet
Covent Garden Orchestra
John Lanchbery, conductor

Frederick Ashton, choreographer
Osbert Lancaster, designer

Recorded at BBC Studio, London, 7–9 September 1962

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: Enhanced Mono
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Booklet notes: English, French, German
Running time: 90 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

This volume represents one in a series of releases that preserve the Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts originally broadcast on national television in the 1950s, thanks to the efforts of its musical director at the time, Charles Munch (1861-1968). The program contains interpretations of two pieces performed at Harvard's Sanders Theatre: Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E Major (February 18, 1958) and Franz Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 98 in B Flat Major (October 18, 1960).

CHARLES MUNCH CONDUCTS HANDEL AND MOZART

George Frideric Handel: Water Music Suite (arr. H. Harty)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. 425, “Linz”
Symphony No. 38 in D major, K. 504, “Prague”

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Charles Munch, conductor

Recorded live from Sanders Theatre, Harvard University on 12 April 1960 (Water Music), 8 April 1958 (Linz Symphony), and 3 November 1959 (Prague Symphony)

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: Enhanced Mono
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Booklet notes: English, French, German
Running time: 62 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

Precious, unrecorded symphonies served up in vital, energising readings.

It sometimes seems as if WGBH-TV Boston had its camera crew surgically attached to the Sanders Theatre at Harvard. Maybe the crew emerged blinking from a surfeit of lectures, keen to get reacquainted with Charles Munch. The torrent of TV material now emerging on ICA Classics is both very welcome and very difficult to sift. What, usefully, should the critic do to suggest why you may or may not wish to buy this DVD, especially if the critic is me, one who suffers from a dual impulse; firstly to buy DVDs like this and then to despair of ever finding or making the time to watch them.
 
So, what’s in it for you when you consider this latest Munch DVD? I’m not saying ICA is being naughty but there’s no indication that this is black and white footage; most people will know this, but not everyone will, even if there’s a still of Munch (in black and white) on the box cover. So it’s black and white and in mono. The dates of the concerts are 1958, 1959 and 1960.
 
The first thing that’s in it for you is that Munch never recorded the two Mozart symphonies in the studio. This makes this AV representation especially valuable. Another thing in it for you, should you be interested in such things (I am), is to see the Boston Symphony in action - the players, the faces, their responses, maybe to try to put names to the faces. To this extent I wish ICA and other companies (almost no one does this, so I’m not singling out ICA) would provide a personnel listing of the orchestra at the time. I appreciate it may not be wholly accurate but I think it would be a nice touch.
 
Things start with the Handel-Harty Water Music suite, a performance of Beechamesque brio and bravado. If you miss the days of such arrangements then Munch and the Boston won’t let you down. The basses are positioned behind the French horns, and the top to bottom sonority, despite the mono sound, is highly enjoyable. Even though Adolf Busch, Boyd Neel and countless others had trail-blazed in this repertoire, Munch makes no concessions, and nor should he have done. Munch is at his most animated in the Allegro finale, smiling very slightly, his baton swishing about fly-fisherman style in his exuberance. One notices that the director decided that a good idea would be a camera shot ‘stepping down’ the orchestral sections, reasonable in theory, but dodgy in practice, not least when the camera slips, as it does once. One also notices that the Boston was an almost all-male orchestra at the time, and that the average age of the strings, at least, must have been quite high. There are some especially patrician looking gentlemen in the first violin section.
 
The Linz Symphony is from 1958 and has by far the most degraded film of the three. Grainy and rather unclear, a critic should counsel gently on this point. It’s hardly unwatchable, but you will most certainly notice the difference. The performance is in Munch’s best, taut and linear style; I would suggest George Szell as a reasonable point of comparison in terms of expression. Though sometimes tense, it’s never driven and the wind phrasing throughout is a delight. The Prague was taped in November 1959, with footage comparable in quality to the April 1960 Handel. I sense, unless it’s the increased clarity of the film that alerts me to the upturned eyes directed toward Munch’s beat, that the orchestra follows him that bit more circumspectly in this symphony. He makes the briefest of pauses between the first and second movements, ensuring a kind of symphonic continuity to occur. The band is ready for him, and the unindulged Andante is all the better for his unsentimental approach. The only demerit is not musical but filmic; some mildly chaotic camera panning shots that disrupt things briefly.
 
Despite such imperfections, I enjoyed the DVD. It enshrines those precious, unrecorded symphonies, grants visual immortality to the Boston denizens, and serves up vital, energising readings. How often you will play it, however, is a question that only you can answer.
 
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International 

SIR NEVILLE MARRINER and ACADEMY OF ST MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS

George Friedrich Handel:
Solomon, HWV 67: Arrival of the Queen of Sheba
Concerto Grosso in A major, Op. 6, No. 11, HWV 329

Ludwig van Beethoven: Grosse Fuge in B flat major, Op. 133 (arr. N. Marriner)

Felix Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90, “Italian”

Benjamin Britten: Les illuminations, Op. 18*

*Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, tenor
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Neville Marriner, conductor

Recorded from St John’s, Smith Square, London, 23–24 May 1974 (Handel), Royal Albert Hall, London (BBC Proms Concerts), 25 August 1975 (Beethoven), and 12 August 1983 (Mendelssohn, Britten)

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: Enhanced Mono
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Booklet notes: English, French, German
Running time: 86 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

R E V I E W:

SIR NEVILLE MARRINER, ACADEMY OF ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS • Neville Marriner, cond; Acad of St. Martin in the Fields • ICA ICAD 5064 (DVD: 86:00) Live: London 1974, 1975, 1983

HANDEL Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Concerto Grosso in A, op. 6/11. BEETHOVEN Grosse Fuge. MENDELSSOHN Symphony 4, “Italian.” BRITTEN Les Illuminations

I suppose most of us have by now become inured to the idea that “chamber” means one-to-a-part, especially in Baroque music, but even the music of later periods has been on a diet in recent years. It’s certainly cheaper that way, regardless of the accuracy of the assumption that this is somehow more “authenticke” than a more generous approach. Neville Marriner never felt it necessary to get on that bandwagon, even as he absorbed some of its performance discoveries, such as crisp articulation and fleeter speeds. This DVD, covering a decade of the ASMF’s 50-year career, shows how it was done.

Through its first dozen or so years, Marriner led from the first violinist’s chair, and we can see what happens in the two Handel pieces from 1974. The intensity of the concentration of all the players and the simple, even discreet, nods from Marriner that set them going are a lesson not in control but in collective expression. Handel’s Sheba was a favorite of Thomas Beecham, albeit heavily tarted up in full orchestral array. Marriner and the Academy take it as it is, and use their modern instruments with an awareness of what Handel might have heard without imaging that they are reproducing it. The queen’s arrival is joyful rather than stately. This is also true of the concerto grosso. The string playing is lean, but not timid. These two pieces were recorded by the BBC in the then-recently renovated St. John’s, Smith Square, and the space and the music are well captured. The passing autos and the evident passing time of day lend a quotidian flavor to the enterprise.

For some reason, Marriner thought it a good idea to realize Beethoven’s quartet movement, the Grosse Fuge , as a piece for small string orchestra. This performance, from a BBC Proms concert in 1975, does not make a strong case either for the band or the arrangement. It is, frankly, leaden and a bit sour.

This disappointment is wonderfully redeemed, however, in the following performance of Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony, in a Proms recording from 1983. Here, the lightness of touch we could hear 10 years earlier in the Handel comes alive again in Mendelssohn’s most buoyant music. This is, simply, a fine, well-balanced, even elegant, performance and is a pleasure to hear.

The same concert presented Britten’s orchestral song cycle Les Illuminations , sung by a clarion Anthony Rolfe Johnson. Singer, conductor, and orchestra are at one here in this gripping exploration of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic world. But for one small niggle, this would go to the top of my list of performances of this piece, Britten and Pears notwithstanding. The niggle is the BBC’s sound, which favors the singer and puts the orchestra into a slightly hollow and opaque background. Why the group did not go into a studio the next day to record it properly is a mystery, but I am glad to have this version. As far as I can tell, this is the late Anthony Rolfe Johnson’s only recording of this piece, alas. Apart from the Beethoven, then, this all makes a fine program.

FANFARE: Alan Swanson

This 5-disc set features four outstanding 20th century conductors, William Steinberg (1899-1978), Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960), Igor Markevitch (1912-83) and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (b. 1931) thrillingly directing several Great Choral Classics of the 19th century, including Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Verdi’s Requiem. Sopranos Galina Vishnevskaya and Dame Janet Baker, among other stellar singers, feature prominently in these performances.

As the 2011 Proms seasons rapidly approaches, this DVD whisks us back thirty seasons to two fine Proms given by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra which, by coincidence, also hail from a season exactly twenty seasons before my first teenage Promenade. That first taste of the Proms magic also featured the BBC Symphony in Russian classics and was to be conducted by another great Russian maestro, Yevgeny Svetlanov; alas, he was ill and died the following year and I never got to see him. Rozhdestzensky is still with us but, for some reason, only a very occasional visitor to the UK and more's the pity; in his excellent booklet notes, David Nice asks 'Is Gennadi Rozhdestvensky the greatest ever conductor of ballet scores?', and, on the evidence of this Nutcracker, which is ideally paced at every turn, it's hard to disagree.
 
Although proportioned something like a conventional concert programme, this selection of performances actually derives from two 1981 Proms, during Rozhdestvensky's relatively brief tenure as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony. The 2nd Act of the Nutcracker was filmed at the end of July and was preceded by a choral version of Mussorgsky's Night on Bare Mountain (the choir can be seen seated behind the orchestra during the Tchaikovsky), Prokofiev's Ugly Ducking and Scriabin's Prometheus. The Glinka items are extracted from a daring programme, mixing Viennese waltzes with double piano concertos, including Bartók's Concerto for two pianos and percussion. A punchy and swift performance of Glinka's Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila opens the programme, followed by three wonderful dances from his opera A Life for the Tsar, the second of which has an energetically skipping rhythmic quality and which I recall fondly from its use in the climactic ball sequence from Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark, a remarkable single-take trawl through Russian history.
 
One of the advantages of seeing rather than merely hearing a performance such as this is the chance it affords to study the conductor's technique, and Rozhdestvensky's manner throughout the programme is minimal but precisely calibrated. The camera frequently cuts to an inert Rozhdestvensky, apparently doing nothing at all, but he is the master of conveying a world of meaning with a raised eyebrow and his hands can suggest a sculptor at work when he wishes. As already noted, tempos are perfectly judged in the Tchaikovsky, treading a fine line between grandeur and excitement and the BBC Symphony Orchestra's playing is every bit as plush and lively as one would expect from a Russian orchestra. Rozhdestvensky's speeds are adjusted for the concert hall: some of them would be tricky to dance to, such as a sweeping but forward driving Pas de deux (The Prince and the Sugar Plum Fairy). It's only a shame that we couldn't have the complete ballet; Rozhdestvensky in the full score does appear on a pricey Melodiya set (MELCD1000665), but it's terrific to have at least half and it's a performance I can imagine returning to often.
 
-- Andrew Morris, MusicWeb International


Gennadi Rozhdestvensky at the BBC Proms
Mikhail GLINKA (1804-1857)
Ruslan and Lyudmila – Overture [5:53]
Three Dances from A Life for the Tsar [16:27]
Pytor Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
The Nutcracker – Act 2 [42:40]
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
rec. 27 July 1981 (Tchaikovsky), 14 August 1981 (Glinka), Royal Albert Hall, London
Producer (original broadcast): Rodney Greenburg
Picture format: 4:3/NTSC
Sound: Ambient Mastering/LPCM Stereo
Region: 0 (worldwide)