There is significant overlap between this set and EMI’s survey
of Toscanini’s BBC Symphony-HMV legacy on EMI Classics 7 23334-2, a
6-CD box. The EMI however is missing the Cherubini, Geminiani and the
Haffner Symphony. I’ll have a little to say about respective
sound quality later.
When he came to Britain in 1935 for the third London Music Festival,
Toscanini had effectively priced himself out of all native orchestras’
reach except the BBC Symphony. Adrian Boult’s ensemble was rivalled in
the city only by Beecham’s slightly younger London Philharmonic.
However, in the BBC Symphony Toscanini found the work of an expert trainer,
and a musician then very much in awe of him - Boult. The orchestra also
sported a wonderful leader in the shape of Arthur Catterall, whom the
Italian conductor is on record as having highly praised. The orchestra was
strong in almost all departments, notably the wind choir. There was
considerable subterfuge to ensure these recordings were made and preserved,
without Toscanini’s permission. It was not until decades after his
death that many of them were first released. I’m sure that the frisson
of excitement when the first LP transfers emerged will not easily be
forgotten.
Toscanini never conducted a complete Cherubini opera but the
Anacreon overture conveys the work’s mythical buoyancy with
great drama. This is the earliest of Toscanini’s inscriptions of it
and it’s the best, with the orchestra dashing and driving and the
sound picture more theatrically intense than the NBC broadcast material.
It’s right to set this reading beside those of important
contemporaries such as Mengelberg, Leo Blech and Ettore Panizza. Successive
examples from the NBC Symphony - 1939, 1943, 1945, 1948, 1950 and 1951 -
serve only to heighten admiration for the June 1935 Brahms Fourth Symphony.
It’s impossible to ignore the superb lyricism, the swelling exultant
flow of the music-making, its passion held in check by refined orchestral
discipline. Both Toscanini and Boult revered Fritz Steinbach as an
interpreter of Brahms. It’s possible, maybe, to detect something of
Steinbach in their shared inheritance in the clarity of textures and
malleably flexible but never distended rhythm. Admittedly, as recorded, the
winds are backwardly placed in Queen’s Hall, but this urgently alive
reading is one of Toscanini’s very best inscriptions of a Brahms work
and an object lesson to all conductors. The first disc concludes with his
powerfully convincing concert version of Siegfried’s Death and
Funeral Music. The following year he recorded this with the New York
Philharmonic Symphony and later, multiply, with the NBC.
The second disc offers more Wagner from 5 June 1935, A Faust
Overture, which he did quite often later at the NBC; the LP was of the
1946 performance. The Prelude to Act I and the Good Friday Music from
Parsifal remind one of his famously fluidly expansive Bayreuth
performances - his account there, at the time, being one of the slowest yet
to be heard. The Act II Fanfare and Good Friday Music are a
little slower than the studio recording he made. The performance of the
Enigma variations was greatly admired by the man who was then, by
common consent, Elgar’s greatest living interpreter, Landon Ronald.
Each variation is strongly characterised and each opportunity for soloistic
presence is richly inhabited. Toscanini brings out the harmonic, the
structural implications of the music much more than most, and does so with
great precision. That said, this is not as moving a performance as the one
conjured over the years by Pierre Monteux.
The Geminiani Concerto grosso (12 June 1935) is making its
first appearance here, some technical problems having previously precluded
issue. The litheness and ensemble strength of the BBC’s strings is a
tribute to the section leaders as much as to the experienced Catterall.
Rossini’s Semiramide overture is the earliest Toscanini
performance known to have survived. In terms of tonal warmth and sheer zest
it’s probably the pick of a big (all NBC) bunch. The disc is rounded
out - if that’s not an infelicitous phrase - by Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony. Talking of infelicity, the doyen of British critics,
Ernest Newman, sourly remarked that parts of this performance sounded
flippant. I have to say I can’t hear what he means unless he was
basing his yardstick on, say, Hans Richter. We’ll never know how
Richter took this symphony, or indeed anything, with any degree of accuracy
as he never recorded, any more than did Steinbach. In any case it’s
really very much a question of degree as to whether you prefer this or the
slightly later 1936 New York version.
La Mer opens Disc 4. It’s a wonderfully vivid reading, made
in June 1935, with trademark precision but balance. In recent months
I’ve auditioned a Koussevitzky performance from New York that simply
astounds, so gripping is it. Toscanini’s is not quite that pulse
quickening, nor is it truly Francophile, if that appellation means so very
much. I well recall the EMI LP coupling of this and the Enigma
variations and it sounded wonderful back then and not so much less now.
Mozart’s Haffner had already been recorded by Toscanini back in
New York in 1929. Subsequent broadcast performances followed with the NBC in
the 1940s. This BBC performance isn’t quite as big a reading as the
New York one of six years previously but it’s less doctrinaire and
more flexible than the 1946 NBC. Admirers of the horn playing of Aubrey
Brain, father of Dennis, will welcome the chance to savour the incidental
music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As an encore there is
Beethoven’s The Creatures of Prometheus overture which was
recorded in Queen’s Hall for commercial release - it never appeared.
Perhaps there was no suitable coupling, as Christopher Dyment suggests in
his outstanding booklet notes.
The transfers here are really splendid. They have a sense of
immediacy and warmth, with very little noticeable surface noise, whilst
still yielding a considerable amount of clarity. The famed Queen’s
Hall acoustic is preserved in all its richness. If you have the EMI box then
you have a real dilemma because of the three extra items in this WHRA
release. Toscanini enthusiasts certainly need one or the other; my hunch is
that this WHRA is, in its restoration skill and completeness, the one to go
for, notwithstanding the fact that EMI naturally holds the masters.
Jonathan Woolf
Previous review: John Quinn
Full track-listing
CD 1 [62:58]
Luigi CHERUBINI (1760-1842)
Anacreon - Overture [10:30]
Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 [38:55]
Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
Götterdämmerung, Act III - Siegfried’s Death and
Funeral Music [13:17]
CD 2 [68:26]
Sir Edward ELGAR (1857-1934)
Variations on an original theme (‘Enigma’), Op. 36
[27:17]
Richard WAGNER
A Faust Overture [12:35]
Parsifal - Prelude to Act 1 [15:20] Act II Fanfare and Good Friday
Music [11:34]
CD 3 [54:49]
Francesco GEMINIANI (1687-1762)
Concerto Grosso in G minor, Op. 3, No. 2 [8:07]
Gioacchino ROSSINI (1792-1868)
Semiramide - Overture [12:02]
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 [34:28]
CD 4 [69:09]
Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
La Mer - Three Symphonic Sketches [22:35]
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)
Symphony No. 35 in D, K 385 (‘Haffner’) [19:32]
Felix MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Incidental Music, Op. 61:
Nocturne [5:48]; Scherzo [4:21]
Encore: Ludwig van BEETHOVEN
The Creatures of Prometheus - Overture, Op. 43* [4:46]
