On 5th October
1975 Vittorio Gui had not long celebrated
his 90th birthday (on 14th
September). Although he had reached
an age when every day might be his last
he had no particular reason to suppose
that this concert would conclude his
career; death actually arrived rather
swiftly, just twelve days later.
Only very recently,
when reviewing
the reissue of his recording of Haydn’s
"The Seasons", I suggested
that this was a conductor whose art
deserved greater currency and that the
Italian radio archives should be examined.
So is this the answer to a prayer –
the great man’s final statements on
two of his best loved composers, at
the head of the orchestra he had founded
(as the Orchestra Stabile di Firenze)
in 1928?
Well, yes and no. Undoubtedly
the occasion must have been a moving
one, and the disc will be a pleasant
memento for anyone who was present,
or who has fond memories of hearing
this conductor "in the flesh".
But this is precisely the problem. You
would have to be middle-aged at least
to have personal memories of a concert
conducted by Gui, and somewhat more
to have attended one of his performances
at Glyndebourne, Covent Garden or any
other opera house. The recording world
invited him to set down three imperishable
Rossini sets, plus a highly regarded
Figaro and a few other operas;
to the world today, even in Italy, he
is virtually an unknown factor as a
conductor of the symphonic repertoire.
Might it have been better to sacrifice
stereo sound and delve back to the days
when he was a youngster in his seventies
and still at the height of his powers?
Again, yes and no.
The recording is a full-blooded, lively
one and enables us to hear only too
well that the Florence orchestra was
at that time an accident-prone, raucously
undisciplined band. But, rather like
the recordings conducted by Pablo Casals
in his 90s, there is a sense of occasion
in which you can still get caught up.
The RAI’s Rome orchestra, of which a
tape exists of a 1958 performance of
the Brahms under Gui, and which could
possibly have been issued instead, is
not exactly blemish-free but has a leaner
sound, with plenty of details of balancing
and articulation to suggest that Gui’s
younger self had intervened much more
thoroughly rather than limiting himself
to the grand outlines. On the other
hand, there is an all-or-nothing feeling
to the late performance which the earlier
one doesn’t quite seem to match, in
so far as my dim off-the-air copy enables
me to judge.
The truth is that Gui
should have been invited to record Brahms
– of whom he had been a standard-bearer
in Italy no less than Toscanini – in
Vienna or Berlin, and either of the
two performances is sufficient to make
that point. For Gui’s recipe in Brahms
was simple but sublime; he chose the
right tempi (this is subjective but
he had a way of making his tempi sound
absolutely right) and got the orchestra
to play its heart out. As far as tempi
are concerned, the two performances
differ in each movement only by a few
seconds, so the late performance is
not compromised either by haste à
la Toscanini or plodding à
la Klemperer. On both occasions
the first movement is swift compared
with Klemperer or Boult (just to take
two of his near contemporaries) and
the opening is not gently eased into.
It is as though a window is opened onto
something that is already happening.
Both times, too, the music surges naturally
into the second subject with an ease
not often matched. His slow movement
has a longer timing than either Boult
or Klemperer (whose Brahms was not particularly
slow), but more because he finds no
need to press ahead with the hammering
triplet passages. His scherzo is full
of energy and he is notably successful
in dropping into exactly the right pace
for the "poco sostenuto" passage.
The finale is remarkable for the ease
with which each variation emerges from
the preceding one, as well as for its
inexorable overall sweep. A great interpretation,
then, and you could hardly fail to be
swept up by the Florence performance
once, but it really is too fallible
orchestrally to permit frequent hearings.
I should be interested to hear what
a sympathetic re-mastering of the earlier
tapes could produce.
The start of the Mozart
left me frankly flabbergasted. It is
so slow, and not only that, the
theme is completely legato, with the
accompaniment very gentle, all quite
without the drive which we normally
expect. As it went on I began to see
a sort of sense to it, and the forte
passages actually have great conviction;
where Klemperer, at a similar tempo,
sounds merely sedate, Gui certainly
does not "go gentle into that good
night", he truly rages. The slow
movement is unusually fast, two-in-a-bar
not six, and also very legato, thus
avoiding the danger of slogging which
attends slower performances. The minuet
is broad but tough, the finale quite
(as opposed to very) fast and again,
weighty. A curious and interesting interpretation,
but the question is, did Gui always
conduct it that way? In this case I
have no earlier comparison, but I do
have a 39th symphony recorded
in Naples in 1961 which is quite weighty
but has a grip, vitality and character
which are not much in evidence here.
So in the case of Mozart, I fear that
the reduction of the interpretation
to its broad outlines has seriously
compromised it. I would be frankly surprised
if the RAI archives could not produce
a Gui 40th from the ’fifties
or ’sixties but if there isn’t one,
then the 39th I mentioned
would serve the conductor’s memory much
better, as would his 1957 Così
fan tutte or his 1960 Requiem.
As I say, the record
shows that even in his 91st
year Gui could generate a sense of occasion,
but I cannot imagine anybody hearing
this without wishing he could hear the
conductor performing the same pieces
ten or twenty years earlier.
Christopher Howell
Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino/Vittorio
Gui 
