Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 68!
Today's listening took me to four works recorded on the same day in 1952.
Liadov: Kikimora - July 29th, 1952
When I set out to listen to this score of Anatoly Liadov I had a very strong and immediate reaction: "What the hell is a Kikimora?"
My scholarly researches led me to a wikipedia article that explains that "Kikimora is a legendary creature, a female house spirit in Slavic Mythology, sometimes said to be married to the Domovoi. She usually lives behind the stove or in the cellar of the house she haunts." I think that explains why I can never get my soup hot enough.
This is a curious piece, sort of a mix of The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Baba Yaga. I have nothing to judge Toscanini's recording against, but it is an effective performance. The low strings are particularly full-sounding in the introduction, and the woodwind solos have a sparkling clarity to them.
Now if only we can do something about that soup.
Thomas: Mignon Overture - July 29th, 1952
There is nothing in the slightest bit stereotypically Toscanini about this recording. I don't know for sure if that's a good thing, but it makes for extremely compelling listening.
From the beginning, this performance is marked by an extraordinary breadth and flexibility of tempo more reminiscent of conductors like Leonard Bernstein. That Toscanini was quite capable of conducting like this is certainly not surprising when you have listened to a significant sampling of his work, but it is far from the image of the tight-fisted, metronomically rigid conductor that has become all too common.
This is all very mundane, however. The more pertinent point is whether or not this approach is appropriate to the music.
The schmaltzy manner with which Toscanini treats the first half of this overture is more akin to Viennese waltzes than to French overtures. I cannot say whether it is right or wrong to interpret the music in this way, but it is very beautiful. It even made me think of some of the gushier moments of the James Bond scores composed by John Barry. This conception doesn't sound very French to my ears, but it is all too easy to get bogged down with national boundaries in interpretation. I strongly doubt that most composers think of their own music in nationalist terms, and Ambroise Thomas probably felt it was more important for his music to be beautiful than to be idiomatically French, Viennese, Cambodian, Klingon or anything else.
Of course, there are many ways you can define beauty, and it is entirely possible that a more stereotypically Toscanini performance would have been exactly what the composer wanted. In the absence of any proof in that regard, I am happy to accept what sounds right to me, and I like this very much.
Ponchielli: Dance of the Hours from La Gioconda - July 29th, 1952
Most people (and by "most people," I mean "me") who have seen Fantasia have a hard time listening to this music without thinking of those dancing hippos in their tutus. But it turns out that there is an entire opera attached to these dances, and Toscanini's association with the work goes back to his very first run as a conductor in 1886, at the age of nineteen. Toscanini continued to lead the opera throughout his career in the theatre, and his expert way with the famous Dance of the Hours likely has to do with his immaculate understanding of the context that surrounds the interlude. That's a guess, of course, since I don't know anything about the opera, but it seems logical. All I know is that Toscanini's recording is fabulous.
Wager: Siegfried Idyll - July 29th, 1952
This is the last of the three official recordings Toscanini made of this work, and it is by far the broadest and warmest of them. This 1952 recording is about a minute and a half longer than the 1936 and 1946 accounts, and this extra expanse is used to canvas out a a reading that is deeply passionate and transcendently delicate.
Incidentally, Robert C. Marsh writes of this recording that "Students of concert life in New York should note that this ends with a fanfare of automobile horns." I listened very closely to the ending and could detect nothing of blaring car horns. Either modern remastering has gotten rid of the offending sounds, or perhaps the cars driven in New York in the 50s were quite Wagnerian in tone quality.
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That's it for Day 68!
Check back tomorrow for a lengthy list of short pieces I don't even want to think about right now. Just like my shopping list.
Happy Monday!
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