This morning I woke up at 6:00 AM and drove five hours across the state to watch the Seattle Seahawks play a monumentally poor game against the Cincinnati Bengals. I was so distraught over this that I had to rush right home and write about Toscanini. Enjoy!
Brahms: Symphony No. 1 - November 6th, 1951
It is simply a fact that by this point in the project we are dealing substantially with remakes of recordings Toscanini made earlier in his career. As the conductor got older, he tended to consolidate his repertoire, and concentrate on the music he knew best. Depending on your perspective, this resulted in either the stagnation of the orchestral repertory, or an exciting choice of different interpretations of the Great Classics by a Master Conductor. Both are true, at least to some extent.
There are only so many Beethoven Fifths and Brahms Firsts that you can listen to without being stricken with musical hardening of the arteries, and Toscanini could have used his late-life celebrity to broaden the repertoire of what can be considered classics. For the most part, he did not do this (interestingly however, the very last piece to enter his repertory was a frequently-performed classic: Schubert's Symphony No. 5, which he performed for the first and only time in 1953, at the age of eighty-six). At the same time, his repetitions allow us to trace his interpretive development over many years, and there is no question that this is a great gift to music lovers. A double-edged sword, perhaps, but a gift nonetheless.
Toscanini performed the Symphony No. 1 more than any other work of Brahms during his NBC years, including for his first broadcast for the network in 1937. That stunning first performance is available for download in a fabulous transfer on the Guild Historical label. Toscanini's first broadcast shows how immediate was the bond between conductor and orchestra, but also how startling and and remarkable a way he had with the music of Brahms. The 1937 broadcast performance is a perfect example of how exciting Brahms can be when its excess weight is jettisoned. Toscanini honed this interpretation through five more broadcast performances and two studio recordings. This 1951 performance was the latter of the two accounts from the studio.
This is a familiar interpretation, containing similar nuances to Toscanini's earlier performances of the Brahms First. The primary difference is in the overall sweep; this recording is tighter and punchier (but with less energy) than the conductor's earlier accounts. There is still great beauty to this performance, but this lies more with the fact that Toscanini's interpretation was so powerful to begin with (not to mention the superb quality of the recorded sound) than with the quality of the performance itself.
Nonetheless, the positive attributes of this recording are nothing to sniff at. For the first time we really get to hear the sonority that Toscanini could produce with this music. The poorer technology of earlier years could not hide the beauty of the conductor's interpretation, but it did substantially mask the timbres that he shaped. No longer, as we now get to hear a great symphonic interpretation in full-fledged color. That's a double-edged sword I am willing to grip.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 - November 9th and 10th, 1951
Toscanini ended up remaking every one of the seventeen works he recorded with the New York Philharmonic while at NBC, and in most cases the later recordings do not come off well by comparison. This is particularly glaring in the case of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. The Philharmonic account of this work is widely considered to among the greatest, if not the greatest, recording Toscanini ever made. The NBC account, however, is not generally considered to be in the same class. And that's the kind way to put it.
Mortimer H. Frank bluntly wonders if "the many distinctions that that can be made between Toscanini's two approved recordings of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony…display anything beyond the later one's inferiority," while Robert C. Marsh feels that "when we consider the two performances it becomes clear that at eighty-four Toscanini could not duplicate what may have been his greatest achievement with this music." This is all perfectly clear from even a superficial listening to the 1951 recording.
This performance does, obviously, exist in considerably better sound than the Philharmonic recording, but this is no compensation for the alarming drop in control coming from Toscanini. The entire reading is astonishingly unsteady rhythmically, and is so haphazardly paced that the climaxes are no more conclusive than the development. Some blame for this must of course go to the NBC Symphony, which should have at least been able to accurately render the dotted sixteenth-note figures in the first movement regardless of what was coming from the podium. I don't know why the recording ended up like this, but it sure is disappointing.
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That's it for Day 60!
Check back tomorrow for music to crack nuts by, music to sing masterly by, and music for seven performed by many more than seven.
Happy Sunday!
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