Day 30: Toscanini's Jupiter ("I'm afraid I can't allow that, Arturo")

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 30!

For today I listened to three short Rossini works and a, well, rather interesting account of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.


Rossini: Passo a sei from William Tell - June 8th, 1945

William Tell was one of only two Rossini operas that Toscanini conducted in the theater (the other was The Barber of Seville). The Passo a sei is the only excerpt from the composer's massive final opera that Toscanini performed in concert aside from the famous overture. What is amazing about this piece is how well it evokes Switzerland while still sounding completely like Rossini. Toscanini's performance is graceful and charming without becoming sugary.

Rossini: Il Signor Bruschino Overture - June 8th, 1945

This is a perfectly respectable performance of a justly little-performed overture. There is a reason why other Rossini overtures are performed with great frequency and this one is not.

Rossini: Siege of Corinth Overture - June 14th, 1945

All that I had to say about the overture to Il Signor Bruschino…ditto this.

Mozart: Symphony No. 41 - June 22nd, 1945 and March 11th, 1946

One of the most vapidly wrong-headed commentaries on Toscanini's musicianship that I have ever read was penned by the late music critic John Ardoin, who wrote for the Dallas Morning News for many years and and authored generally excellent books on the recorded legacy of Wilhelm Furtwängler and Maria Callas. In The Furtwängler Record there is a passage where Ardoin compares the German conductor's sense of pulse to that of Toscanini, noting that "Rests were a troublesome aspect of a Toscanini performance because they often minimized that all-important downbeat. Rests became walls that had to be vaulted, and he leapt over them as though afraid they would stop the flow of the music. Furtwängler, on the other hand, went by phrase rather than by measure, allowing the music to follow its own physiognomy rather than imposing one upon it."

This is ridiculous for several reasons. First, the length of a given measure happens to be the very "physiognomy" that the composer has imposed upon it. Western music is by its very nature divided into measures that are equal to small phrases that add up to bigger phrase-lengths of larger numbers of measures. Granted, bar-lines did not evolve into a standardized format until the 17th century, but even in the earliest days of music there was a natural pulse that divided the beats into groups of four or eight or some other number. These groupings served the same function as measures, and the gradual introduction of bar-lines into printed music only served to reinforce this.

Second, any representative sampling of Toscanini's recordings will show that he most certainly did not impose his own phrase-structures into the music he conducted by vaulting over rests. In any of his finer performances a beautifully singing phrase structure is palpably audible, in which rests became an inherent part of the musical line (Toscanini's one-time assistant George Szell was known to say that "rests are not for resting"). Unfortunately however, there are certain Toscanini performances in which Ardoin's charges do carry a kernel of truth, and this recording of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony is one of them.

It would be all-too-literal to call this recording "restless". Things begin relatively well with a first movement that is overly driven, but no more so than most of Toscanini's performances of 18th century music. Where things get ridiculous is in the second movement, where even rests of short duration get lopped-off as though Toscanini was desperate to get out of the recording studio. The result is an absolute musical disaster in which phrases do not breathe and Mozart's structure suffers from hyper-tension. Things don't improve much in the final two movements, in which the music continues to be ruthlessly driven to the breaking point. One Amazon reviewer of this album notes that Toscanini "presses the tempi of the work about as far to the fastest possible articulation in the final movement as can be achieved by an orchestra of human players (or perhaps even beyond it!)." While that statement may not be literally true (it was, after all, recorded this way) it is certainly true that human listeners are unlikely to be persuaded by such a conception of this masterwork (or at least this human).

I don't fully understand why Toscanini could be such a fine interpreter of the music of, say, Beethoven, but so unpersuasive in the music of the late 18th century. There were, after all, only thirteen years separating the composition of Mozart's final symphony and that of Beethoven's first. But it must be remembered that widespread interest in the music of the past is a relatively recent phenomenon. Toscanini grew up in a world where music that was more than fifty years old was performed quite infrequently (Harvey Sachs notes that between 1881 and 1886, when Toscanini was a teenager and playing cello in the orchestra of Parma's Teatro Regio, the house's repertoire did not include even one opera written more than fifty years earlier). Although Toscanini occasionally gave outstanding performances of music that was not part of his core repertoire (Petrouchka comes to mind), his finest readings were of music that he conducted regularly and felt deeply. There should be nothing surprising to this; it is a natural part of being human, and even an extraordinary human like Toscanini was not immune to this. Nonetheless, it is quite unfortunate that Toscanini could not or would not reach down into the depths of his extraordinary musicianship to elicit a performance that was equal to the level of Mozart's final symphonic masterpiece.

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That's it for Day 30!

Check back tomorrow for three more Rossini overtures, some Verdi, and we may even have time for a little ice-skating.

Happy Friday!

Day 29: Holiday Coriolan'

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 29!

For today I continued through Toscanini's eighth season at NBC with a symphony, three overtures, and one scherzo. These were recorded just weeks after V-E Day, and in most cases the excitement of World War II coming to an end were quite audible in these readings. The works recorded during these two sessions were (with one unfortunate exception) among the most thrilling ever conducted by Toscanini.


Haydn: Symphony No. 98 - May 25, 1945

This is not one of Toscanini's most distinguished Haydn recordings (not that any of his Haydn recordings are especially persuasive), and is a grave disappointment in the context of the many fine performances that the conductor led during the surrounding months. The first two movements are both overly slow and chunky. Toscanini's slower tempos were marked with breadth and flexibility in his finest performances, but this recording is lacking in forward movement and continuity. The Minuet, meanwhile, is ridiculously fast, while the last movement is so driven that the 6/8 meter beats you over the head instead of naturally flowing. Amazingly, Toscanini's biographer Mortimer H. Frank describes this recording as "throughly representative of the maestro's finest work," an assessment that leaves me flabbergasted. Reasonable minds can of course differ on how they view a performance, but how Frank can possible view this Haydn recording as being in the same league as Toscanini's finest work is a complete mystery to me.

Weber: Der Freischütz Overture - May 25th, 1945

Amazingly, this stunning recording of Weber's Der Freischütz Overture was recorded on the very same day as the disappointing Haydn Symphony recording from above. The haunted forest-world of Weber is stunningly evoked in Toscanini's hushed opening. The explosion of light at the end of the overture brilliantly balances the opening pallor, and the NBC Symphony plays this music with thrilling intensity.

Beethoven: Coriolan Overture - June 1st, 1945

This very brisk performance of the Coriolan Overture sustains extreme power without losing any strength on account of its speed - a less commanding reading would probably sound very glib at this tempo. Unfortunately, even the remarkable string players of the NBC Symphony cannot maintain immaculate ensemble at Toscanini's tempo, and the resulting performance is a bit messy at times - extremely compelling, but messy. The coda of this overture, which critic John Ardoin has described as (along with Mahler's Ninth Symphony) coming "as close as music can to capturing the sensation of death and dying", ebbs away from this frenetic activity into gloom and silence.

Beethoven: Leonore Overture No. 3 - June 1st, 1945

Interestingly, this recording of Beethoven's third Leonore Overture has a good deal more drama and theatricality than the reading that Toscanini gave as part of the complete Fidelio performance from six months earlier (like most conductors, Toscanini opted to use this overture as an interlude between the two scenes of the second act). This recording is energetic, full-blooded, and deeply moving. The suffering of Florestan is palpably projected in the opening darkness of this work, a suffering that gradually yields to brilliant light in the stunning final pages. This is Beethoven the way it should be performed - full of meaning and revolutionary vigor.

Mendelssohn: Scherzo from String Octet - June 1st, 1945

I admit I did not really want to like this performance. The Octet is one of the few Mendelssohn works that really speak to me, and it was hard for me to imagine it performed by a full orchestra, even if it was arranged by the composer. I have always viewed the Octet as the ultimate Ode to Youth, and the configuration of eight string players has always seemed the perfect combination of musicians to convey the ecstatic energy of the young Mendelssohn's vital creation. But Toscanini's players are fully up to the challenge of playing with youthful energy in a large orchestra led by the seventy-eight-year-old conductor. This music is played with breathtaking energy and vitality, and fully up to the standards of Toscanini's finest work.

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That's it for Day 29!

Check back tomorrow for three Rossini overtures and Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.

See you tomorrow!

Day 28: O Capitan! My Capitan!

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 28!

Today I continued with the recordings of Toscanini's eighth season with NBC. Recorded as World War II was winding down, the relatively large quantity of American music from this season should not be surprising.

Beethoven: Creatures of Prometheus Overture - December 18th, 1944


Toscanini was unfailingly thorough with the the shorter orchestral works of Beethoven, and this fine performance is a perfect example of his spirited but precise way with the composer's earlier works. The articulations are sharply attacked, and the phrases are beautifully sung.

Gershwin: An American in Paris - May 18th, 1945

Toscanini apparently genuinely liked George Gershwin as a person, but the fact he only performed the great composer's music during the patriotic fervor of World War II seems to indicate the music itself had little sway with him. An American in Paris is the only Gershwin piece Toscanini recorded commercially, and outside of that work only the Piano Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue had live performances with the NBC Symphony (one each).

Toscanini does, however, seem to have given this music his full attention. Mortimer H. Frank writes that "Toscanini's surviving performances of this work (probably the only ones he led) evince his musicality and responsiveness to the jazz idiom, while suggesting an elegance not always encountered in ostensibly more idiomatic performances." That may be true, but I strongly doubt Toscanini could have gotten results like this from an orchestra less intimately familiar with the remarkable jazz/art music fusion of Gershwin. The NBC Symphony was the perfect orchestra for this music, and Toscanini got the most he possible could out of them. It is nonetheless too bad that he didn't have the same depth of sympathy for Gershwin the masterful composer as he did for Gershwin the man.

Sousa: El Capitan May 18th, 1945

There's not much to say about  this beyond that Toscanini clearly took this music seriously: everything is in its place and given all due weight. In its own way this is actually fairly interesting listening. Toscanini conducting a Sousa march is a bit like Stanley Kubrick directing an episode of The A-Team, but this is nonetheless a very rousing and compelling performance (and I bet that A-Team episode would have been awesome).

Sousa: Stars and Stripes Forever - May 18th, 1945

At first blush this seems to be overly fast for a march, but in fact Toscanini's tempo is virtually identical to Sousa's own recording of his magnum opus. I clocked Sousa's tempo at roughly 134, while Toscanini is at about 132 or so, certainly within range of the traditional march speed. I think the reason this seems so fast is because Toscanini was such a master at clarifying details, even in "pops" repertoire. The speed of his musical metabolism is such that even his slow to moderate tempos always brim with momentum, and in the case of Stars and Stripes Forever the result is a rousing triumph of patriotic fervor.

I once played a concert that consisted entirely of Sousa marches, and it was fascinating to hear how much range there could be to his music. It is too bad that we keep hearing the same three or four marches, when there are a number of others that are equally rousing while displaying a bit more depth. My own favorite is the Sesquicentennial March, the Trio theme of which could have found a place in a mature composition of Mahler with a bit of reharmonization. I'm not ready to place Sousa on the mantel of truly great composers, but considering how iconic his music is in American popular culture, it would be welcome to hear a wider variety of his marches on concert programs.

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That's it for Day 28! Check back tomorrow for some Haydn, Weber, and, yes, more Beethoven.

See you tomorrow!

Day 27: High-Fidelio Reproduction

Hey everyone, welcome to Day 27!

Today I listened to the first complete opera recording in Toscanini's official discography, a fascinating performance of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio. Toscanini was predominately active as an opera conductor until well into the second half of his career, but his recorded legacy from the stage is very sparse. The only complete staged operas that survive are four works recorded during the 1937 Salzburg Festival; beyond that there are only bits and pieces from earlier Salzburg seasons and one post-war concert from La Scala in which staged scenes from a variety of operas were performed. Fortunately there are also the seven operas he performed in concert with NBC, most of which come from the core repertory of the early days of his career. Although his concert presentations of these operas should not be considered completely representative of how he performed them on the stage (the practical concerns of staging always end up affecting the musical product) they serve as useful latter-day souvenirs of one of the most brilliant eras in the history of operatic theatre.


Beethoven: Fidelio - December 10th and 17th, 1944

To perform a German opera live on the radio, and to have sung it in German during the height of World War II was a feat that could only have been pulled off by Arturo Toscanini. The United States has never had the best history with maintaining tolerance during wartime, and the fact that this performance of Fidelio apparently came off without controversy is an indication of the extraordinary respect the public had for Toscanini. And of course Fidelio, with its profound message of political liberty, was exactly the right opera for the time. The fact that it was performed in German made it all the more poignant, as proof that the cause of freedom knew no national boundaries, even at a time when the most unspeakable atrocities of the 20th century were being committed.

As in the case of the Leningrad Symphony broadcast of two years earlier, this complete performance of Fidelio is more impressive for its sense of occasion than for the performance itself. Toscanini made a profound international statement by programming this opera at the time he did, but the performance was musically very uneven. The playing of the NBC Symphony is oftentimes overly tight, and the casting left some to be desired. Herbert Janssen lacks any sense of foreboding or menace in his portrayal of the murderous Don Pizarro, and Sidor Belarsky fails to convey any of the good-natured humor in the character of Rocco.

Above all, what I hear in this performance is a lack of theatre. I'm sure it is no easy task to convey passionate drama in a concert presentation that is being broadcast over the radio, but Beethoven's writing is so descriptive of both action and ideas that more theatricality probably should have resulted from this performance. The only surviving recording of Toscanini conducting a staged performance of this music comes from a 1934 Salzburg production, and of this only a portion of the first act remains. I have not heard this recording, but by all accounts it is remarkable. In comparing the Salzburg performance with the present NBC recording, Harvey Sachs states that "The pacing is generally much broader in the Salzburg version, the singing is better and the playing does not have the occasional tenseness which the NBC betrays; but above all, there is a sustained and monumental dramatic power (no doubt helped by the fact that it comes directly from the theatre) which one experiences with astonishment."

I have no doubt that this is an accurate assessment, although it should not be inferred that the NBC recording is in any way a failure. If Toscanini could not fully live up to his own standards I suppose that is one of the pitfalls of being a performer with such a high ceiling. Even when the details were not ideal, Toscanini always understood the greater meaning of the music he performed, and Fidelio is an opera that courses with ideas and meaning. Toscanini was rightly considered a symbol of liberty during the Second World War, and in this imperfect performance he blessed the public with one of the great symbols of liberty to come from the operatic stage.

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That's it for Day 27!

Check back tomorrow for a mostly American selection of works, with a sprinkling of Austro-German music.

Happy Monday!

Day 26: The State of Louisiana gets its Just Deserts

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 26!

For today I wrapped up the remaining recordings from Toscanini's seventh season with NBC.


Verdi: Act III from Rigoletto - May 25th, 1944

Toscanini's final act as Music Director of La Scala was to take the company on a wildly successful tour of Austria and Germany in May of 1929. Musicologist Alfred Einstein attended the Berlin performances of this tour, which featured six operas in all: Falstaff, Il Trovatore, Manon Lescaut, Aida, Lucia di Lamermoor, and Rigoletto. Writing in the Berliner Tagblatt, Einstein had this to say about these performances:

"Let us hope that the German artists who attended this performance have learned something… Even if the Scala tour had nothing to offer us but a lesson in a true style for Italian opera, that would in itself be an important factor… For the Germans, the Italian operatic style is generally considered according to traditional criteria: the singer who calmly takes his time and exaggerates high notes, orchestral crescendo violently worked up to the final dynamic explosion, save phrasing,… and instead - instead, here are fortissimo which are not shouted at all, a totality not drowned in cheap melodrama, but rather passionate and without rhetoric."

These words were undoubtedly taken quite graciously by Toscanini, who always wanted to be considered an "honest musician."

During Toscanini's third term at La Scala between 1920 and 1929, it seemed to be his mission to set the record straight about  the music of Verdi. The Italian master's operas had received incalculable abuse over the decades from vain singers and lackadaisical orchestras. The Italian public had gotten so used to hearing this music in a form that was torn at the seams that Verdi's own powerful writing was rarely discernible. Harvey Sachs notes that "Every little provincial theatre in the country performed these works according to the local requirements - with or without certain instruments, with or without certain arias or ensembles, and so on." Toscanini did a great deal to change this during his years at La Scala - gratuitous mannerisms were to become much less frequent in Italy following the conductor's reforms.

This outstanding recording of the final act of Rigoletto is a perfect example of how emotionally overwhelming it can be to take Verdi at his word, without the mannerisms that had lain encrusted over his scores for so many years. The moment the hunchback realizes he has killed his own daughter is so crushing in this performance that a palpable gasp is quite clearly heard from the audience (it was recorded live at Madison Square Garden). This is one of the most shattering moments I have heard in any opera recording, and the radiant strains of "La donna è mobile" from the philandering Duke become painfully ironic when juxtaposed with this anguished cry of Rigoletto. It is most unfortunate that Toscanini did not perform the rest of this opera on this concert, but this powerful excerpt will have to do. It would be another six months before Toscanini would record a complete opera with the NBC Symphony, but that's tomorrow's story.

Puccini: Intermezzo from Act III of Manon Lescaut - July 2nd, 1944

Although Toscanini conducted many productions of Puccini's operas during the first half of his career and knew the composer extremely well, he sadly left very few recordings of his friend's music. All Toscanini left for posterity was this recording of the Intermezzo from Manon Lescaut and the extremely important complete recording of La bohème, which we will come to early next week.

There is a refreshing directness about this recording of the Manon Lescaut excerpt that does nothing to diminish its ravishing beauty. Puccini's orchestra is oftentimes given a polished sheen that is in disturbing contrast to the emotionally tortured drama unfolding around it (Herbert von Karajan, I'm looking at you). Toscanini goes for none of that, and gives this music all of the raw intensity of one who had spent the majority of his career in the theatre. There are still poignant string portamentos and lush sonorities in this recording, but Toscanini doesn't let you forget that this opera is a tragedy. Manon, one of those characters who was once euphemistically referred to as a "fallen woman", has been condemned to   wander the vast deserts of (wait for it…) Louisiana, and Toscanini makes you feel both the pain and the nostalgia of this powerful music. Puccini may have had a rather mystical sense of geography, but there is no question he wore the most honest and penetrating of hearts on his sleeve.

Sibelius: The Swan of Tuonela - August 27th, 1944

This Nordic cousin of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead gets a moodily brooding performance from Toscanini, with beautifully atmospheric playing from the strings. Sadly, the solo English Horn phrases this music in such a flat and lifeless manner that this reading never fully plumbs the full depths of this depiction of the Finnish underworld (and yes, I am fully aware of the irony of using the word "lifeless" as a derogatory adjective while writing about a piece that depicts the journey to the afterlife, so don't bother pointing that out).

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That's it for Day 26! Check back tomorrow for Fidelio, the first complete opera Toscanini led at NBC.

See you tomorrow!

Day 25: Awaiting the VooDoo Concerto

Hey everyone! Welcome to a late and rather shortened Day 25.

When I embarked on this project I guess I was in a bit of denial that there would be some days where it would be very difficult to write well-thought and detailed entries. Today was just such a day, as I completed a whirlwind trip to Portland, Oregon that left little time for contemplative rumination and computer work. While away I did spend some time at Powell's, which is the most extraordinary bookstore I have ever been to, and is according to some sources the largest such store in the world. While there I picked up a biography of Toscanini by a writer named Tobia Nicotra that was published in 1929, eight years before the conductor joined NBC. I will be very interested to spend some time reading this, to have an idea of how the world saw Toscanini before the radio made him a truly international celebrity.

I also had time to wait in line for doughnuts at a famous Portland establishment called VooDoo Doughnuts, which has been featured on the Food Network and has pastries with names like Old Dirty Bastard, Maple Blazer Blunt, Gay Bar, and, of course, Triple Chocolate Penetration. Notice I say I had time to "wait in line" at VooDoo Doughnuts, not to actually obtain a doughnut. It turns out that the wait time to actually purchase items from this shop on the weekend requires you to budget approximately the same amount of time you would spend to reroof your house with one hand. So I was able to get some fun pictures from VooDoo Doughnuts, but nothing else during this trip.

I ALSO, if you can believe this, had a bit of time to listen to some Toscanini in the car. Here are some quick thoughts from these car-noise-addled listenings:

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 - October 29th, 1944

The soloist for this performance was Arthur Rubinstein, who delivered a beautifully nuanced performance of this concerto that was sensitively accompanied by Toscanini. Rubinstein left some interesting recollections of the rehearsals for this performance, which provide a revealing take on Toscanini's role as accompanist. The two were apparently musically at odds in preparing this concerto. Many of the details were not in in sync, and the run-throughs had been unsatisfactory. After all this, Toscanini turned to the soloist to ask if he would "kindly repeat the first movement." Rubinstein reluctantly agreed, and according to him "A miracle happened...The tempo was right this time and the tutti sounded with all the nuances required. Toscanini did not miss one tiny detail. He was right there, and we finished every phrase beautifully together. He respected all my dynamics, held up the orchestra where I made the tiniest rubato, with a flourish."

All of this is audible in the performance. It lacks the super-charged energy level of the recording Toscanini made of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto with Vladimir Horowitz the previous year, but it is perhaps the most lovingly detailed and musically refined performance Toscanini ever gave of a concerto. The heavenly slow movement is played with an especially beautiful, loving flexibility. Toscanini was oftentimes not at ease when working with strong-willed soloists, but the right situation could yield spectacular results, as in the case of this beautiful performance.

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That's it for Day 25!

Today was supposed to be the second of three days devoted to Toscanini's seventh season with NBC. But I've just discovered that, due to a dating error in my chronology, I accidentally jumped ahead to Season Eight with this Beethoven concerto, which I had mistakenly believed to have been recorded six months earlier. I hope you're not too offended (I've been crying and gnashing my teeth most of the day in penitence). Tomorrow I'll return to the correct chronology with some Verdi and Puccini.

See you tomorrow!

Day 24: Wedding Secrets of the Nations

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 24!

Today's listening encompassed the first three works that Toscanini recorded in his seventh season at NBC.


Cimarosa: Overture to The Secret Marriage - November 14th, 1943

This is certainly a spirited performance, featuring a brisk tempo and bright sonorities that avoid getting bogged down into overwrought intensity, as many of Toscanini's Mozart performances do at times. This overture may not be top-drawer repertoire, but a reading like this allows it come to life in a natural and compelling way.

The Spokane Symphony played the Secret Marriage overture about three years ago in a concert that was titled "Mozart's Rivals," which I guess implied that Cimarosa was considered a serious rival for Mozart (a pretty amusing thought, actually). I recall that a violinist in the orchestra who shall remain nameless expressed the view that the title of this opera really ought to be Wedding Secrets. I'm still not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds like the kind of thing that is probably illegal in many countries.

Verdi: Hymn of the Nations - December 8th and 20th, 1943

Virtually every Toscanini biography I have read describes this piece as a "potboiler". In a sense, I suppose that is an accurate assessment, but it makes for fascinating listening as part of the wartime ethos in which Toscanini performed it. This curious work is a sort of mini-cantata in which a chorus and tenor soloist first sing about the celestial realm of peace (this was the first collaboration between Verdi and librettist Arrigo Boito), and then break out into a medley of national anthems. Verdi included Il Canto deli Italiani, the Marseillaise, and God Save the Queen in his piece, to which Toscanini added The Star-Spangled Banner and the Internationale in order to have the American and Soviet allies represented as well. Toscanini also made one key alteration to the Italian hymn, changing "Italia, patria mia" (Italy, my country) to "Italia, patria mia tradita" (Italy, my betrayed country).  The result is a fascinating document of wartime propaganda. The patriotic fervor of the performers is clearly completely genuine, and in its own way this is quite a moving performance.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 1 - March 12th, 1944

Wow, this is intense! This is also much better than Toscanini's recording of the Leningrad Symphony from twenty months earlier. About two weeks ago I took issue with the neo-verismo style the NBC Symphony employed in a recording of Sibelius's Symphony No. 2, a performance that seemed to me overwrought with misplaced intensity. They play with a similar style in this Shostakovich recording, but here it is used to tremendous effect.

Toscanini was not at ease in Shostakovich's idiom; although he clearly respected the composer's work, Toscanini did not feel an inner-pull toward this music. He admitted as much in a letter sent to Leopold Stokowski during the negotiations to determine which conductor would lead the American premiere of the Leningrad Symphony, in which Toscanini acknowledged that he did not love Shostakovich's music in the same way as Stokowski. The anti-fascist meaning of the Leningrad Symphony was the chief reason Toscanini badly wanted to conduct its American premiere, rather than any deep feeling for the music.

Nonetheless, Toscanini had enough appreciation for the music of Shostakovich to program his Symphony No. 1 several times. He lived with this symphony longer than he lived with the Leningrad, and understood it much more comprehensively. I suspect the style of this performance is not exactly "authentic",  but it is very compelling. The second movement in particular is played with a ferocious energy I have never heard in any other performance, while the third movement is sustained with an astonishing operatic cantabile.

Following this recording Toscanini would never again touch the music of Shostakovich. We'll never know how he would have conducted the Symphony No. 5 or 10 or the Festive Overture - which is fine, actually. Toscanini may have not loved this music or shown devotion to its dissemination, but his meager and uneven Shostakovich legacy is extremely compelling in its own way.

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That's it for Day 24! Tomorrow will bring Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 and the third act of Rigoletto.

Have a great Saturday!

Day 23: Poets and Peasants and Murder-suicides

Good afternoon, and welcome to Day 23!

Today I listened to extracts from two works of the 19th century stage.


Suppé: Overture to Poet and Peasant - July 18th, 1943

One doesn't usually hear such things about the music of Suppé, but I find this Toscanini performance of the Poet and Peasant Overture to be utterly sublime. I have often wondered if posterity has tragically undervalued this composer; there is a haunting melody in his overture to Die schöne Galathee that, with some modifications of orchestration and general context, could easily pass for Berlioz or even late Liszt. There is unfortunately no easy way to ascertain the worth of Suppé's operettas as distinct from the still frequently-performed overtures; a search on Amazon and other websites did not turn up any recordings of complete Suppé operettas, nor do I recall ever seeing one in a record store (back in the days when there were record stores). So has this composer been undervalued? There is no real way to know at this time, but this extraordinary Toscanini performance of the Poet and Peasant overture is by itself enough to earn Suppé further consideration.

Toscanini could be very inconsistent with the light Viennese repertoire. The recording he made of Strauss's Blue Danube waltz only seventeen months earlier was steely driven and utterly alien to the spirit of the music. The Poet and Peasant overture, on the other hand, could not be more different: it is beautifully shaped and phrased with a delicate, supple lyricism that ebbs and flows with grace and control. This is no mere fluff; this is the sublime creation of a master craftsman who happens to composing in a light vein. Toscanini understood this, and at last gave this music the seriousness it deserved. I hope someday we will be able to hear more of Suppé with the same gravitas.

Verdi: Overture and "Quando le sere" from Luisa Miller - July 25th, 1943

When Toscanini conducted these excerpts at NBC it had been more than forty years since he had last led a production of this supremely melodramatic opera. It's the standard formula: boy meets girl, girl likes boy, another boy likes girl, girl doesn't like other boy, first boy ends up being the Count's son, second boy threatens girl, second boy threatens girl's father, Count puts girl's father in jail, girl is forced to renounce love to first boy to get father out of jail, first boy gets angry and kills girl and himself. Got it?

Even for the stringent standards of realism for 19th century Italian opera this is stretching it, and I wonder if Toscanini's heart was really with this work. One review of his only La Scala production of Luisa Miller in 1902 called the performance "mediocre, because concord and conviction were lacking", while another said that "the work, which is certainly not one of Verdi's best, bored people." What I sense from these excerpts that Toscanini recorded many years later is not exactly boredom or lack of conviction, but simply that the conductor did not feel devotion to this music as he did to Otello or Falstaff. Although the overture is certainly played with fire, the string passagework is much messier than would normally exist in a recording that Toscanini had approved for release.

The "Quando le sere" aria, meanwhile, is certainly intense, but very stiff in execution: Toscanini's soloist, the wonderful Jan Peerce, almost sounds driven to the point of being uncomfortably declamatory. In this scene, Rodolfo (boy one) is lamenting the letter Luisa wrote in which she renounced her love for him. Rodolfo does not yet know that Luisa was forced to write this letter to get her father out of jail, and reminisces of the happy times they had spent together while cursing her betrayal. Painful emotions sting all the more when juxtaposed with feelings of lost happiness, and I think that was what Verdi was going for with his rather pastoral orchestration. The clarinet rivulets in this aria are typical of Verdi's moments of ironic tranquility, but there is no sense of serenity to this performance, only a muscular tenseness.

I don't mean to be overly harsh to this recording. We are very fortunate to have as much documentation of Toscanini's way with Verdi as we do; Toscanini was the only really significant link with Verdi to live well into the age of recording and to leave many performances for posterity. But there were other Verdi works that clearly were closer to the conductor's heart, and the recordings Toscanini left for the finest of Verdi's music are among the glories of the heritage of recorded sound.

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That's it for Day 23! I had originally intended to finish up with Toscanini's recording of Bizet's L'Arlesienne Suite, but I could not make the CD work; I will return to it at a later day. Tomorrow we will move on to Toscanini's seventh season with NBC, with more Verdi and works by Beethoven and Shostakovich.

Have a happy Friday!

Day 22: The Italian nationalism of the Old Testament.

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 22!

For today I listened to the first few pieces Toscanini recorded during his sixth season with NBC, beginning in 1942. Earlier that year the musicians union had imposed a ban on all studio recordings in the United States, so all of the recordings Toscanini made from this point until 1944 were taken from live radio broadcasts.

Having been successfully lured back to NBC, Toscanini was now sharing the stage with Leopold Stokowski (who was still in the middle of a three-year contract with the network). Each conductor had his own unique way with programming, and having these two very different Maestros on the podium made for refreshing variety. Toscanini (as he did all too often in this stage of his career) concentrated on familiar repertoire, while Stokowski programmed a number of splashy modern compositions that Toscanini never touched, like Holst's The Planets and Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky.

In general I would say that these recordings are a significant improvement over the very uneven work of the previous year. Now that Toscanini was officially back at work at NBC the orchestra was at least partially "his" again, and the sonority was now much more unified than during the previous season. The NBC Symphony, however, still radiated little of the sharply contoured fire of their most successful recordings of earlier seasons. While the recordings from the 1942-1943 season were certainly more successful than those of the preceding one, it is clear that orchestra and conductor had not yet fully recaptured the bond they had displayed in their finest moments from earlier years.

Brahms: Serenade No. 2 - December 27th, 1942

Toscanini obviously loved this piece dearly - he can quite audibly be heard singing along with the phrases that moved him - though I admit I don't fully understand where his affection came from. Written while Brahms was still in his 20s, this Serenade was one of his very earliest orchestral efforts. Its relative lack of popularity these days can't be blamed entirely on immaturity - it was written one year after the Piano Concerto No. 1 - but there is no denying that it lacks the fluid sonority of his later music.

I suspect what drew Toscanini to this piece may have been the work's easy-going yet spirited youthfulness. There is a certain charm to this music, and Toscanini clearly gave it the same importance he gave the Brahms symphonies. The clarity of detail in this performance is actually quite extraordinary, and not at all like the thick Brahms we hear more frequently. Mortimer H. Frank believes that this performance lacks some of the beauty and grace of Toscanini's earlier live performance of this piece in 1938. I have not heard that broadcast, but I certainly hear no lack of beauty and grace to this 1942 recording.

Verdi: "Va, pensiero" from Nabucco - January 31st, 1943

This music had great meaning to Toscanini, as it did to all of the Italian people. Also known as the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, this extract from Verdi's first successful opera deeply resonated with the cause of Italian nationalism during the mid-19th century. Toscanini's father was quite caught up in this cause, and there can be no doubt this fervor also affected young Arturo, born only six years after Italian unification. Toscanini led this very chorus at Verdi's 1901 public funeral in Milan, an occasion attended by many thousands of the city's grieving citizens. The favor was returned upon the death of Toscanini fifty-six years later, with Victor De Sabata leading the La Scala orchestra and chorus in the same music, as the famous conductor was lowered into his final resting place.

Toscanini's 1943 recording is appropriately reflective and very beautiful. Although there is spirit to this performance, there is also a weight and solemnity that suggests that Toscanini's thoughts were on his homeland. It was still another nine months before Mussolini was to be deposed, and the possibility that Italy might be permanently under fascist control was still frighteningly real. There is pain to this Verdi performance, but also hope - hope for a better future.

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 - April 25th, 1943

This performance was given during a war bond concert Toscanini gave with soloist and son-in-law Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall. Toscanini and Horowitz each provided their services without fee, and more than $11,000,000 was raised for the war effort through this concert. Robert C. Marsh writes of this Tchaikovsky Concerto reading that "the effect was a performance of a sort that should have made all subsequent attempts at the work anti-climactic." High praise certainly, but well-deserved.

If I earlier indicated that this piece is not a favorite of mine I should note that, although my view has not changed, I took great pleasure listening to this Toscanini/Horowitz recording. There is an infectious, palpable excitement to this performance that is absent from the studio recording I listened to last week. Toscanini's recordings from the war years are oftentimes tight and rigid, but he really understood the importance of occasion. This brilliant Tchaikovsky performance was imbued with that important sense of occasion from the very first powerful notes to come from the horn section. Horowitz's playing, if occasionally a bit heavy-handed, is wondrously engrossing.

Incidentally, if you haven't yet seen this, I would strongly recommend checking out on youtube the hilarious Muppets sketch of Victor Borge playing the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto - it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

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That's it for Day 22!

For tomorrow we'll have some Viennese music that is clearly promoting class warfare, and some Verdi excerpts that are clearly promoting assisted suicide. So join me tomorrow for some politically charged discourse!

Day 21: Going the distance from St. Petersburg to Leningrad

Welcome to Day 21: the all-Shostakovich all-day special!

Today will be devoted entirely Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. Toscanini's performance of this symphony in July of 1942 must be considered one of the most important concerts given in the United States during World War II.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 - July 19th, 1942

Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony is far from his strongest music, but it deserves a special place in history for the powerful symbolism it exerted during the darkest days of World War II, a time when the very survival of liberty was frighteningly precarious. As Hitler's army waged its odious siege over the city of Leningrad, Dmitri Shostakovich worked on the seventh of his generally remarkable fifteen symphonies. These works express in music what the composer could never have put into words. He longed for freedom from the dreadful repression of his home country, yet as far as I am aware he never really seriously considered leaving the Soviet Union. He was a Russian, and he remained committed to his homeland for his entire life. Shostakovich was never a happy man (the only photo I have yet found of him smiling was taken after his death, when he was in his coffin), but he had a profound belief in the beauty of Russian art and culture. This rich heritage had in Dmitri Shostakovich an ideal custodian through decades of tyranny from within, and three years of catastrophic warfare imposed from without.

The story of how this symphony ended up being performed by Arturo Toscanini inside a radio studio in New York City less than five months after its premiere in the Russian city of Kuibyshev during the worst day of the war reads like an espionage novel. The 252-page score and more than 2500 pages of orchestral parts were painstakingly microfilmed and flown in a military plane to Tehran. From there they were driven to Cairo for the flight to the United States. The score arrived in Toscanini's hands on June 14th of 1942, and a fight immediately ensued with Leopold Stokowski over who was to conduct the American premiere. 

As you may remember, Stokowski had been hired by NBC to replace Toscanini after his resignation from the network, and Stokowski had been the one to persuade NBC to buy the rights to the American premiere. When Toscanini was given the score to the symphony he wrote to Stokowski to persuade him to relinquish the premiere: "At once I was deeply taken by its beauty and its anti-Fascist meanings, and I have to confess to you, by the greatest desire to perform it." Stokowski evidently did not understand that this meant Toscanini was asking to conduct the very first American performance, and Toscanini had to write further that he "felt the strongest sympathy and emotion for this special work, so I urged the NBC to have it performed by me. Try to understand me, my dear Stokowski, only because of the special meaning of this Symphony. Happily, you are much younger than me, and Shostakovich will not stop writing new symphonies. You will certainly have all the opportunities you like to perform them."

In the end Toscanini won the fight and performed the North American premiere of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony on July 19th, 1942. What may be most remarkable about this is Toscanini's super-human feat of conducting the complete massive score from memory after only a few weeks of study. The performance itself was a bit like the symphony: deeply flawed but extremely compelling in spite of itself. From the very first bars this is obviously a Toscanini performance, with all the benefits and drawbacks that come with it. With all the razor-sharp attacks and edgy tempos of his most volatile Beethoven performances, Toscanini gave this symphony all the nerve it could handle. This approach works (for the most part) quite well in the outer movements, but the inner movements are greatly weakened by Toscanini's over-wrought intensity. 

Shostakovich himself was not impressed by this performance, claiming that "hearing it made me angry. Everything is wrong. The spirit and the character and the tempos. It's a lousy, sloppy hack job." The enmity was mutual: years later Toscanini found the score in one of his files and had to ask what it was. His son, Walter, reported that Toscanini became agitated and said "Did I learn that? I must have been crazy."

Both the creator and the interpreter were being overly harsh. The greater meaning of the Leningrad Symphony is much more important than the sum of its imperfect parts. Shostakovich wrote this music as a statement against evil, and the world accepted it as such with open arms. Toscanini was the most famous performing musician in the world, and the part he played in bringing this statement of humanity before the world had an incalculable effect towards the victory of basic human decency over the evil of Hitler's hordes. Art and culture may be the most effective weapon the human race has over tyrants, and in this respect Shostakovich and Toscanini are two of the greatest warriors the world has ever known.

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That's it for Day 21! Check back tomorrow for some little-known Brahms, some mildly well-known Verdi, and some all-too-well-known Tchaikovsky. See you tomorrow!

Day 20: The Return to NBC (Toscanini's return, not Steve Carell)

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 20!

Today I listened to most of the recordings that were made during Toscanini's fifth season with NBC, but during that year he was not officially working for the network. He had left in a huff following the previous season when he discovered that NBC had been deceiving him about how the musicians of his orchestra were being used - not, as it turned out, for his exclusive use. Leopold Stokowski was appointed to succeed him, and Toscanini left to make some masterful recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and also led some concerts with his previous orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was not, however, to be away from NBC for much longer.

In December of 1941 the Department of the Treasury asked Toscanini to conduct the NBC Symphony again to promote the sale of war bonds. The virulently anti-fascist conductor could not refuse this offer. After leading two initial broadcasts, Toscanini returned three more times between January and April of 1942 to lead war bond concerts, and these paved the way for his eventual return to the network. NBC was finding Stokowski every bit as hard to handle as Toscanini had been, and they were soon to make diplomatic overtures (through Toscanini's son, Walter) to have the NBC Symphony Orchestra reunited with its Maestro.

The recordings from this season are very uneven in quality, and include some of his weakest studio efforts. Orchestra and conductor were in the process of reacquainting themselves during this season, and the musical quality suffered somewhat as result. Nonetheless, this season paved the way for Toscanini's truly long-term connection with the NBC Symphony, and for the vast quantities of truly remarkable recordings that were to made during the final years of the conductor's life.


Strauss: On the Beautiful Blue Danube - December 11th, 1941 and March 19th, 1942

Good lord, this is awful…just awful. This may in fact bet the worst recording in all of Toscanini's official discography. What's so appalling about this performance is the complete and utter lack of the Viennese gemütlichkeit that is absolutely inherent to any fine or even respectable performance of this music. The overall stiffness of execution is mind-boggling, although to be fair the players of the NBC Symphony seem to be making at least a token effort to make this reading idiomatic. This is one recording whose utter failure can be completely attributed to Toscanini.

Verdi: Overture to I vespri siciliani - January 24th, 1942

Toscanini always performed Verdi with great authority, and this recording is no exception. It is occasionally a bit overly contained in character, and the boxy recorded sound leaves the music little room to bloom. Toscanini still manages to drive this overture to a rousing climax, and this ends up as one of the more satisfying recordings of his truncated fifth season at NBC.

Thomas: Overture to Mignon - March 19th, 1942

That Toscanini could make such lightweight music sound like this shows just how seriously he took everything he performed. The carefully-shaped introduction in particular is played with great beauty and dignity, featuring some of best horn playing I have yet heard from NBC. Oddly, Toscanini released a second official recording of this piece ten years later, when it only saw two live performances during his NBC years. Many staples of Toscanini's repertoire were recorded only once, like the Die Meistersinger prelude or Beethoven's Ninth, which probably says something about the randomness of RCA's interests.

Barber: Adagio for Strings - March 19th, 1942

This beautiful recording is the pick of an oftentimes disappointing pack from today's listening. Toscanini gave the world premiere of this music in 1938 and consistently performed it with deeply felt sensitivity, although he sadly did not return to it after this recording was made. Barber does not seem to have originally intended for this piece to have the tragic connotations it now has, and Toscanini performs it more as a gentle song than as an anguished statement of profound importance. The Adagio for Strings does work beautifully in Toscanini's conception, and can almost be heard as a moving operatic interlude.

Smith: The Star-Spangled Banner - March 19th, 1942

There's no question that the United States possesses one of the most stirring national anthems in the world, and Toscanini performs it with great dignity and the patriotic fervor of one whose native country was still subjugated by tyranny. But I still can't hear The Star-Spangled Banner without thinking of Poltergeist, so I can't help but be a bit scared by it.

Wagner: Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde - March 19th, 1942

This is sadly almost as bad as the Blue Danube, but Strauss waltzes were hardly staples of Toscanini's repertory, and it is all the more depressing that he would perform one of his favorite works in this stiff, lifeless manner. As we saw in Day 15, Toscanini's 1901 production of Tristan at La Scala was attended by Wagner son, Siegfried, who was so impressed by what he saw that his mother, Cosima, was compelled to send Toscanini a letter in which she effusively thanked him for taking such care with this masterpiece on a foreign stage. This was obviously music Toscanini understood profoundly, and performed frequently. So why did this 1942 recording of the Liebestod sound like it did? It is possible that Toscanini was distracted by World War II and what was happening to his homeland, but I think it has more to do with the fact that in 1942 he was no longer feeling that the NBC Symphony was "his" orchestra. The recordings from this year are generally very tight-sounding, and Toscanini's more relaxed performances tended to come with orchestras he felt a great affinity with. As it turned out he was to stay with NBC for a long while after this, giving him the opportunity to leave many, many great treasures for posterity.

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In July of 1942 Toscanini was to conduct one of the most important concerts given in the United States during World War II. This concert landed him on the cover of Time Magazine and made him an international symbol of freedom. But that's tomorrow's story.

See you then!

Day 19: Oh Mendelssohn, Berlioz, wherefore art thou Scherzo?

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 19, the Shakespeare Day!


Mendelssohn: Incidental Music from A Midsummer Night's Dream - January 11th and 12, 1942

Toscanini returned to the Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream with exceptional frequency - six recordings in all. He also performed the Nocturne with some regularity, but this wonderful recording shows how deep a grasp Toscanini had over the rest of the score (minus the bits that are too wound up with the drama to make sense apart from an actual staged production of the play). Robert C. Marsh observers that Toscanini gave this music "incandescent tonal brilliance, and playing in which the beauty, the delicacy of inflection, and the plastic distinction of the moving line cause one to gasp as wonder follows wonder." I don't have much to add to that.

The control and even tempers of Mendelssohn's music have never really appealed to my sensibilities except for a few isolated works, but Toscanini has a way with A Midsummer Night's Dream that helps me begin to understand. The overture in particular is played with a magical lightness perfectly evocative of Shakespeare's fairy world. Although the less-familiar excerpts are not at the same level as the Scherzo and Nocturne, they provide the popular extracts with the context that make them really begin to make sense in their larger purpose. Although Toscanini does not place all of the movements in the same order as Mendelssohn, they form a convincing artistic whole that gives this entire score great shape.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 - February 8th, 1942

Toscanini performed the Pathétique Symphony in one of his earliest orchestral concerts in 1898, and then didn't touch it again until he first performed it with the NBC Symphony forty years later.  He claimed he returned to it when he came to the realization that it was "honest music", which is a profound realization about a work that is often performed in a terribly dishonest way.

I once had a friend in college who despised Tchaikovsky's music. We had a long-standing agreement that I would get a free sandwich if I could ever get her to admit that she liked any single piece by Tchaikovsky. At issue was apparently the seemingly rampant emotionalism in his music. Ever the romantic idealist, I have always argued that this a good thing, while her point of view is a bit more rationalist and controlled. At one point I may have gotten her to grudgingly admit that she liked the Pathétique Symphony, but she was still troubled by the overly emotional way in which it was typically performed. "But that's not real emotion the way it's usually played," I argued. "That's just clownish rubbish." We debated this for some time, but after a long while she came to the conclusion that we were actually agreeing without realizing it, and I soon realized she was right. What my friend saw as overly emotional I had been hearing as falsely emotional, and in a way these really are very much the same thing.

Tchaikovsky's music is oftentimes played as though the performer has carte blanche to impose any tempo fluctuation that they may be feeling, as though this somehow makes the music any more emotional and deeper felt. This despite the incredibly detailed tempo modifications that are already in the score, and nearly all of which are provided with metronome markings. I think Tchaikovsky absolutely knew what he was doing, and although I believe in wringing every last bit of emotion out of this music I still believe the best way to reach the heart is through the brain.

Gunther Schuller in particular has argued in favor of following Tchaikovsky's metronome markings, and feels that they are the key to unlocking the emotion in his music. In The Compleat Conductor he writes about the Pathétique that "this is not some tearful maudlin exercise in bathos, but rather a music of extreme anguish, and of anger, a desperate outcry of pain". This is the true essence of this powerful music, and in this Philadelphia Orchestra recording of 1942 Toscanini gave it one of its most honest and, yes, emotional performances.

The Philadelphia Sound has long been described as full and sumptuous, but this remarkable recording shows how biting the orchestra could be when the music called for it. Philadelphia was nearing the end of its collaboration with Toscanini when this recording was made, and orchestra and conductor at last truly sound like they have reached full unity of purpose with this Tchaikovsky performance.

Debussy: La Mer - February 8th and 9th, 1942

Toscanini performed La Mer more often than any other work save for the Die Meistersinger Prelude during the latter half of his career, and that passion is evident in this beautiful performance. Toscanini was particularly pleased with how the first movement turned out in this recording, saying that listening to it was "just like reading the score". Unfortunately he evidently felt differently about the latter two movements. He badly wanted to return to La Mer, but a recording ban that the musician's union imposed shortly after the completion of the Philadelphia sessions put an end to plans to redo the portions Toscanini was unhappy with.

This recording is a bit more sharply etched than one usually hears in the music of Debussy, but this does not to me sound at all inappropriate for the piece. Pierre Monteux played La Mer under the direction of the composer, and reported that Debussy said he couldn't understand why musicians insisted on playing his music with a whispery, ethereal quality. "When I write forte, I mean for it to be played forte," he is supposed to have said. Toscanini takes this score at face value (beyond some reorchestration that apparently had Debussy's blessing) and plays it with great power that in its own way is as evocative of the ocean as the more "whispery" performances.

Berlioz: Queen Mab Scherzo from Romeo and Juliet - February 9th, 1942

This seems to be about the most terrifying piece in the entire orchestral repertoire for the string section (and by "string section" I of course mean "not the basses"). Mercutio's monologue about Queen Mab is one of the most evocative passages in all of Shakespeare, and Berlioz transforms it into breathtakingly virtuosic music that has given nightmares to many a hapless string player (when I played this work with Pierre Boulez in December of 2003 I remember him saying "I'm so sorry but once more through the Queen Mab… just so I can sleep tonight"). According to Shakespeare, Mab's "chariot is an empty hazelnut made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers. And in this state she gallops night by night through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love." If it is indeed possible to directly represent words with musical sound, this piece is a perfect example (in the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film Mercutio used this monologue to describe some sort of ecstasy-like drug, which seems particularly apt for Berlioz's unique descriptive powers).

It's hard to imagine a better performance of the Queen Mab Scherzo than this Toscanini recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The playing is astonishingly light and virtuosic, and remarkably well-balanced. It is particularly clear from listening to this that Philadelphia indeed possessed one of the great string sections the world had ever seen, and the wind playing is remarkable as well (the horns are particularly wonderful).

Toscanini is to be especially commended for championing Romeo and Juliet at a time when Berlioz was inexplicably considered to be low-brow and unworthy of serious attention. This massive score is one of the towering masterpieces of the 19th century and one of the very finest pieces ever composed. Toscanini programmed excerpts from Romeo and Juliet throughout his life (he called the Love Scene "the most beautiful music in the world") but his 1947 performance of the complete score at NBC must rank as one of the most important concerts ever given in the United States. Fortunately that concert was recorded and released by RCA, and we will come to this tremendously important recording in a few weeks.

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That's it for Day 19!

That does it for Toscanini's recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Tomorrow we'll return to the NBC Symphony for good with a slender selection of works that will satisfy a few people but leave most wanting, just like the netflix streaming library.

Day 18: Death at a Festival

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 18!

Yesterday I began my survey of the recordings Toscanini made with the Philadelphia Orchestra between November of 1941 and February of 1942. Let's continue with:


Debussy: Iberia - November 18th, 1941

Of all the works that were staples of Toscanini's repertoire during the latter half of his  career, Debussy's Iberia was the one most recently composed. Of the sixteen pieces Toscanini conducted thirty times or more during this period, only Iberia and another work by Debussy, La Mer, were composed in the 20th century. Considering Toscanini was active until 1954, I can't say that's a good thing.

Toscanini has been widely criticized for playing as little modern music as he did, and for the extremely conservative bent of the few contemporary works he did perform. His defenders have tried to justify this by placing Toscanini in his broader historical context. Harvey Sachs notes that "When Toscanini was born, in 1867, Rossini was still alive… Brahms was not quite thirty-four years old…Bizet, Tchaikovsky Dvořák, Massenet, Boito, and Grieg were all in their twenties; and Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Mascagni, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, and Busoni were under the age of ten." Sachs further notes that Toscanini entered Parma's Royal School of Music during the same month as the world premiere of Brahms's First Symphony, and that when Toscanini made his conducting debut in 1886 Bartók was five years old and Alban Berg was only one.

It is genuinely quite remarkable that a musician from Toscanini's era lived so long into the age of recorded sound and produced so many documents for posterity. Given his age, it can be quite tempting to forgive Toscanini for his indifference to challenging modern music, but in the end I don't find this to be a persuasive excuse. Other long-lived conductors have shown  devotion to the music of their time for the duration of their careers. Leopold Stokowski was an outstanding example of this, and I have seen first-hand the remarkable devotion of the 86-year-old Pierre Boulez to the propagation of challenging new music. In 2008 I performed in the world-premieres of two works by wonderful composers who were in their twenties at the time under the baton of Maestro Boulez, who had guided them tirelessly through the process.

It is hard to imagine a person like Toscanini ever taking part in project like that. He showed great interest in the new music of his youth but as he got older eventually began to turn his back on what was unfamiliar. While you cannot blame a conductor for wanting to primarily promote the music he understands best, the extent to which Toscanini emphasized the music that was most familiar to him can all too easily result in musical hardening of the arteries. The great masterpieces of music are performed frequently for a reason, but for them to stay fresh they have to be played alongside music that is new and unknown. Obviously not every new work is going to be a masterpiece, but if we don't regularly perform new music we will never get to the good stuff that will last for posterity.

Toscanini did wrong by modern music, but he was certainly a musician who followed his convictions. He knew what he liked, and performed his favorite music with consummate skill and professionalism. Iberia was clearly among his favorite pieces, and this stunningly atmospheric Philadelphia Orchestra recording is breathtaking in its evocation of musical exoticism. The French loved the very idea of Spain, and Toscanini exploits their conceptualization of the exotic with phenomenal flair and vitality. I just wish he could have played modern music with the same level of conviction.

Respighi: Roman Festivals - November 19th, 1941

Toscanini knew Respighi well and played a great deal of his music, including the premiere of Roman Festivals in 1929. Twelve years later the music had lost none its intensity in Toscanini's interpretation. Although the sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra is a bit too smooth to really let Respighi's exuberant sounds burst in full exhilaration, this is a fabulous recording of a score Toscanini obviously cared about very much.

Strauss: Death and Transfiguration: January 11th, 1942

Toscanini's admirers evidently have a very difficult time with the conductor's devotion to this great Strauss tone poem. Robert C. Marsh writes that "the material in Death and Transfiguration is dangerously close to vanity in its simplest form, and its treatment is frequently obvious and pretentious. " The slightly more charitable Mortimer H. Frank believes that Toscanini's take on Death and Transfiguration makes "what some feel is not quite a top-drawer score sound better than it actually is" (this would have been the perfect place for a "transfiguration" joke).

I have yet to find a commentator who is squarely in Toscanini's camp to say a kind word about this tone poem, which might make you think that the kind of person who likes Toscanini's interpretations in principle just doesn't seem to like this kind of music. This is of course entirely paradoxical, as Toscanini himself obviously had tremendous affection for this piece. I do as well. As a devout agnostic I have no defined view of what happens after we die, but I'm enough of a Romantic to long for a perfect and idyllic afterlife where, to quote Revelation, God will wipe every tear from our eyes. I can hardly imagine any more sublime image of this afterlife than the Transfiguration of Strauss's tone poem. Music can't always be defined by the sum of its working parts, and what Strauss created in this music is something that goes beyond the limits of analysis.

As for Toscanini's performance, the Philadelphia Orchestra plays with all the unity of purpose and beauty of sonority that you would expect from this ensemble. Marsh believes that a person who is predisposed to enjoy this music would be unlikely to find Toscanini's version of it compelling: "The person who is fond of this score presumably admires some its defects and, if record sales are any guide, enjoys a broad, rhetorical performance in which the melodrama is played for all it's worth. Toscanini, as one would expect, does not comply." No, he doesn't comply, but that makes his performance all the more powerful. Toscanini presents the work with a raw, honest emotion that in its own way is much more powerful than the maudlin tears of a clown. And Toscanini's interpretation is actually very close to that of the composer, whose 1944 recording of this work with the Vienna Philharmonic is in many respects quite similar to this Philadelphia performance. Beauty is, as they say, in the eye of beholder, but Toscanini's eye is in very good company.

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That's it for Day 18. Tomorrow I will finish up the Philadelphia recordings. Until then!

Day 17: Another "great" ninth symphony? No! Shoo, Bert!

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 17!

Tonight it is the big opening night of the Spokane Symphony with the fabulous Jon Kimura Parker as soloist in the Grieg Piano Concerto. Any Spokane readers who have not procured their tickets for this should do so immediately - you don't want to miss a concert like this.

Somehow with all the excitement going on today I managed to listen to and write about Toscanini's remarkable Philadelphia Orchestra recording of Schubert 9. I thought I would go a bit into why Toscanini ended up making these recordings with this most elegant of American orchestras.


During his fourth season at NBC Toscanini had a major falling out with the network and tendered his resignation in April of that year. His reasoning was a bit murky; the letter of resignation Toscanini sent to network head David Sarnoff made note of his ill health and of vague feelings of depression at the tragedy of what was going on in Europe. There may have been some truth to this, but it is widely believed that the catalyst for his decision was a bizarre incident that occurred during rehearsals for Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

Since joining NBC in 1937 Toscanini had been been under the impression that the musicians of the NBC Symphony were for the exclusive use of himself and his approved guest conductors. In fact this whole time they were also being used for all manner of other broadcasts, ranging from jingles to radio serials. Things came to a head during a Carnegie Hall rehearsal on December 27th, 1940, when the 5:00 start time was delayed by half an hour on a day in which thirty-five players from the orchestra had to leave at 7:30 to get back to the studio for another broadcast. When 7:30 came and went the personnel manager gave the signal for the players who had to leave to sneak out one by one. Although Toscanini had notoriously bad eyesight, it is mind-boggling to think that NBC could have thought he would not notice musicians sneaking out of his rehearsal, and he naturally viewed this as an outright expression of contempt.

Now that the jig was up about how the NBC Symphony was really being used, Toscanini grudgingly served out the rest of the season and then resigned his position. His retirement turned out to be very much temporary, and Toscanini ended up conducting the NBC Symphony for another thirteen years. During his brief period of estrangement from NBC Toscanini made a series of remarkable recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In 1941 the Philadelphia Orchestra was still very much the instrument of Leopold Stokowski. Eugene Ormandy had become Music Director in 1938, but the orchestra did not really see the full effects of the transition of leadership for several more years. Stokowski had been responsible for procuring some of the world's most remarkable wind players, such as oboist Marcel Tabuteau and flutist William Kincaid. The famous Philadelphia string sound was also largely the work of Stokowski, who would stop at nothing to get exactly the sonority he desired.

Ironically, Stokowski lost his concertmaster, Mischa Mischakoff,  to the NBC Symphony due to his unique manner of rehearsing the strings. Evidently at the time it was considered a major faux pas to ask the concertmaster to play by himself during a rehearsal unless it was for a solo. Stokowski disregarded this and asked Mischakoff to play a passage he was unhappy with. When Stokowski seem satisfied, Mischakoff asked him "Excuse me Maestro, did you like the way I played this passage?" When Stokowski said it was fine, Mischakoff left his seat and said "I'm very glad you liked it, Maestro, because it's the last note you're ever going to hear me play."

These Philadelphia recordings are particularly important for giving us the chance to hear Toscanini as a guest conductor with a long-established ensemble. With the NBC Symphony Toscanini was leading an orchestra that did not have the years of tradition built into it, and even the finest of the NBC recordings do not have the same tonal weight as these excellent Philadelphia recordings. Unfortunately, these valuable documents did not begin to see release until the 1960s, long after Toscanini's death. In the meantime the masters had deteriorated significantly, so the sound quality is not what it should have been. Modern remastering has improved the sound to very listenable levels, but it remains a bit depressing to think what these recordings could have been had they been shown proper respect.

Schubert: Symphony No. 9 - November 16th, 1941

By common consent this is the prize of Toscanini's Philadelphia recordings, and it is hard to argue with that. This symphony had long been a staple of Toscanini's programming (it had been on his very first symphonic concert in 1896) and he led it masterfully. As in Toscanini's finest Brahms performances, this Schubert recording shows just how powerful music of the Romantic era can sound when unencumbered with copious rhetoric. This performance is certainly not a dull affair, and Toscanini fills it with an exceptional rhythmic vitality from start to finish.

Schubert 9 is a piece that has taken me a long time to come to terms with. It always seemed to me to badly ramble and utterly fail in its overly obvious attempt to match Beethoven's Ninth in character and spirit. I am very gradually coming to like this music, but I am not yet all the way there. I now realize that at the very least Schubert was really onto something with this music. His amazing way with sonority clearly prefigures Bruckner with its organic blocks of sound, and this is a connection I really didn't make until I listened to this Toscanini recording. By letting Schubert's score (mostly) speak for itself, the sinewy timbre groupings and phrases sing with great power and urgency. Although I am still not entirely on board with this music, the remarkable Toscanini recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra must be considered one of the most persuasive accounts it has ever seen.

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I had originally intended to also listen to Debussy's Iberia, but time has now run out. So I will take that up tomorrow along with Respighi's Roman Festivals, Strauss' Death and Transfiguration, and the incidental music from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream.

Have a good Saturday night, and I will see you tomorrow!

Day 16: One Tritsch, One Tratsch, and a Funeral.

Hey y'all, welcome to Day 16!

Today's listening ranged from the picaresque to the whimsical to the bombastic to the funereal - sounds like a pretty successful New Year's Day.

Let's get started with a look at:


Wagner: Siegfried's Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung - March 17th and May 14th, 1941

It's amazing what a difference it makes to take the voices away from this music. Toscanini performed this same excerpt with the singing of Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior in February of 1941, less than one month before this present recording was made. The result was utterly mind-blowing with the voices: exuberant, exalted and profoundly powerful. Recording this same music with orchestra alone unfortunately resulted in one of the dullest and most gravely disappointing performances Toscanini gave of the music of Wagner: the sonority is flat, the phrasing is limp, and the energy is slack. The playing of the NBC is actually quite remarkable in its precision of ensemble, but this performance never gets off the ground musically.

Johann Strauss: Tritsch-Tratsch Polka - May 6th, 1941

This recording is bright and spritely, but the NBC Symphony was no Vienna Philharmonic. If this performance could be wearing clothing it would be wearing a tutu rather than lederhosen.

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 - May 6th and 14th, 1941

Well, I could talk about the fact that this is generally an excellent performance filled with expressive nuance and powerful (if occasionally a bit clangy) playing from Vladimir Horowitz, but I really don't care for this piece much, so I thought I would go into a bit of story-telling instead.

I went to grad school at Northwestern University, where the orchestra director was an oftentimes funny and occasionally very hot-tempered Russian man named Victor Yampolsky. He was what my sister would call a "walking quote-book", coming up with some of the most inspired rehearsal commentary I have ever encountered. Some favorites include "Don't slow down! The bank closes at five, and you won't get any money." And "Do you have a calculator…to help you count?" Perhaps the most wonderful thing I have ever heard a conductor utter was brought on by some unsatisfactory trombone playing: "Trombones! You sound like you are chewing cardboard! Have you ever chewed cardboard before? It's not very good, so STOP!!"

Maestro Yampolsky could occasionally erupt in ferocious anger when he felt the students were not taking the rehearsal seriously, but one of the more amusingly spaced-out moments I encountered at a Northwestern concert fortunately occurred when he was not on the podium. In 2003 a fine doctoral conducting student of Yampolsky's by the name of Anna Binneweg led a performance of the Tchaikovsky first Piano Concerto (you do remember that's the piece I'm talking about, right?) as part of one of her required conducting recitals. There is a section in the first movement of this concerto where the trombones have a major entrance that follows a long pedal-point build-up in the orchestra. In most cases this trombone entrance erupts from the stage in breathtaking sonority when all this tension is finally  released. I should also perhaps explain that Northwestern is well-known for producing extremely "brassy" brass players whose playing was frequently described as "balls to the wall" in their impressive volume.

When the concert came along and the first movement reached this glorious passage, the spine-tingling build-up of sonority welled up from the depths and finally climaxed with the magisterial intoning of…nothing. The trombone players were simply looking off dreamily into space. Anna was ever the consummate professional and always sweetly tactful, but this incident finally led to the clouded look of fury no one thought was possible from her. I cannot remember who the trombonists were in this concert, but one player who was in school with me at the time is now Principal Trombone of the San Francisco Symphony - it's at least possible he was involved (their management should look into it). Had Yampolsky been conducting this concert he may well have stopped the show right there and started screaming. As it was, all that happened was that Yampolsky walked up to the (presumably) dejected trombone players after the concert and said "Guys, I know how much you like to play soft and sensitive, but that was a leeetle bit too soft."

With regards to the Toscanini performance I've really run out of space to talk about it any more, so let's just go ahead and grade it an A+++. The extra + is for it being something extra extra special (the third + was a typo).

Wagner: Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung - May 14th, 1941

Toscanini's performances of Wagner were among the finest of his era, but he could be very inconsistent. This reading of Siegfried's Funeral Music is sublimely beautiful in its depiction of death and grief, yet it was recorded on the very same day Toscanini completed his gravely disappointing Rhine Journey. Where the NBC Symphony's sonority was limp and disinterested in the earlier Götterdämmerung excerpt, they here play with extraordinary power and heart-rending passion. Toscanini had a linear way with this music that was very different from how German conductors of his era would play Wagner, but his finest performances show just how potent his interpretation could be. This is one of his finest performances.

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That's it for Day 16! Check back tomorrow for the first of three days of Toscanini's recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra, including his famous first recording of Schubert's Symphony No. 9. Have a good Friday night, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Day 15: Finding the "grin" in Lohengrin

Ah yes, I believe the time has come for (long drumroll) (ominous voice) Daaaay Fifteeeeeeen.

I started by listening to one of the greatest of all romantic symphonies and continued with two opera excerpts. Both opera extracts had been recorded by Toscanini during his tenure with the New York Philharmonic, but this is the first complete Brahms symphony to see an official release.


Brahms: Symphony No. 1 - March 10th and December 11th, 1941

I have made no secret about the fact I don't care for the standard, "weighty" manner of playing Brahms. The music he writes has great weight and depth, but the lines have nowhere to flow when they are performed with turgid heaviness - playing like this causes his grand, monumental structures to fall apart. It is absolutely true that certain rare conductors of genius can make a good case for the heavy sonorities that are typical of Brahms performances, but as much as I enjoy the finest work of Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler I believe the true sound of these sublime works are in the energetic, flowing readings that are the hallmarks of conductors like Claudio Abbado, Stanisław Skrowaczewski, and Arturo Toscanini.

This stunning 1941 recording of Brahms 1 is not Toscanini's finest performance of the symphony, but it is a reading of the highest level. Brahms's First Symphony was a work Toscanini really understood, and every performance he gave of it was a thing of beauty. His Brahms 1 immediately knocks you over with a searing intensity and a tempo that is somewhat faster than traditional. Yet his performance never becomes rigid or unyielding, nor are his sonorities any less powerful for his faster tempos.

Recordings like this are proof of just how powerful Brahms can be when played with driven, exciting energy. There are certainly beauties of a very different kind to be found in the finest performances of the "heavy" Brahms, but an entirely new and more profound sound comes from these masterpieces when they are played with ecstatic, crackling life. Toscanini understood this brilliantly and performed the Brahms symphonies, especially the first, with great meaning and intelligence.

Verdi: Preludes to Act I and III from La traviata - March 10th, 1941

This is a beautiful performance with lovely cantabile lines from the strings, but ultimately it is not in the same class as the earlier recording with the New York Philharmonic. This performance is more earthbound and much less operatic. Violetta's suffering seems to be commuted to a truncated discomfort, and the overall power of this reading suffers from the desensitized playing. While this recording is certainly far from a failure, it does not belong in the class of Toscanini's finest work.

Wagner: Prelude to Lohengrin - March 17th and May 6th, 1941

Like the 1941 La traviata preludes this Lohengrin recording suffers from an unflattering comparison to an earlier and much more beautiful reading Toscanini gave with the New York Philharmonic. This later performance is almost a minute shorter than the Philharmonic recording and is much more earthy in character. It fails to elicit the "magical, supernatural feelings" or the "celestial harmonies" that so inspired Toscanini when he first heard this music as a boy. Toscanini's finest recordings oftentimes have brisk tempos, but they are never rigid or unyielding. This performance is both.

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That's it for Day 15! Tomorrow features a bit of everything: a bit of piano, a bit more Wagner, a bit bit more Wagner, and even a little polka. If you listen closely enough you might even be able to hear the lederhosen. I'm told Siegfried was buried in them.

Day 14: The Sublime and the Ridiculous

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 14!

I thought I'd get a little variety in my life, so for today's listening I got a bit of both the sublime and the ridiculous. The three Wagner excerpts are among the beautiful creations of Western art, while Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony is...well, let's just say it moves me to tears of a very different sort.

Let's get started with a bit of story time:


Leopold Mozart: Toy Symphony - February 15th, 1941

I may just be a bass player in the Spokane Symphony (described by one reviewer as a "competent, provincial ensemble"), but I have a few claims to musical fame that go beyond the fact I once coughed up wine onto conductor Roger Norrington's floor. Yes sir, I have some stories to tell. Back in November of 1995 I served as a, ahem, featured soloist with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Granted, I was not soloing on the double bass, or even on any instrument that is normally expected to make musical sounds outside of a kindergarten class. But still, I was a soloist with a major orchestra!

What happened was that a group of musicians from the Seattle Youth Symphony orchestras were asked to play various toys in a children's concert performance of Leopold Mozart's incandescently masterpieceful Toy Symphony. The toy I was given was an instrument P.D.Q Bach once wrote for called the Lasso d'Amore, which is a hollowed-out pipe of foam that you twirl around at different speeds to make different pitches. I was devoted to mastering this instrument and practiced it for hours every day, give or take a few hours.

The idea of having Youth Symphony musicians play these toys in the concert was probably that they would look cute in their youthful toy-playing whimsy, but this was strained by the fact that in 1995 I was going through my wannabe criminal delinquent phase. I was fifteen years old and had grown a scraggly beard and refused to smile even to get dates (for some reason I  thought the appropriate attire for this look was a button-down shirt and sport coat). The passport photo I carried around during that time was widely described as "terrorist-looking". I once went through a security check at the Amsterdam airport (after shaving and getting a haircut) where a border control agent looked at my passport, then glanced up at me. He seemed puzzled and then carefully studied the photo. When he finally looked up he said "What happened?"

Anyway, I may not have been the Seattle Symphony's idea of a fresh-faced, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed toy musician looking for playful hijinks, but I'd like to think I gave a perfectly satisfying performance on the Lasso d'Amore that was filled with profound musical substance.

If indeed a meaningful performance of the Toy Symphony is possible, it was certainly intrepreted in this manner by Toscanini in this 1941 performance with the NBC Symphony. The toys were all played with remarkably concentrated precision, and Leopold Mozart's unique way with orchestral fun was given deeply serious under-tones (based on Leopold's portrayal in Amadeus I'm not sure that's at all inappropriate). Overall I enjoyed this performance very much, but it could have used a lot more Lasso d'Amore.

Wagner: Act I, Scene III from Die Walküre - February 22nd, 1941

Toscanini was the first non-German to ever be invited to conduct at the Wagner temple at Bayreuth, where he conducted for the first time in 1930. The seeds of this appearance were sown thirty years earlier, when Wagner's son Siegfried attended a performance of Tristan that Toscanini led at La Scala. Siegfried was sufficiently impressed to report to his mother about the extraordinary level of the Italian production. Cosima Wagner later wrote to Toscanini to say that "My son has given me an account of the performance of Tristan which he attended in Milan, and he has told me so many good things about it that I take upon myself the duty of expressing to you the contentment I feel in knowing that a work of such great difficulty has been performed with care on a foreign stage….All these indications of your respect towards and instinct for the incomparable work to which you have dedicated yourself with so much ardor made my son very happy to have been a witness, and at a distance I join in his satisfaction."

Despite this apparent appreciation from the Wagner family it took quite some time for Toscanini to be invited to conduct at Bayreuth - the idea of inviting an Italian to conduct at this most Teutonic of festivals seemed unthinkable. When finally the pieces came into place for Toscanini to conduct at Bayreuth the effect was galvanizing. Rehearsing entirely from memory he was able to correct mistakes in the parts that had gone unnoticed for decades. He would erupt in fury when the orchestral playing was not to his liking, and nearly left the festival out of anger. Siegfried Wagner convinced him to stay by promising that the weaker players would be replaced (as a union musician I can't condone this).

It is very unfortunate that no complete Wagner operas conducted by Toscanini exist in good sound (a surviving 1937 Salzburg Die Meistersinger is almost unlistenable) but the few excerpts he led at NBC are so extraordinary that he can be forgiven. I wish that Toscanini had instead recorded the final scene of Act III from Die Walküre with its heartbreaking duet between Wotan and Brünnhilde, but this Act I excerpt will suffice. Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior joined NBC for this performance, and these two great Wagner singers are spectacular.

This Die Walküre excerpt was drawn from the same live broadcast that the next recording came from, an all-Wagner program that one excited amazon reviewer called "the greatest Wagner concert of all time." The Die Walküre excerpt is wonderful, but still greater was yet to come on the same concert.

Wagner: Dawn, Duet, and Siegfried's Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung - February 22nd, 1941

Toscanini conducted the concert arrangement of Siegfried's Rhine Journey many, many times, but this is the only surviving performance of the excerpt in its full operatic context. Although his recordings of the concert arrangement are wonderful, this recording with Melchior and Traubel is in an entirely different class. Of Toscanini's recording of the orchestral excerpt with the New York Philharmonic I complained about the overly polished, antiseptic sound, but presenting this music in its intended context seems to blow all of that away. The youthful energy of this recording absolutely explodes out of the NBC Symphony, and the singing of the soloists is nothing short of stunning. In this scene Siegfried has just spent his first night with Brünnhilde and is setting off for adventure down the Rhine. This is the music of exalted exuberance, and it apparently needs to be heard with singers to come across with its full powerful effect.

I would rank this Wagner performance with the 1939 Beethoven Eroica as the greatest Toscanini recording I have yet listened to during this project. Incidentally this comes from one of the very few official RCA releases that are currently available for download from amazon. I would strongly recommend obtaining this extraordinary performance.

I should also perhaps note that this recording is another example of the incredibly schizophrenic brass playing of the NBC Symphony. These first two Wagner excerpts were drawn from the very same concert, but the brass (and particularly principal trumpeter Harry Glantz) sound mind-blowingly awful in the Die Walküre scene, while they somehow sound fabulous in the Rhine Journey. Glantz is note-perfect in the climax of the Rhine Journey duet (in the same passage where he split at least one note in all three of Toscanini's orchestra-only recordings) yet sounded like an amateur in the earlier excerpt. I have no explanation.

Wagner: Brünnhilde's Immolation from Götterdämmerung - February 24th, 1941

This was also performed on the same concert as the two earlier Wagner excerpts, though for some reason it was decided to rerecord Brünnhilde's Immolation in a separate recording session two days later. It was this studio recording that was approved by Toscanini and appears on the official RCA release. The live performance has been released on EMI's Great Conductor's series (which is available for download), and Toscanini fans have long debated whether the studio or live version is superior. I've found that there is a bit more raw intensity to the live performance, while the studio recording has more of a contemplative quality. This latter approach seems to me the more appropriate. Brünnhilde is facing both her own mortality and the end of the reign of the gods, yet willingly rides her horse into her own funeral pyre. The studio recording seems to analyze her emotions at a distance, yet for me that makes the music even more powerful. I don't want to split hairs, as both the live and studio recordings are extraordinary. They just tell two different sides of the story, and the fact that Toscanini could tell both sides so effectively exposes the lie that he was always rigid in his interpretation.

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That's it for today! Tomorrow will bring Brahms 1 and two Verdi excerpts.

Take care, and I'll see you soon!