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.
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