This latest release in Naxos’s Great Conductors series
usefully and pertinently turns the spotlight on Victor de Sabata’s earliest
recordings – the small series of discs made for Italian Parlophon during
a three-day period in Turin in December 1933. Added to which is the
much better known Pastoral Symphony, recorded in Rome in 1947.
As Mark Obert-Thorn’s Producer’s Note explains de Sabata also recorded
the Act II Intermezzo from Wolf-Ferrari’s I Quattro rusteghi
at the earlier session, a performance never issued and now presumably
lost. Whilst he was subsequently to re-record it for HMV the other titles
here are discographically unique as far as he was concerned and this
is especially important in the case of de Sabata’s own Juventus.
He had quite a lot to contend with in the recording
studio of the Turin broadcasting authority. A dead room acoustically
- and small - with a commensurately small body of strings, this is especially
noticeable in the Stravinsky, which suffers from a lack of body and
depth. Quite a novelty for the time Fireworks had already been
recorded by Kleiber in Berlin and by Gabriel Pierné conducting
the Colonne Orchestra. The Mossolov – or Mosolov – was certainly one
of the earliest recordings, if not the first, of this Futurist exercise
(Ehrlich recorded it with the Paris Symphony and, perhaps improbably
… perhaps not … Arthur Fiedler had a go with his Boston forces). De
Sabata has the measure of its driving implacability. Perhaps the most
delightfully played of the four surviving pieces from these early sessions
are the two movements drawn from the Glazunov symphonic suite From
the Middle Ages. I think Sevitzky and the Indianapolis Orchestra
had beaten de Sabata to the honour of pioneers here – especially as
they’d recorded the whole four-movement suite – but de Sabata brings
real expressive freedom to the Troubadour’s Song, lacing the
delicious music with succulence and opulent portamenti and in the ensuing
Scherzo catching the nasality and archaisms to perfection. A
pity the clinking percussion is so terribly over-recorded but that was
one of the liabilities of the Turin set-up.
De Sabata’s own Juventus, something of a compositional
calling card for him as a younger man, is written up in the notes here
as a Korngold inspired affair. It’s true that the work was conducted
by Toscanini – de Sabata was later to conduct at the older man’s funeral
in 1957 – but, more relevantly, by Strauss, who must surely have benignly
recognized his own stamp on the work. If there is indeed a kinship with
Korngold it’s very heavily filtered through the explicitly Straussian
aesthetic. Gorgeous violins lead, Don Juan like, into the late Romantic
syntax warmed by lavish portamanti – turbulent, energetic and distinctly
central European. The main work here, though, is the 1947 Pastoral
recorded in Rome with the Santa Cecilia Academy Orchestra. This is certainly
nether hard bitten nor over languorously genteel. De Sabata steers a
judicious path between generosity of phrasing and architectural alignment.
The first movement is full of delightful inflections, the rise and flow
of the music relaxed but full of inner part detail and appropriate momentum.
In the Andante he is certainly not as leisurely as Stokowski, say, or
Beecham, instead finding a sense of almost improvisatory freedom warmed
by auburn strings and Elysian winds. The concluding allegretto has prodigious
layering of sound, with great clarity of sound but also great metrical
freedom. He encourages just the right weight of rhythmic impetus and
the arco and pizzicato momentum is conveyed with skill and panache.
For so electrifying a conductor de Sabata’s legacy
is woefully small; there are few obvious signs here of the incendiary
medium he would routinely become when stepping onto the rostrum. For
all their imperfections these early, rather miscellaneous recordings
cast de Sabata in a somewhat unfamiliar embryonic light and are strongly
recommended.
Jonathan Woolf
Turin Orchestra of the
Italian Broadcasting Authority (all except Beethoven) recorded Turin December
1933.