Day 20: The Return to NBC (Toscanini's return, not Steve Carell)

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 20!

Today I listened to most of the recordings that were made during Toscanini's fifth season with NBC, but during that year he was not officially working for the network. He had left in a huff following the previous season when he discovered that NBC had been deceiving him about how the musicians of his orchestra were being used - not, as it turned out, for his exclusive use. Leopold Stokowski was appointed to succeed him, and Toscanini left to make some masterful recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and also led some concerts with his previous orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was not, however, to be away from NBC for much longer.

In December of 1941 the Department of the Treasury asked Toscanini to conduct the NBC Symphony again to promote the sale of war bonds. The virulently anti-fascist conductor could not refuse this offer. After leading two initial broadcasts, Toscanini returned three more times between January and April of 1942 to lead war bond concerts, and these paved the way for his eventual return to the network. NBC was finding Stokowski every bit as hard to handle as Toscanini had been, and they were soon to make diplomatic overtures (through Toscanini's son, Walter) to have the NBC Symphony Orchestra reunited with its Maestro.

The recordings from this season are very uneven in quality, and include some of his weakest studio efforts. Orchestra and conductor were in the process of reacquainting themselves during this season, and the musical quality suffered somewhat as result. Nonetheless, this season paved the way for Toscanini's truly long-term connection with the NBC Symphony, and for the vast quantities of truly remarkable recordings that were to made during the final years of the conductor's life.


Strauss: On the Beautiful Blue Danube - December 11th, 1941 and March 19th, 1942

Good lord, this is awful…just awful. This may in fact bet the worst recording in all of Toscanini's official discography. What's so appalling about this performance is the complete and utter lack of the Viennese gemütlichkeit that is absolutely inherent to any fine or even respectable performance of this music. The overall stiffness of execution is mind-boggling, although to be fair the players of the NBC Symphony seem to be making at least a token effort to make this reading idiomatic. This is one recording whose utter failure can be completely attributed to Toscanini.

Verdi: Overture to I vespri siciliani - January 24th, 1942

Toscanini always performed Verdi with great authority, and this recording is no exception. It is occasionally a bit overly contained in character, and the boxy recorded sound leaves the music little room to bloom. Toscanini still manages to drive this overture to a rousing climax, and this ends up as one of the more satisfying recordings of his truncated fifth season at NBC.

Thomas: Overture to Mignon - March 19th, 1942

That Toscanini could make such lightweight music sound like this shows just how seriously he took everything he performed. The carefully-shaped introduction in particular is played with great beauty and dignity, featuring some of best horn playing I have yet heard from NBC. Oddly, Toscanini released a second official recording of this piece ten years later, when it only saw two live performances during his NBC years. Many staples of Toscanini's repertoire were recorded only once, like the Die Meistersinger prelude or Beethoven's Ninth, which probably says something about the randomness of RCA's interests.

Barber: Adagio for Strings - March 19th, 1942

This beautiful recording is the pick of an oftentimes disappointing pack from today's listening. Toscanini gave the world premiere of this music in 1938 and consistently performed it with deeply felt sensitivity, although he sadly did not return to it after this recording was made. Barber does not seem to have originally intended for this piece to have the tragic connotations it now has, and Toscanini performs it more as a gentle song than as an anguished statement of profound importance. The Adagio for Strings does work beautifully in Toscanini's conception, and can almost be heard as a moving operatic interlude.

Smith: The Star-Spangled Banner - March 19th, 1942

There's no question that the United States possesses one of the most stirring national anthems in the world, and Toscanini performs it with great dignity and the patriotic fervor of one whose native country was still subjugated by tyranny. But I still can't hear The Star-Spangled Banner without thinking of Poltergeist, so I can't help but be a bit scared by it.

Wagner: Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde - March 19th, 1942

This is sadly almost as bad as the Blue Danube, but Strauss waltzes were hardly staples of Toscanini's repertory, and it is all the more depressing that he would perform one of his favorite works in this stiff, lifeless manner. As we saw in Day 15, Toscanini's 1901 production of Tristan at La Scala was attended by Wagner son, Siegfried, who was so impressed by what he saw that his mother, Cosima, was compelled to send Toscanini a letter in which she effusively thanked him for taking such care with this masterpiece on a foreign stage. This was obviously music Toscanini understood profoundly, and performed frequently. So why did this 1942 recording of the Liebestod sound like it did? It is possible that Toscanini was distracted by World War II and what was happening to his homeland, but I think it has more to do with the fact that in 1942 he was no longer feeling that the NBC Symphony was "his" orchestra. The recordings from this year are generally very tight-sounding, and Toscanini's more relaxed performances tended to come with orchestras he felt a great affinity with. As it turned out he was to stay with NBC for a long while after this, giving him the opportunity to leave many, many great treasures for posterity.

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In July of 1942 Toscanini was to conduct one of the most important concerts given in the United States during World War II. This concert landed him on the cover of Time Magazine and made him an international symbol of freedom. But that's tomorrow's story.

See you then!

Day 19: Oh Mendelssohn, Berlioz, wherefore art thou Scherzo?

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 19, the Shakespeare Day!


Mendelssohn: Incidental Music from A Midsummer Night's Dream - January 11th and 12, 1942

Toscanini returned to the Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream with exceptional frequency - six recordings in all. He also performed the Nocturne with some regularity, but this wonderful recording shows how deep a grasp Toscanini had over the rest of the score (minus the bits that are too wound up with the drama to make sense apart from an actual staged production of the play). Robert C. Marsh observers that Toscanini gave this music "incandescent tonal brilliance, and playing in which the beauty, the delicacy of inflection, and the plastic distinction of the moving line cause one to gasp as wonder follows wonder." I don't have much to add to that.

The control and even tempers of Mendelssohn's music have never really appealed to my sensibilities except for a few isolated works, but Toscanini has a way with A Midsummer Night's Dream that helps me begin to understand. The overture in particular is played with a magical lightness perfectly evocative of Shakespeare's fairy world. Although the less-familiar excerpts are not at the same level as the Scherzo and Nocturne, they provide the popular extracts with the context that make them really begin to make sense in their larger purpose. Although Toscanini does not place all of the movements in the same order as Mendelssohn, they form a convincing artistic whole that gives this entire score great shape.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 - February 8th, 1942

Toscanini performed the Pathétique Symphony in one of his earliest orchestral concerts in 1898, and then didn't touch it again until he first performed it with the NBC Symphony forty years later.  He claimed he returned to it when he came to the realization that it was "honest music", which is a profound realization about a work that is often performed in a terribly dishonest way.

I once had a friend in college who despised Tchaikovsky's music. We had a long-standing agreement that I would get a free sandwich if I could ever get her to admit that she liked any single piece by Tchaikovsky. At issue was apparently the seemingly rampant emotionalism in his music. Ever the romantic idealist, I have always argued that this a good thing, while her point of view is a bit more rationalist and controlled. At one point I may have gotten her to grudgingly admit that she liked the Pathétique Symphony, but she was still troubled by the overly emotional way in which it was typically performed. "But that's not real emotion the way it's usually played," I argued. "That's just clownish rubbish." We debated this for some time, but after a long while she came to the conclusion that we were actually agreeing without realizing it, and I soon realized she was right. What my friend saw as overly emotional I had been hearing as falsely emotional, and in a way these really are very much the same thing.

Tchaikovsky's music is oftentimes played as though the performer has carte blanche to impose any tempo fluctuation that they may be feeling, as though this somehow makes the music any more emotional and deeper felt. This despite the incredibly detailed tempo modifications that are already in the score, and nearly all of which are provided with metronome markings. I think Tchaikovsky absolutely knew what he was doing, and although I believe in wringing every last bit of emotion out of this music I still believe the best way to reach the heart is through the brain.

Gunther Schuller in particular has argued in favor of following Tchaikovsky's metronome markings, and feels that they are the key to unlocking the emotion in his music. In The Compleat Conductor he writes about the Pathétique that "this is not some tearful maudlin exercise in bathos, but rather a music of extreme anguish, and of anger, a desperate outcry of pain". This is the true essence of this powerful music, and in this Philadelphia Orchestra recording of 1942 Toscanini gave it one of its most honest and, yes, emotional performances.

The Philadelphia Sound has long been described as full and sumptuous, but this remarkable recording shows how biting the orchestra could be when the music called for it. Philadelphia was nearing the end of its collaboration with Toscanini when this recording was made, and orchestra and conductor at last truly sound like they have reached full unity of purpose with this Tchaikovsky performance.

Debussy: La Mer - February 8th and 9th, 1942

Toscanini performed La Mer more often than any other work save for the Die Meistersinger Prelude during the latter half of his career, and that passion is evident in this beautiful performance. Toscanini was particularly pleased with how the first movement turned out in this recording, saying that listening to it was "just like reading the score". Unfortunately he evidently felt differently about the latter two movements. He badly wanted to return to La Mer, but a recording ban that the musician's union imposed shortly after the completion of the Philadelphia sessions put an end to plans to redo the portions Toscanini was unhappy with.

This recording is a bit more sharply etched than one usually hears in the music of Debussy, but this does not to me sound at all inappropriate for the piece. Pierre Monteux played La Mer under the direction of the composer, and reported that Debussy said he couldn't understand why musicians insisted on playing his music with a whispery, ethereal quality. "When I write forte, I mean for it to be played forte," he is supposed to have said. Toscanini takes this score at face value (beyond some reorchestration that apparently had Debussy's blessing) and plays it with great power that in its own way is as evocative of the ocean as the more "whispery" performances.

Berlioz: Queen Mab Scherzo from Romeo and Juliet - February 9th, 1942

This seems to be about the most terrifying piece in the entire orchestral repertoire for the string section (and by "string section" I of course mean "not the basses"). Mercutio's monologue about Queen Mab is one of the most evocative passages in all of Shakespeare, and Berlioz transforms it into breathtakingly virtuosic music that has given nightmares to many a hapless string player (when I played this work with Pierre Boulez in December of 2003 I remember him saying "I'm so sorry but once more through the Queen Mab… just so I can sleep tonight"). According to Shakespeare, Mab's "chariot is an empty hazelnut made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers. And in this state she gallops night by night through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love." If it is indeed possible to directly represent words with musical sound, this piece is a perfect example (in the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film Mercutio used this monologue to describe some sort of ecstasy-like drug, which seems particularly apt for Berlioz's unique descriptive powers).

It's hard to imagine a better performance of the Queen Mab Scherzo than this Toscanini recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The playing is astonishingly light and virtuosic, and remarkably well-balanced. It is particularly clear from listening to this that Philadelphia indeed possessed one of the great string sections the world had ever seen, and the wind playing is remarkable as well (the horns are particularly wonderful).

Toscanini is to be especially commended for championing Romeo and Juliet at a time when Berlioz was inexplicably considered to be low-brow and unworthy of serious attention. This massive score is one of the towering masterpieces of the 19th century and one of the very finest pieces ever composed. Toscanini programmed excerpts from Romeo and Juliet throughout his life (he called the Love Scene "the most beautiful music in the world") but his 1947 performance of the complete score at NBC must rank as one of the most important concerts ever given in the United States. Fortunately that concert was recorded and released by RCA, and we will come to this tremendously important recording in a few weeks.

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That's it for Day 19!

That does it for Toscanini's recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Tomorrow we'll return to the NBC Symphony for good with a slender selection of works that will satisfy a few people but leave most wanting, just like the netflix streaming library.

Day 18: Death at a Festival

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 18!

Yesterday I began my survey of the recordings Toscanini made with the Philadelphia Orchestra between November of 1941 and February of 1942. Let's continue with:


Debussy: Iberia - November 18th, 1941

Of all the works that were staples of Toscanini's repertoire during the latter half of his  career, Debussy's Iberia was the one most recently composed. Of the sixteen pieces Toscanini conducted thirty times or more during this period, only Iberia and another work by Debussy, La Mer, were composed in the 20th century. Considering Toscanini was active until 1954, I can't say that's a good thing.

Toscanini has been widely criticized for playing as little modern music as he did, and for the extremely conservative bent of the few contemporary works he did perform. His defenders have tried to justify this by placing Toscanini in his broader historical context. Harvey Sachs notes that "When Toscanini was born, in 1867, Rossini was still alive… Brahms was not quite thirty-four years old…Bizet, Tchaikovsky Dvořák, Massenet, Boito, and Grieg were all in their twenties; and Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Mascagni, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, and Busoni were under the age of ten." Sachs further notes that Toscanini entered Parma's Royal School of Music during the same month as the world premiere of Brahms's First Symphony, and that when Toscanini made his conducting debut in 1886 Bartók was five years old and Alban Berg was only one.

It is genuinely quite remarkable that a musician from Toscanini's era lived so long into the age of recorded sound and produced so many documents for posterity. Given his age, it can be quite tempting to forgive Toscanini for his indifference to challenging modern music, but in the end I don't find this to be a persuasive excuse. Other long-lived conductors have shown  devotion to the music of their time for the duration of their careers. Leopold Stokowski was an outstanding example of this, and I have seen first-hand the remarkable devotion of the 86-year-old Pierre Boulez to the propagation of challenging new music. In 2008 I performed in the world-premieres of two works by wonderful composers who were in their twenties at the time under the baton of Maestro Boulez, who had guided them tirelessly through the process.

It is hard to imagine a person like Toscanini ever taking part in project like that. He showed great interest in the new music of his youth but as he got older eventually began to turn his back on what was unfamiliar. While you cannot blame a conductor for wanting to primarily promote the music he understands best, the extent to which Toscanini emphasized the music that was most familiar to him can all too easily result in musical hardening of the arteries. The great masterpieces of music are performed frequently for a reason, but for them to stay fresh they have to be played alongside music that is new and unknown. Obviously not every new work is going to be a masterpiece, but if we don't regularly perform new music we will never get to the good stuff that will last for posterity.

Toscanini did wrong by modern music, but he was certainly a musician who followed his convictions. He knew what he liked, and performed his favorite music with consummate skill and professionalism. Iberia was clearly among his favorite pieces, and this stunningly atmospheric Philadelphia Orchestra recording is breathtaking in its evocation of musical exoticism. The French loved the very idea of Spain, and Toscanini exploits their conceptualization of the exotic with phenomenal flair and vitality. I just wish he could have played modern music with the same level of conviction.

Respighi: Roman Festivals - November 19th, 1941

Toscanini knew Respighi well and played a great deal of his music, including the premiere of Roman Festivals in 1929. Twelve years later the music had lost none its intensity in Toscanini's interpretation. Although the sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra is a bit too smooth to really let Respighi's exuberant sounds burst in full exhilaration, this is a fabulous recording of a score Toscanini obviously cared about very much.

Strauss: Death and Transfiguration: January 11th, 1942

Toscanini's admirers evidently have a very difficult time with the conductor's devotion to this great Strauss tone poem. Robert C. Marsh writes that "the material in Death and Transfiguration is dangerously close to vanity in its simplest form, and its treatment is frequently obvious and pretentious. " The slightly more charitable Mortimer H. Frank believes that Toscanini's take on Death and Transfiguration makes "what some feel is not quite a top-drawer score sound better than it actually is" (this would have been the perfect place for a "transfiguration" joke).

I have yet to find a commentator who is squarely in Toscanini's camp to say a kind word about this tone poem, which might make you think that the kind of person who likes Toscanini's interpretations in principle just doesn't seem to like this kind of music. This is of course entirely paradoxical, as Toscanini himself obviously had tremendous affection for this piece. I do as well. As a devout agnostic I have no defined view of what happens after we die, but I'm enough of a Romantic to long for a perfect and idyllic afterlife where, to quote Revelation, God will wipe every tear from our eyes. I can hardly imagine any more sublime image of this afterlife than the Transfiguration of Strauss's tone poem. Music can't always be defined by the sum of its working parts, and what Strauss created in this music is something that goes beyond the limits of analysis.

As for Toscanini's performance, the Philadelphia Orchestra plays with all the unity of purpose and beauty of sonority that you would expect from this ensemble. Marsh believes that a person who is predisposed to enjoy this music would be unlikely to find Toscanini's version of it compelling: "The person who is fond of this score presumably admires some its defects and, if record sales are any guide, enjoys a broad, rhetorical performance in which the melodrama is played for all it's worth. Toscanini, as one would expect, does not comply." No, he doesn't comply, but that makes his performance all the more powerful. Toscanini presents the work with a raw, honest emotion that in its own way is much more powerful than the maudlin tears of a clown. And Toscanini's interpretation is actually very close to that of the composer, whose 1944 recording of this work with the Vienna Philharmonic is in many respects quite similar to this Philadelphia performance. Beauty is, as they say, in the eye of beholder, but Toscanini's eye is in very good company.

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That's it for Day 18. Tomorrow I will finish up the Philadelphia recordings. Until then!

Day 17: Another "great" ninth symphony? No! Shoo, Bert!

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 17!

Tonight it is the big opening night of the Spokane Symphony with the fabulous Jon Kimura Parker as soloist in the Grieg Piano Concerto. Any Spokane readers who have not procured their tickets for this should do so immediately - you don't want to miss a concert like this.

Somehow with all the excitement going on today I managed to listen to and write about Toscanini's remarkable Philadelphia Orchestra recording of Schubert 9. I thought I would go a bit into why Toscanini ended up making these recordings with this most elegant of American orchestras.


During his fourth season at NBC Toscanini had a major falling out with the network and tendered his resignation in April of that year. His reasoning was a bit murky; the letter of resignation Toscanini sent to network head David Sarnoff made note of his ill health and of vague feelings of depression at the tragedy of what was going on in Europe. There may have been some truth to this, but it is widely believed that the catalyst for his decision was a bizarre incident that occurred during rehearsals for Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

Since joining NBC in 1937 Toscanini had been been under the impression that the musicians of the NBC Symphony were for the exclusive use of himself and his approved guest conductors. In fact this whole time they were also being used for all manner of other broadcasts, ranging from jingles to radio serials. Things came to a head during a Carnegie Hall rehearsal on December 27th, 1940, when the 5:00 start time was delayed by half an hour on a day in which thirty-five players from the orchestra had to leave at 7:30 to get back to the studio for another broadcast. When 7:30 came and went the personnel manager gave the signal for the players who had to leave to sneak out one by one. Although Toscanini had notoriously bad eyesight, it is mind-boggling to think that NBC could have thought he would not notice musicians sneaking out of his rehearsal, and he naturally viewed this as an outright expression of contempt.

Now that the jig was up about how the NBC Symphony was really being used, Toscanini grudgingly served out the rest of the season and then resigned his position. His retirement turned out to be very much temporary, and Toscanini ended up conducting the NBC Symphony for another thirteen years. During his brief period of estrangement from NBC Toscanini made a series of remarkable recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In 1941 the Philadelphia Orchestra was still very much the instrument of Leopold Stokowski. Eugene Ormandy had become Music Director in 1938, but the orchestra did not really see the full effects of the transition of leadership for several more years. Stokowski had been responsible for procuring some of the world's most remarkable wind players, such as oboist Marcel Tabuteau and flutist William Kincaid. The famous Philadelphia string sound was also largely the work of Stokowski, who would stop at nothing to get exactly the sonority he desired.

Ironically, Stokowski lost his concertmaster, Mischa Mischakoff,  to the NBC Symphony due to his unique manner of rehearsing the strings. Evidently at the time it was considered a major faux pas to ask the concertmaster to play by himself during a rehearsal unless it was for a solo. Stokowski disregarded this and asked Mischakoff to play a passage he was unhappy with. When Stokowski seem satisfied, Mischakoff asked him "Excuse me Maestro, did you like the way I played this passage?" When Stokowski said it was fine, Mischakoff left his seat and said "I'm very glad you liked it, Maestro, because it's the last note you're ever going to hear me play."

These Philadelphia recordings are particularly important for giving us the chance to hear Toscanini as a guest conductor with a long-established ensemble. With the NBC Symphony Toscanini was leading an orchestra that did not have the years of tradition built into it, and even the finest of the NBC recordings do not have the same tonal weight as these excellent Philadelphia recordings. Unfortunately, these valuable documents did not begin to see release until the 1960s, long after Toscanini's death. In the meantime the masters had deteriorated significantly, so the sound quality is not what it should have been. Modern remastering has improved the sound to very listenable levels, but it remains a bit depressing to think what these recordings could have been had they been shown proper respect.

Schubert: Symphony No. 9 - November 16th, 1941

By common consent this is the prize of Toscanini's Philadelphia recordings, and it is hard to argue with that. This symphony had long been a staple of Toscanini's programming (it had been on his very first symphonic concert in 1896) and he led it masterfully. As in Toscanini's finest Brahms performances, this Schubert recording shows just how powerful music of the Romantic era can sound when unencumbered with copious rhetoric. This performance is certainly not a dull affair, and Toscanini fills it with an exceptional rhythmic vitality from start to finish.

Schubert 9 is a piece that has taken me a long time to come to terms with. It always seemed to me to badly ramble and utterly fail in its overly obvious attempt to match Beethoven's Ninth in character and spirit. I am very gradually coming to like this music, but I am not yet all the way there. I now realize that at the very least Schubert was really onto something with this music. His amazing way with sonority clearly prefigures Bruckner with its organic blocks of sound, and this is a connection I really didn't make until I listened to this Toscanini recording. By letting Schubert's score (mostly) speak for itself, the sinewy timbre groupings and phrases sing with great power and urgency. Although I am still not entirely on board with this music, the remarkable Toscanini recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra must be considered one of the most persuasive accounts it has ever seen.

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I had originally intended to also listen to Debussy's Iberia, but time has now run out. So I will take that up tomorrow along with Respighi's Roman Festivals, Strauss' Death and Transfiguration, and the incidental music from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream.

Have a good Saturday night, and I will see you tomorrow!

Day 16: One Tritsch, One Tratsch, and a Funeral.

Hey y'all, welcome to Day 16!

Today's listening ranged from the picaresque to the whimsical to the bombastic to the funereal - sounds like a pretty successful New Year's Day.

Let's get started with a look at:


Wagner: Siegfried's Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung - March 17th and May 14th, 1941

It's amazing what a difference it makes to take the voices away from this music. Toscanini performed this same excerpt with the singing of Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior in February of 1941, less than one month before this present recording was made. The result was utterly mind-blowing with the voices: exuberant, exalted and profoundly powerful. Recording this same music with orchestra alone unfortunately resulted in one of the dullest and most gravely disappointing performances Toscanini gave of the music of Wagner: the sonority is flat, the phrasing is limp, and the energy is slack. The playing of the NBC is actually quite remarkable in its precision of ensemble, but this performance never gets off the ground musically.

Johann Strauss: Tritsch-Tratsch Polka - May 6th, 1941

This recording is bright and spritely, but the NBC Symphony was no Vienna Philharmonic. If this performance could be wearing clothing it would be wearing a tutu rather than lederhosen.

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 - May 6th and 14th, 1941

Well, I could talk about the fact that this is generally an excellent performance filled with expressive nuance and powerful (if occasionally a bit clangy) playing from Vladimir Horowitz, but I really don't care for this piece much, so I thought I would go into a bit of story-telling instead.

I went to grad school at Northwestern University, where the orchestra director was an oftentimes funny and occasionally very hot-tempered Russian man named Victor Yampolsky. He was what my sister would call a "walking quote-book", coming up with some of the most inspired rehearsal commentary I have ever encountered. Some favorites include "Don't slow down! The bank closes at five, and you won't get any money." And "Do you have a calculator…to help you count?" Perhaps the most wonderful thing I have ever heard a conductor utter was brought on by some unsatisfactory trombone playing: "Trombones! You sound like you are chewing cardboard! Have you ever chewed cardboard before? It's not very good, so STOP!!"

Maestro Yampolsky could occasionally erupt in ferocious anger when he felt the students were not taking the rehearsal seriously, but one of the more amusingly spaced-out moments I encountered at a Northwestern concert fortunately occurred when he was not on the podium. In 2003 a fine doctoral conducting student of Yampolsky's by the name of Anna Binneweg led a performance of the Tchaikovsky first Piano Concerto (you do remember that's the piece I'm talking about, right?) as part of one of her required conducting recitals. There is a section in the first movement of this concerto where the trombones have a major entrance that follows a long pedal-point build-up in the orchestra. In most cases this trombone entrance erupts from the stage in breathtaking sonority when all this tension is finally  released. I should also perhaps explain that Northwestern is well-known for producing extremely "brassy" brass players whose playing was frequently described as "balls to the wall" in their impressive volume.

When the concert came along and the first movement reached this glorious passage, the spine-tingling build-up of sonority welled up from the depths and finally climaxed with the magisterial intoning of…nothing. The trombone players were simply looking off dreamily into space. Anna was ever the consummate professional and always sweetly tactful, but this incident finally led to the clouded look of fury no one thought was possible from her. I cannot remember who the trombonists were in this concert, but one player who was in school with me at the time is now Principal Trombone of the San Francisco Symphony - it's at least possible he was involved (their management should look into it). Had Yampolsky been conducting this concert he may well have stopped the show right there and started screaming. As it was, all that happened was that Yampolsky walked up to the (presumably) dejected trombone players after the concert and said "Guys, I know how much you like to play soft and sensitive, but that was a leeetle bit too soft."

With regards to the Toscanini performance I've really run out of space to talk about it any more, so let's just go ahead and grade it an A+++. The extra + is for it being something extra extra special (the third + was a typo).

Wagner: Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung - May 14th, 1941

Toscanini's performances of Wagner were among the finest of his era, but he could be very inconsistent. This reading of Siegfried's Funeral Music is sublimely beautiful in its depiction of death and grief, yet it was recorded on the very same day Toscanini completed his gravely disappointing Rhine Journey. Where the NBC Symphony's sonority was limp and disinterested in the earlier Götterdämmerung excerpt, they here play with extraordinary power and heart-rending passion. Toscanini had a linear way with this music that was very different from how German conductors of his era would play Wagner, but his finest performances show just how potent his interpretation could be. This is one of his finest performances.

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That's it for Day 16! Check back tomorrow for the first of three days of Toscanini's recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra, including his famous first recording of Schubert's Symphony No. 9. Have a good Friday night, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Day 15: Finding the "grin" in Lohengrin

Ah yes, I believe the time has come for (long drumroll) (ominous voice) Daaaay Fifteeeeeeen.

I started by listening to one of the greatest of all romantic symphonies and continued with two opera excerpts. Both opera extracts had been recorded by Toscanini during his tenure with the New York Philharmonic, but this is the first complete Brahms symphony to see an official release.


Brahms: Symphony No. 1 - March 10th and December 11th, 1941

I have made no secret about the fact I don't care for the standard, "weighty" manner of playing Brahms. The music he writes has great weight and depth, but the lines have nowhere to flow when they are performed with turgid heaviness - playing like this causes his grand, monumental structures to fall apart. It is absolutely true that certain rare conductors of genius can make a good case for the heavy sonorities that are typical of Brahms performances, but as much as I enjoy the finest work of Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler I believe the true sound of these sublime works are in the energetic, flowing readings that are the hallmarks of conductors like Claudio Abbado, Stanisław Skrowaczewski, and Arturo Toscanini.

This stunning 1941 recording of Brahms 1 is not Toscanini's finest performance of the symphony, but it is a reading of the highest level. Brahms's First Symphony was a work Toscanini really understood, and every performance he gave of it was a thing of beauty. His Brahms 1 immediately knocks you over with a searing intensity and a tempo that is somewhat faster than traditional. Yet his performance never becomes rigid or unyielding, nor are his sonorities any less powerful for his faster tempos.

Recordings like this are proof of just how powerful Brahms can be when played with driven, exciting energy. There are certainly beauties of a very different kind to be found in the finest performances of the "heavy" Brahms, but an entirely new and more profound sound comes from these masterpieces when they are played with ecstatic, crackling life. Toscanini understood this brilliantly and performed the Brahms symphonies, especially the first, with great meaning and intelligence.

Verdi: Preludes to Act I and III from La traviata - March 10th, 1941

This is a beautiful performance with lovely cantabile lines from the strings, but ultimately it is not in the same class as the earlier recording with the New York Philharmonic. This performance is more earthbound and much less operatic. Violetta's suffering seems to be commuted to a truncated discomfort, and the overall power of this reading suffers from the desensitized playing. While this recording is certainly far from a failure, it does not belong in the class of Toscanini's finest work.

Wagner: Prelude to Lohengrin - March 17th and May 6th, 1941

Like the 1941 La traviata preludes this Lohengrin recording suffers from an unflattering comparison to an earlier and much more beautiful reading Toscanini gave with the New York Philharmonic. This later performance is almost a minute shorter than the Philharmonic recording and is much more earthy in character. It fails to elicit the "magical, supernatural feelings" or the "celestial harmonies" that so inspired Toscanini when he first heard this music as a boy. Toscanini's finest recordings oftentimes have brisk tempos, but they are never rigid or unyielding. This performance is both.

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That's it for Day 15! Tomorrow features a bit of everything: a bit of piano, a bit more Wagner, a bit bit more Wagner, and even a little polka. If you listen closely enough you might even be able to hear the lederhosen. I'm told Siegfried was buried in them.

Day 14: The Sublime and the Ridiculous

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 14!

I thought I'd get a little variety in my life, so for today's listening I got a bit of both the sublime and the ridiculous. The three Wagner excerpts are among the beautiful creations of Western art, while Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony is...well, let's just say it moves me to tears of a very different sort.

Let's get started with a bit of story time:


Leopold Mozart: Toy Symphony - February 15th, 1941

I may just be a bass player in the Spokane Symphony (described by one reviewer as a "competent, provincial ensemble"), but I have a few claims to musical fame that go beyond the fact I once coughed up wine onto conductor Roger Norrington's floor. Yes sir, I have some stories to tell. Back in November of 1995 I served as a, ahem, featured soloist with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Granted, I was not soloing on the double bass, or even on any instrument that is normally expected to make musical sounds outside of a kindergarten class. But still, I was a soloist with a major orchestra!

What happened was that a group of musicians from the Seattle Youth Symphony orchestras were asked to play various toys in a children's concert performance of Leopold Mozart's incandescently masterpieceful Toy Symphony. The toy I was given was an instrument P.D.Q Bach once wrote for called the Lasso d'Amore, which is a hollowed-out pipe of foam that you twirl around at different speeds to make different pitches. I was devoted to mastering this instrument and practiced it for hours every day, give or take a few hours.

The idea of having Youth Symphony musicians play these toys in the concert was probably that they would look cute in their youthful toy-playing whimsy, but this was strained by the fact that in 1995 I was going through my wannabe criminal delinquent phase. I was fifteen years old and had grown a scraggly beard and refused to smile even to get dates (for some reason I  thought the appropriate attire for this look was a button-down shirt and sport coat). The passport photo I carried around during that time was widely described as "terrorist-looking". I once went through a security check at the Amsterdam airport (after shaving and getting a haircut) where a border control agent looked at my passport, then glanced up at me. He seemed puzzled and then carefully studied the photo. When he finally looked up he said "What happened?"

Anyway, I may not have been the Seattle Symphony's idea of a fresh-faced, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed toy musician looking for playful hijinks, but I'd like to think I gave a perfectly satisfying performance on the Lasso d'Amore that was filled with profound musical substance.

If indeed a meaningful performance of the Toy Symphony is possible, it was certainly intrepreted in this manner by Toscanini in this 1941 performance with the NBC Symphony. The toys were all played with remarkably concentrated precision, and Leopold Mozart's unique way with orchestral fun was given deeply serious under-tones (based on Leopold's portrayal in Amadeus I'm not sure that's at all inappropriate). Overall I enjoyed this performance very much, but it could have used a lot more Lasso d'Amore.

Wagner: Act I, Scene III from Die Walküre - February 22nd, 1941

Toscanini was the first non-German to ever be invited to conduct at the Wagner temple at Bayreuth, where he conducted for the first time in 1930. The seeds of this appearance were sown thirty years earlier, when Wagner's son Siegfried attended a performance of Tristan that Toscanini led at La Scala. Siegfried was sufficiently impressed to report to his mother about the extraordinary level of the Italian production. Cosima Wagner later wrote to Toscanini to say that "My son has given me an account of the performance of Tristan which he attended in Milan, and he has told me so many good things about it that I take upon myself the duty of expressing to you the contentment I feel in knowing that a work of such great difficulty has been performed with care on a foreign stage….All these indications of your respect towards and instinct for the incomparable work to which you have dedicated yourself with so much ardor made my son very happy to have been a witness, and at a distance I join in his satisfaction."

Despite this apparent appreciation from the Wagner family it took quite some time for Toscanini to be invited to conduct at Bayreuth - the idea of inviting an Italian to conduct at this most Teutonic of festivals seemed unthinkable. When finally the pieces came into place for Toscanini to conduct at Bayreuth the effect was galvanizing. Rehearsing entirely from memory he was able to correct mistakes in the parts that had gone unnoticed for decades. He would erupt in fury when the orchestral playing was not to his liking, and nearly left the festival out of anger. Siegfried Wagner convinced him to stay by promising that the weaker players would be replaced (as a union musician I can't condone this).

It is very unfortunate that no complete Wagner operas conducted by Toscanini exist in good sound (a surviving 1937 Salzburg Die Meistersinger is almost unlistenable) but the few excerpts he led at NBC are so extraordinary that he can be forgiven. I wish that Toscanini had instead recorded the final scene of Act III from Die Walküre with its heartbreaking duet between Wotan and Brünnhilde, but this Act I excerpt will suffice. Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior joined NBC for this performance, and these two great Wagner singers are spectacular.

This Die Walküre excerpt was drawn from the same live broadcast that the next recording came from, an all-Wagner program that one excited amazon reviewer called "the greatest Wagner concert of all time." The Die Walküre excerpt is wonderful, but still greater was yet to come on the same concert.

Wagner: Dawn, Duet, and Siegfried's Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung - February 22nd, 1941

Toscanini conducted the concert arrangement of Siegfried's Rhine Journey many, many times, but this is the only surviving performance of the excerpt in its full operatic context. Although his recordings of the concert arrangement are wonderful, this recording with Melchior and Traubel is in an entirely different class. Of Toscanini's recording of the orchestral excerpt with the New York Philharmonic I complained about the overly polished, antiseptic sound, but presenting this music in its intended context seems to blow all of that away. The youthful energy of this recording absolutely explodes out of the NBC Symphony, and the singing of the soloists is nothing short of stunning. In this scene Siegfried has just spent his first night with Brünnhilde and is setting off for adventure down the Rhine. This is the music of exalted exuberance, and it apparently needs to be heard with singers to come across with its full powerful effect.

I would rank this Wagner performance with the 1939 Beethoven Eroica as the greatest Toscanini recording I have yet listened to during this project. Incidentally this comes from one of the very few official RCA releases that are currently available for download from amazon. I would strongly recommend obtaining this extraordinary performance.

I should also perhaps note that this recording is another example of the incredibly schizophrenic brass playing of the NBC Symphony. These first two Wagner excerpts were drawn from the very same concert, but the brass (and particularly principal trumpeter Harry Glantz) sound mind-blowingly awful in the Die Walküre scene, while they somehow sound fabulous in the Rhine Journey. Glantz is note-perfect in the climax of the Rhine Journey duet (in the same passage where he split at least one note in all three of Toscanini's orchestra-only recordings) yet sounded like an amateur in the earlier excerpt. I have no explanation.

Wagner: Brünnhilde's Immolation from Götterdämmerung - February 24th, 1941

This was also performed on the same concert as the two earlier Wagner excerpts, though for some reason it was decided to rerecord Brünnhilde's Immolation in a separate recording session two days later. It was this studio recording that was approved by Toscanini and appears on the official RCA release. The live performance has been released on EMI's Great Conductor's series (which is available for download), and Toscanini fans have long debated whether the studio or live version is superior. I've found that there is a bit more raw intensity to the live performance, while the studio recording has more of a contemplative quality. This latter approach seems to me the more appropriate. Brünnhilde is facing both her own mortality and the end of the reign of the gods, yet willingly rides her horse into her own funeral pyre. The studio recording seems to analyze her emotions at a distance, yet for me that makes the music even more powerful. I don't want to split hairs, as both the live and studio recordings are extraordinary. They just tell two different sides of the story, and the fact that Toscanini could tell both sides so effectively exposes the lie that he was always rigid in his interpretation.

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That's it for today! Tomorrow will bring Brahms 1 and two Verdi excerpts.

Take care, and I'll see you soon!