In general, I’m a fan of Erich Kunzel. Most of the time, he treats
pops concert warhorses with respect and delivers honest, solid
performances. But this disc, with its vague theme of exotic places,
misses the mark on just about every level. I don’t think there’s
a real programming idea here, and even if there were, these less-than-stirring
performances would puncture it. Kunzel and company are far too
sleek and professional to elicit an outright thumbs-down, but
I can’t summon a great deal of enthusiasm for this.
The
disc starts off with the fastest Bolero I’ve heard in
years. At 13:26,
Kunzel is putting it in the range Zubin Mehta hit in his glossy
LA Philharmonic recording for Decca almost 40 years ago. And
the brisk tempo might be welcome by listeners who grew up with
the recordings of Toscanini and Koussevitzky, who similarly
zoomed through it. But anyone who wants to hear this music pushed
to the obsessive brink, which is evidently what Ravel had in
mind, won’t much go for it. The recording Ravel led himself
in 1928 is controversial in terms of determining the correct
stable pitch for the recording. The Philips reissue of it in
the 1980s placed it at a running time of just under sixteen
minutes, while later restorations have pitched it lower, resulting
in running times as slow as 16:25, which more accurately matches
the composer’s written description of the piece as being 17
minutes in duration.
Among
the versions around the 16 to 17 minute range, the late Charles
Munch recording with the Orchestre de Paris on EMI seems to
be the loving but, alas, slack work of an aging conductor losing
his grip; indeed, he died not long after that recording was
made. For less than a decade previously, Munch had done the
work in just over 15 minutes in a seething account with the
Boston Symphony for RCA. The famous Karajan DG recording (16:08) has many fans; I’m not among them. Karajan beefs it up with a second
snare drum, but thanks to his imprecise baton technique, the
two drums are never quite in sync, which drives me up the wall.
Additionally, between electronic manipulation and the conductor’s
manipulation of the players, Karajan’s recording actually manages
to have the brass drowned out by the strings toward the end,
a sound that would be virtually impossible to achieve live in
concert. Similarly paced, Simon Rattle’s Bolero is joyless
and grim. Some of the slower versions try too hard and end up
tipping off the scale in the other direction, such as the bombastic
version Daniel Barenboim recorded with the Orchestre de Paris
for DG, running over 17-and-a-half minutes and falling apart
from its own ponderous weight. It is interesting to note that
when Barenboim rerecorded the piece in Chicago, he decided to forego risking the slow tempo and dashed it off considerably
faster. I have also heard that Ravel’s associate, the Portuguese
conductor Pedro de Freitas-Branco made a recording of Bolero
that runs over 18:30.
I haven’t heard that, but would be very interested in hearing
a version that pushes it to such an obsessive extreme.
This
leaves as finest contenders the sexy and swaggering (if unsmiling)
Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra on EMI (17:09),
the colorful if a little laid-back André Previn and the London
Symphony, also on EMI (17:15) and the impressively controlled,
though rather prim Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and the Minnesota
Orchestra on Vox, or for a real treat, in surround sound on
a high-resolution remastering from Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab
(17:22). I’d also like to draw attention to a mostly-forgotten
one-off that Morton Gould and the London Symphony did for Varese
Saraland Records in 1978. It has the flaws of an unedited performance,
but also the excitement. Gould’s tempo is slow (16:44),
but he lets the players cut loose. Being a musician who regarded
himself more as an entertainer than an abstract theoretician,
Gould also doesn’t mind pulling all the stops out in the final
pages, making a glorious noise, whereas most conductors keep
the hand on the throttle. If you can find it, it’s a highly
entertaining recording, also including scorching renditions
of Alberto Ganister’s Estancia Suite, the “Polka and
Fugue” from Jerome Weinberger’s Shawna (in a performance
that even surpasses the legendary Reiner/Chicago Symphony version),
and Shostakovich’s Festive Overture. In the end, though,
I’d probably say the best seducer of the lot is Muti, though
Previn gives his players more freedom, avoiding the slightly
driven manner of Mute’s. The real question is this: Why has
there not been a great recording of Ravel’s Bolero in
almost thirty years?
Getting
back to the recording at hand, it is very handsomely played
and recorded, so anyone searching for a crystalline recording
of the work at a brisk clip, this should do nicely. In its well-coiffed
elegance, this recording reminds me somewhat of the version
Christoph von Dohnányi recorded with the Cleveland Orchestra
for Teldec in 1989. Like the Dohnányi, I can respect it on a
technical level without liking it. I’ll take the slow burn any
day over the wham, bam, thank ya, ma’am.
Unlike
the rest of this program, the music of Borodin does not evoke
Spain. But it is equally colorful and actually slips fairly easily into
this company. Alas, then, that Kunzel chose to salute a cheesy
musical (Kismet) with excerpts from the Borodin works
subjected to hatchet jobs in the Broadway piece. For that matter,
though, Kunzel’s medley is hardly much better. We hear the opening
snippet of the Symphony No. 2, with a gratuitous gong-thwack
for good measure, not to mention a bellowing tuba that manages
to blare out over the other instruments. Then, without transition,
we get a cut from In the Steppes of Central Asia, abruptly
dropped for a lush string orchestration of the “Nocturne” from
the String Quartet No. 2, closing with (yawn) a bit of
Symphony No. 1. But wait, there’s more! The second medley
gives us chunks of the quartet again, the Petite Suite
(not familiar with that), and bits of the “Overture” and “Polovtsian
Dances” from Prince Igor. I was particularly annoyed
by the excerpts from the dances, which even make cuts within
the dances. The first dance used here is the one with the famous
kettledrum introduction. Here it is, well, loud. Then the languorous
dance comes in, but way under tempo. Then Kunzel leaps ahead
for an overly fast tempo for the next dance. Going into the
coda, he conversely chooses a leaden tempo and refuses to budge
from it. Is there truly some crowd out there, clamoring for
chopped Borodin in honor of a cheesy musical performed in this
manner? If so, they’ll be delighted with this, I guess. But
for those who want to hear this music conducted for real, with
true joy and a symphonic concept which links all the tempos
together, listen to the classic Ernest Ansermet recording with
the Swiss Romande Orchestra on Decca.
Kunzel
offers the two suites from Carmen next. Well, most of
them, anyway. For no apparent reason, he cuts the “Nocturne”
from the second suite, even though the disc had plenty of room
left. I found Kunzel’s versions of the suites pleasant, without
being compelling. I would compare them to the lyricism and poise
of the accounts Eugene Ormandy recorded with the Philadelphia
Orchestra for RCA in 1975, only Kunzel offers a shade more charm,
except in the “Prelude to Act One,” where he is uncharacteristically
melodramatic. To hear this music taken seriously and played
with real drama, I love the swaggering, strutting rendition
Leonard Bernstein made with the New York Philharmonic for Columbia in the 1960s. The one movement that
doesn’t come off well was that “Nocturne,” which Bernstein pushes,
while Ormandy finds a full, romantic shape for it. In other
movements, Bernstein takes a more operatic approach than the
lyrical Ormandy or the suave Kunzel, etching lots of character
into the notes. In a more direct comparison, one could say that
Kunzel gets an even more flexible playing from the Cincinnati
Pops than Jesus Lopez-Cobos did about a decade ago in his recording
of Bizet a single Carmen Suite for Telarc with the Cincinnati
Symphony, which consists of many of the same players. Telarc’s
sound, while similar, now seems a little more focused, thanks
to the high-resolution technology. Cincinnati’s Music Hall remains a little
overly large, though, letting sound get lost somewhere high
overhead. The nice thing about the Telarc recordings is that
they actually achieve a better sound than one can hear anywhere
in that concert hall during a live performance. The sound is
even better in multichannel format, which helps draw the listener
into that cavernous space.
Finally,
Kunzel offers a rather light and bright performance of Albéniz’s
“Fęte-Dieu ŕ Séville,” as orchestrated by Arbós. By light, I
mean emotionally, for there is some heavy bass in the recording,
capturing the rumble of the bass drum on the all-wooden stage
of Cincinnati’s
Music Hall with impressive texture. But the performance itself
makes no attempt to treat this impressionist picture of a sacred
Easter processional as anything other than pretty sounds, clocking
in at a swift 7:09. By comparison, Ernest Ansermet’s old
Decca recording of the complete suite offers real grandeur with
a timing of 8:15,
with the bracingly dry old-style French sound of the Swiss Romande
Orchestra. Even better, despite a somewhat glaring early digital
recording, is the complete version of the suite recorded by
the London Symphony under Mexican conductor Enrique Batíz on
EMI. In some repertoire, Batíz himself can come across as a
little glib, but in this work, he was in his element, suspending
time in the quiet coda to search out profundity and mystery,
where Kunzel offers little but calm. Let’s face it, in a work
this short, the fact that Batíz is almost two minutes slower
than Kunzel indicates a serious difference in vision.
With
the availability of superior versions of all these pieces, I’m
afraid this becomes superfluous, unless the particular assemblage
of these pieces in light, bright performances appeals.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
[65:27] 
