Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 56!
For today I listened to the three works that Toscanini recorded shortly after the completion of his famous transcontinental tour of the United States with the NBC Symphony in 1950. The musicians of the orchestra widely considered this tour to be the artistic high-water mark of the ensemble, with its lack of outside distractions and numerous fine concert halls in which to perform. Both Toscanini and the orchestra were in an extremely positive frame of mind when they returned to New York for what turned out to be their final sessions in Studio 8-H (the broadcasts moved to Carnegie Hall the following season, and since 1975 Studio 8-H has been used by Saturday Night Live). These recordings are with one exception among the greatest of Toscanini's entire recorded legacy, and this listening session was a particular pleasure.
Debussy: La Mer - June 1st, 1950
Arturo Toscanini only ever performed nine works by Claude Debussy, but his favorite of those nine, La mer, was at the foundation of his repertoire. Toscanini performed La mer thirty-two times (!) during his decade with the New York Philharmonic, eighteen times with the NBC Symphony, and at least six times with other orchestras.
Obviously a Toscanini specialty long before he arrived at NBC, La mer was apparently a rather frightening specter to the young musicians of the new radio broadcast orchestra. The Debussy work was programmed on Toscanini's third broadcast with the NBC Symphony, and the musicians actually procured the services of Pierre Monteux to "teach" La mer to them before the maestro's arrival in New York for his first week of rehearsals in 1937. This says as much about the relative modernity of the score at that time (it had been premiered only thirty-two years earlier) as it did about the humility of the NBC Symphony and their eagerness to please their elder statesman conductor.
Toscanini had made a studio recording of La mer with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1942, but this went unreleased during his lifetime and is marred by poor sound. After performing the work six times during the transcontinental tour of the United States, the NBC Symphony reconvened in Studio 8-H five days after the last concert to finally make a proper studio recording of Debussy's poem of the sea. This recording has achieved a legendary status among aficionados of Toscanini's work, and is widely regarded to be among his very finest surviving documents of any piece of music.
My own reaction to this recording was at first a bit uncertain. I have long been a devotee of Pierre Boulez's stunning recording of La mer with the Philharmonia Orchestra, and it is still difficult for me to hear the work played in a different way. But Toscanini's more muscular conception of the score continues to grow on me the more I listen to it. The ocean is not, of course, a wispy, ethereal geographic phenomenon. It is an immense, powerful, and dangerous organism, and Toscanini (who crossed the Atlantic dozens of times) displays unique understanding of that power in this recording. At the same time, the fine details of the work are immaculately worked out (including some reorchestration that was apparently approved by Debussy), as though it was very important to Toscanini to not let one wave go unnoticed.
I'm still not ready to call this one of my favorite recordings, but there is no denying its power. La mer was a work that was extremely deep with Toscanini's musical DNA, and the care he lavished on it shines luminously through every measure. There may be more beautiful performances of La mer out there, but I doubt there are any others that are more of an experience.
Saint-Saens: Danse macabre - June 1st, 1950
Danse macabre? More like Dance and Sob.
At his worst, Toscanini was certainly capable of being overly rigid and hard-edged in his rhythmic drive. This was disastrous in recordings like the 1942 Liebestod from Tristan or the Blue Danube waltz from the same year, but I think that trait could have actually have been an asset to Saint-Saens' Danse macabre (at least at times). This work should sound demonically driven with bone-rattling fury, and the hard-driven approach Toscanini was (fairly, at times) accused of applying to the classics would have worked perfectly for this piece.
Unfortunately, what we get in this recording is a bizarrely weighty spaciousness. The genuinely macabre elements of this work are transformed into an effect of misplaced grandeur, as though we end up looking at an enormous gargoyle dressed up like Monopoly's Uncle Moneybags smoking a fat cigar. I like Danse macabre very much, and I find Toscanini's recording to be both gravely disappointing and a serious misrepresentation of Saint-Saens' intentions.
For a truly macabre presentation of this music, I would suggest watching Jean Renoir's classic film The Rules of the Game. A devastating satire of the decadence of the French aristocracy in the years before World War II, The Rules of the Game features Danse macabre during a disturbing scene at a masquerade ball that is filled with skeletons. I wish Toscanini could have captured some of the same spirit.
Debussy: Ibéria - June 2nd, 1950
The French have always had a thing for Spain, and Debussy's Ibéria is one of the best of the Gallic takes on the music of their southern neigbor. Toscanini dearly loved this piece, which was one of the cornerstones of his repertoire. He apparently never conducted the other two of Debussy's Images (which is disappointing, as I'm sure he would have led a fantastic Rondes des printemps), but programmed Ibéria no fewer than twenty-five times in the United States.
Even more so than the La mer recording from the previous day, Toscanini's reading of Ibéria is richly atmospheric, and fully evocative of a foreigner's fascination with Spanish exoticism. The typically Toscaninian rhythmic drive suits the music very well, but the conductor applies tasteful elasticity to the tempo at appropriate moments. NBC Symphony violist Milton Katims (a fascinating man who lived very close to where I grew up in Seattle and knew my parents quite well) recalled telling Toscanini about a guest conductor who gave a performance of Ibéria with the NBC Symphony that was intensely boring "because he played precisely what was printed on the page." When the maestro insisted that that was exactly how he performed it, Katims placed the score on the piano, and asked Toscanini to play it as he saw fit: "As he played, I pointed out the slight stringendi here, the poco ritardando he made there, his rubato in another spot, etc. - none of which was in the score…He protested that it wasn't possible to be a machine."
Katims' story is very instructive about the relative value of the rhythmic units of tempo. While it is true that Toscanini generally had a very forward-moving conception of time, he did not believe that tempo should be without nuance. His finest preserved performances show that he could be as malleable with time as any other conductor (in fact, I find the rubato of some of his New York Philharmonic recordings to be a bit extreme). No musician can, of course, be a machine, and even if one was sufficiently gifted to perform a score exactly in tempo and with the exact relative rhythmic values of every note, such a result would be profoundly unmusical - because music is not a machine, and cannot be performed as such. Toscanini was one of the great musicians of his time, and while his musical decisions were at times highly questionable, they were always as deeply felt as any other great musician.
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That's it for Day 56!
Check back tomorrow for some sacred music, some womanizing music, and some music that is (probably) neither of those.
Happy Wednesday!
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