Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 42!
For today I began with a blast from the past, with two Beethoven concertos I neglected to include from Toscanini's eighth season at NBC. I now have a firm schedule for all of remaining listening sessions, so this shouldn't happen again. I strongly doubt that many of you care, but I am a man who likes fluid consistency. Breaking otherwise correct chronologies is very disturbing to my internal organs, and is probably linked to ebola and Middle-East tensions. I'll make it a point to fix any errors in the chronology when I publish the book version of this blog (at which point the other problems of the world should be fixed as well).
After the two concertos I moved on to the incidental music from A Midsummer Night's Dream by Felix somethingerother. It put me in a very puckish mood.
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4 - November 26th, 1944
Rudolf Serkin was the soloist for this recording, which was drawn from a live broadcast. An air-check of Serkin performing this concerto with Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic in 1936 has also been preserved; I have not heard that recording, but it is by all accounts superior to this NBC broadcast. The NBC account is certainly not bad, but Toscanini and Serkin are so at odds in artistic temperament that their collaboration fails to generate the sparks a truly first-rate performance of this concerto commands.
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 - August 9th, 1945
This is certainly a breezy account of this concerto. I am not intimately familiar with this piece, but I don't believe I have heard a faster account of it elsewhere. Beethoven did not to my knowledge provide this concerto with metronome markings, but his student Carl Czerny did. These markings are rather faster than has become traditional, and are in fact quite close to what Toscanini and his soloist, Ania Dorfmann, employed in this recording.
Does that make it right? Apparently not, if you believe some critics. Mortimer H. Frank calls it "bland and glib", while Robert C. Marsh notes that Dorfman "blandly" moves along "without the qualities of color, accent and continuity which Toscanini is exhibiting and which one would expect a perceptive soloist to duplicate." Ouch.
I agree that this performance is not one of the prizes of the Toscanini discography, but I think the critical judgment is a little harsh. I don't find anything in principle wrong with the tempos, and there are moments in the recording that are quite powerful. Moments. The bottom line is that the flaws of this performance should not distract from the moments that are so right.
Mendelssohn: Incidental Music from A Midsummer Night's Dream - November 4th, 1947
Here we have the last preserved account of Toscanini's way with this music, some of which he performed with exceeding frequency, notably the Scherzo and Nocturne movements. Toscanini had last recorded an extensive selection of the Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1942 - a fabulous recording, but one marred by poor sound. This NBC remake has some beautifully atmospheric moments, and is recorded in far superior sound.
The best of this recording is very, very good, and show the NBC Symphony to be getting quite close to the level of the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Intermezzo and Nocturne movements in particular from this NBC recording are probably the best of Toscanini's surviving readings of these numbers, and the Overture is not marred by poor tuba playing, as the Philadelphia recording was. But the Scherzo does not have the light, silken beauties of Toscanini's 1929 New York Philharmonic recording, and the Wedding March is somehow both overly heavy and lightweight at the same time. All in all, while this NBC performance has some tremendous strengths, it cannot be considered one of Toscanini's great recordings.
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That's it for Day 42!
Check back tomorrow for the three Ms: Mozart, Mozart, Mozart.
Happy Wednesday!
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