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Stock’s is a name that has always been on the
margins of appreciation but this exemplary production should do
much to challenge indifference. If you know him primarily, or
exclusively, as accompanist to Schnabel in their recordings of
the Fourth and Fifth Beethoven Concertos then this double CD set
will round out your appreciation decisively. It would be good
to hear more of his large-scale symphonic recordings some time
– the Schumann Spring Symphony has appeared in recent years in
a box devoted to the Chicago Symphony – but he recorded a fair
amount of important literature, in addition to the material collated
here.
What we do have however is, I think, enough to
demonstrate that Stock has been undervalued. He was born in Germany
in 1872 and studied violin and composition at the Cologne Conservatoire;
one of his teachers was Humperdinck and Mengelberg was a classmate.
He joined Theodore Thomas’s fledgling Chicago orchestra, then
only a few years old, as a violist but soon advanced to Thomas’s
assistant and on the older man’s death in 1905 stood in as conductor
– a position he was to hold until his own death in 1942. He didn’t
tour much and made essentially a local reputation. In a land then
colonized by such heavyweights as Stokowski, Koussevitzky and
Toscanini Stock must have seemed solidly Teutonic and just a bit
penny plain – much as his own name lacked the glamour of the flamboyant
maestri then bestriding the globe.
Appearances as ever can be deceptive. Stock was
an astute orchestral builder and a talented musician, flexible
and versatile enough to cope with intriguing corners of the repertoire
as much as the master works. The Meistersinger Prelude to Act
1 convinces through its unhurried grandeur, Stock demonstrating
a kind of portamenti-legato style that comes close to ecstasy,
lavishing eloquently judged rubati along the way. The end is held
back and not pushed forward, adding to the effectiveness of the
reading. Of the Brahms Hungarian Dances in the Dvořák
orchestrations No. 20 is especially superb and one should note
that these are, apparently, previously unissued 1926 sides, the
only such examples here and all the more valuable for it (in excellent
sound). The only example of a compromised recording is
the December 1925 Goldmark. Wonderful piece and excellently played
– but this sounds like one of those provisional, quasi-acoustic
set ups in which the Victor engineers stuck to the devil they
knew, as it doesn’t sound as if there are many strings and the
uniform thin tone and portamenti are here rather a trial. Stock
is predictably athletic and full of finesse in these smaller items
– particularly good with the winds and spruce rhythm of the Suk
– but he is splendid with the Tchaikovsky Symphony. This is a
subjectivist approach, in line with prevailing orthodoxies, or
some prevailing orthodoxies at any rate. There are a lot of rhetorical
pauses and emotive underlinings but the linearity of the music
making is not compromised and it emerges as a commanding and sympathetic
reading.
The second disc is especially valuable in presenting
Walton’s Scapino in its original version. Written as a commission
for the Chicago Orchestra’s 50th Anniversary season
Stock took it into the recording studio three weeks after premiering
it. The Dohnányi is not a work of vast pretensions but
the 1928 recording holds up well and allows one to appreciate
the conductor’s élan and elegance, most notably in the
Romanza where the rhythm is pliant, the control immaculate. Strauss’s
Also sprach Zarathustra tended to be judged against the almost
contemporaneous Koussevitzky recording and found wanting but listening
to it coolly one can but admire its nobility and grandeur, the
degree of structural cohesion and seamlessness that Stock generates
from its pages and the clarity and direction of it as a whole.
Stock was a well-rounded musician, stylistically
apt and adaptable. Though Mark Obert-Thorn warns us about the
recording of the Strauss the sound here, as on all the discs,
is bright and natural sounding. Side joins have been expertly
managed; surface noise is present of course but with no suppression
of higher frequencies; Obert-Thorn has written the notes and I
recommend them, as indeed I do this enterprising and convincing
selection. More Stock please.
Jonathan Woolf
Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Frederick
Stock