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!
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