It's getting late, so I'll get right to it without the usual pontificating:
Verdi: La forza del destino Overture - June 28th, 1945
One of the more common themes of earlier books about Toscanini's discography is the quality of the recorded sound, which oftentimes gets more commentary than the level of the performance itself. Robert C. Marsh's 1962 Toscanini and the Art of Conducting has this to say about the conductor's 1945 recording of the overture to La forza del destino: "The Verdi is now just an uninteresting old recording, replaced by the 1952 version which offers the identical performance with better sound." While I agree that the 1952 version of this overture is excellent, it seems very odd to me that Marsh uses the (very slight, to my ears) more rustic sound of the 1945 recording as a reason to call it "uninteresting." Even in the works Toscanini conducted that varied little interpretively throughout his career there are always interesting details that are unique to each recording. So long as the level of the recorded sound is of sufficient quality to be able to discern the finer nuances of the performance (and in most of the official Toscanini recordings this is the case), I find Marsh's frequent quibbling about the playback to be splitting hairs.
It would be especially unfortunate to let misgivings about the quality of the sound keep you from enjoying a performance such as this. Toscanini does not indulge in much of the tempo give-and-take that has become traditional in this piece, and to my ears the music becomes the much more powerful for it. The conductor led La forza del destino many times in the first half of his career, and really understood the meaning of the drama Verdi put into the overture. Toscanini consistently performed this music brilliantly, but each recording has enough that is wonderful and unique that no one version can be considered definitive.
Waldteufel: Skater's Waltz - June 28th, 1945
Toscanini's only other recording of a famous waltz (On the Beautiful Blue Danube) was a complete travesty, and probably the worst recording he ever made. The Skater's Waltz is much more successful; it is relaxed and graceful without any pandering. While Toscanini does occasionally drive the music slightly more than one usually hears, his slightly curt reading seems to my ears to be quite appropriate, at least based on my own labored experiences with ice skating.
Berlioz: Rákóczi March from The Damnation of Faust - September 2nd, 1945
Musicologist Jacques Barzun has cited the important role Toscanini played in the revival of interest in the music of Berlioz during the first half of the twentieth century. Toscanini produced some of the finest early recordings of Berlioz's music (including the first complete Roméo et Juliette), and many of these are landmarks in the history of the gramophone. This recording of the Rákóczi March, however, is more of a testament to the general exhilaration everyone was feeling about the ending of World War II than any kind of transcendent musical experience. This recording was lifted from the second of three radio broadcasts that Toscanini led after the surrender of Japan as a kind of exclamation point to the NBC Symphony's season.
While the excitement is palpable in this performance, it cannot in any way be considered an accurate representation of Berlioz's intentions, owing to its absurdly fast tempo. Toscanini often complained about other conductors taking tempos that greatly exceeded Berlioz's metronome markings (particularly in the March to the Scaffold and in Harold in Italy) but he does exactly the same thing here. Berlioz's metronome marking for the Rákóczi March is 84 to the half note, while Toscanini's tempo in this recording is a ridiculous 114 (a mere thirty clicks off the mark). While there is a certain amount of superficial excitement in Toscanini's brisk tempo, there is absolutely no sense of impending doom in this clipped conception, taking away the great power this music possesses. Toscanini and the NBC Symphony can certainly be forgiven for not wanting to think about hell and damnation during the exhilarating weeks that followed the ending of the Second World War, but one still wishes for more darkness from this performance.
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That's it for Day 32!
I hope you all had a good weekend, and I'll be back tomorrow with a bit of remainders from the past.
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