Sunday Classics: An intrepid voice from the rugged North -- Jan Sibelius

The concluding rondo of Sibelius's Violin Concerto gets a rousing performance by David Oistrakh with the Moscow Radio Symphony under Gennady Rozhdestvensky, February 1966. A different Oistrakh recording of the piece was one of my first three classical LPs -- but totally by accident. What I wanted on that record was what the world considered the "filler" work -- see below.

by Ken

I worry -- okay, I worry a lot -- about the lack of exposure our young (and not-so-young) folk get to classical music. Damned if I know what to do about it, but this week I've been remembering how much music has stayed with me from first exposure in a "music appreciation" ordeal I and my eighth-grade classmates were subjected to and made fun of.

I'm not sure it had much impact on the other kids, though. It made a difference that I'd already had some exposure. We always had a piano in our house (my mother had played), and I'd taken lessons, though not very fruitfully; I wasn't much for practicing. We had my mother's old classical 78s, and even a few classical LPs. Perhaps most important, there was no open hostility to classical music in our household. (I shudder to think what it must be like now when culture generally and classical music in particular are free targets for derision.)

That summer I got to pick out my first own classical LPs, my first stereo LPs (though I'm not sure I even had a stereo record player yet!), as a graduation present from my grandmother. The three LPs I picked were all based on things I'd heard in that silly music appreciation ordeal. I would add that they're all exceptionally beautiful records, which I still listen to with great pleasure.

They all featured the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, which indeed became one of my early classical passions. I not only bought their records but went to some of their New York concerts. (By then we were living in New York.) And again it's a passion that has stayed with me. I have to admit that deep down I still kind of wish every orchestra could sound like the Philadelphia did in the Ormandy years.

So what were the three records? First there was Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite, the first Ormandy-Philadelphia stereo version -- a piece, a performance, and a recording job I still adore. Then there were two LPs bought for pieces by Finland's master composer, Jan Sibelius (1865-1957): his stirring patriotic symphonic poem Finlandia (1899-1900) and one of the Four Legends from the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic), The Swan of Tuonela (1895).

With Finlandia we find ourselves smack back in the "Age of Nationalism," which we last visited in the Czech realm of Smetana and Dvořák. It just took the wave of national liberation longer to reach the northerly Finns, literally squeezed throughout their history between Sweden and Russia. At this point, Finland was a Grand Duchy of Russia, and listeners quickly picked up on the nationalistic fomenting going on in Sibelius's symphonic poem. (Titles given consideration, en route to Finlandia, included The Awakening of Finland and multiple forms of Fatherland.)

It's straightforwardly enough put together: a dark and brooding, even menacing initial section; a more urgent working out of some of this same material announced by the trumpets at 2:47; at 3:22 a newly confident, even celebratory section ushered in by a strangely striding five-beat figure; all resolving at 5:10 into the famous hymnlike tune stated first by the woodwinds, then taken over at 6:04 by the strings.

Finlandia, Op. 26

Philadelphia Orchestra,
Eugene Ormandy, cond.
Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded c1969




Now this is a terrifically urgent performance by Ormandy and the Philadelphians, but as it happens it's not "my" Ormandy-Philadelphia Finlandia, which dates from about a decade earlier. "My" Finlandia, in fact, was a super-spectacular, in which the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was enlisted to join in at the string restatement of the hymn tune singing an adaptation of the composer's 1941 adaptation of patriotic words to his famous tune. Wow!

I can't tell you how many hundreds of times I listened to that performance. Possibly the people around me at the time can provide a more accurate count.

At the same time I was more or less forced to listen as well to music by Grieg (the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1) and Hugo Alfvén (the Swedish Rhapsody No. 1), because that's what was on the record I had to buy to get the Ormandy Finlandia. You see, rather to my surprise, on the famous day of that shopping spree, I discovered that I would have to acquire two separate LPs to get both Finlandia and The Swan of Tuonela, about 17 minutes' worth of music! Just think of the additional begging, wheedling, and cajoling I had to engage in to get my grandmother to spring for three records instead of the agreed-upon two.

I guess I wore her down, though, because I walked out of the store with all three. And I loved The Swan of Tuonela. (I suppose it's just a coincidence that we're working our way through the Greatest Moments for English Horn, following our encounter with the legendary Largo of Dvořák's New World Symphony. Can Marguerite's aria "D'amour l'ardente flamme" from Berlioz' Damnation of Faust be far behind?)

"The Swan of Tuonela" by South African painter Gabriel de Jongh


The Swan of Tuonela, Op. 44, No. 2
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond.
Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded c1959

Now this actually was my Swan, though we could have gone with the remake made for that same 1969-ish LP. (What? Ormandy's Finlandia and Swan on the same LP??? Is there somebody I can report this to, even if it is, oh, 44 years later?)

SIDEBAR: REMEMBERING LOUIS ROSENBLATT

In either of those Ormandy Swans we would be hearing English hornist Louis Rosenblatt (1928-2009). I don't suppose his is exactly a household name, but he was the Philadelphia Orchestra's English horn principal for 36 years, from 1959 until his retirement in 1995, and he died just this past August. (He's seen here, sort of, with his Philadelphia oboe colleagues around 1972.) He would in fact record the Swan solo with Ormandy yet again, another decade later, when Ormandy did all of the Four Legends from the Kalevala for EMI.

Rosenblatt seems to have been more or less shanghaied into the English horn job. In 1959 he was hired to be Philadelphia's assistant oboe principal, the job he wanted, with a chance to succeed to the principal's chair. But suddenly the English horn principal, Rosenblatt's old teacher John Minsker (who had played the solo in Ormandy's mono Philadelphia Swans), decided to retire, and Ormandy, left without an English horn principal with some important solos coming up that season, decided that Rosenblatt would be switched. The switch seems to have taken.

I wonder if I was ever aware of that 1969-ish Ormandy-Philadelphia LP that included both Finlandia and The Swan. By then I guess I would just have found it ironic, because by then I had developed relationships with all that other music on my two LPs, including what filled up the rest of the one that contained The Swan.

I guess it started when I became wary of continuing to plunk the phonograph needle down (and yes, what I had then was surely a "needle" rather than a "stylus") in the middle of side 2 trying to hit the start of The Swan, especially since my record player of the time probably had a tracking force measurable in ounces rather than grams. So, not entirely of my own accord, I was prompted to explore whatever the heck it was that preceded "my" Swan on side 2. That turned out to be the music in our video clip, the finale of Sibelius's Violin Concerto, played by David Oistrakh, accompanied by -- who else? -- Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphpia Orchestra. It sounded like this:


Violin Concerto, Op. 47: iii. Allegro ma non tanto
David Oistrakh, violin; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond.
Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Dec. 21, 1959

For music lovers who weren't there, it's hard to re-create the sensation created with the gradual dribble of great musicians dribbled out to the West by the Soviet government, known mostly from poor-quality records made from tapes three or four generations removed from the Soviet masters. Oistrakh first visited the U.S. in 1955, and his enormous personal charm made him a prized visitor, taken advantage of by both Columbia and RCA. Columbia scheduled a recording of the Sibelius Concerto when he played it in Philadelphia in December 1959, and that was what was spread out across the remaining side and a half of my Swan of Tuonela LP.

Once I discovered the delicious rondo of the Violin Concerto, I always listened to it along with The Swan. In time I developed more curiosity about side 1. Oh, I'm sure I had listened to the whole concerto; it just hadn't made much impression on me, and I hadn't yet learned that just one hearing doesn't necessarily. Now the opening of the piece seems to me one of the most gripping starts to any piece of music I know.

Eventually the Sibelius Violin Concerto became one of my most-loved pieces, and in time I found a recording that grabbed me in a way that no other had (or since has). The soloist was a staggeringly gifted young Frenchwoman named Ginette Neveu.

SIDEBAR: TRAGICALLY LOST ARTISTS

There are irreplaceable musicians we tend to think of as tragic because of the tragedy of their premature death -- the cellist Emanuel Feuermann (born 1902, died of an infection following surgery in 1942), the British hornist Dennis Brain (born 1921, died in a one-car crash on Sept. 21, 1957), the American pianist William Kapell (born 1922, died in a plane crash outside San Francisco, while returning from an Australian tour, on Oct. 29, 1953) -- but whose art itself was anything but tragic in tone. With Neveu, who was born in 1919 and died in a plane crash in the Azores on Oct. 27, 1949, I'm not so sure. It's much less of a stretch to think of her as a "tragic artist."

Neveu's was always a dark art. There was plenty of luster to her tone, but the disposition was, shall we say, distinctly not-cheerful. That's an art made to order for the gloom-shrouded world of the first movement of Sibelius's Violin Concerto. I wanted you to hear at least that from her 1945 recording, then couldn't resist including the rest. (Don't feel obliged to listen to all of it, though.)

Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47

Ginette Neveu, violin;
Philharmonia Orchestra,
Walter Süsskind, cond.
EMI, recorded Nov. 21, 1945


i. Allegro moderato


ii. Adagio di molto


iii. Allegro ma non tanto

EXPLORING SIBELIUS

Since those days I've obviously spent a deal of time exploring Sibelius's good-sized and varied output. What has emerged for me is closely related to the composer's original standing as a voice for his country's struggle for liberation. I can only guess how Finns relate to his music, but I hear a voice of the rugged, lonely North. Setting aside the fact that in present-day Finland well over 10 percent of the population lives in Helsinki (with another large chunk clustered nearby in the south), for me the Finns are a hardy people living close to nature, close to the land, a land of astonishing physical beauty, but a challenging, even punishing environment that keeps basic issues of survival at the forefront of its rugged inhabitants' attention.

This is Lake Tuusulan, alongside which Sibelius built Ainola, the home into which he and his wife Aino moved in 1904 and lived out their lives -- Jan till 1956, Aino till 1969. The township of Järvenpää at the time the Sibeliuses relocated there has been described by Erik Tawaststjerna as "to a large extent untouched countryside; foals and sheep almost nosed their way into the house, and from time to time an elk majestically bestrode the grounds."

At this point we really need to hear Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, a piece that speaks intimately about those basic questions of existence. I don't know whether the finale will "read" out of context, in a symphony that is inescapably "cyclical," in that its musical materials are worked continuously through the piece, but here it is, played by an alarmingly young-looking Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony in Stockholm in January 1987:



Now I've heard significantly more powerful performances by wholly non-Scandinavian forces -- by that noble Scotsman Alexander Gibson, for example, and the East German Kurt Sanderling, and our own Leonard Bernstein (early on with the New York Philharmonic, later with the Vienna Philharmonic) -- but it's interesting to hear the Finnish Salonen and his Swedish cohorts. (And despite the uneasy history between the Finns and the Swedes, in which most of the uneasiness after all lies with the Finns, Sibelius is probably as much a national composer in Sweden as in Finland. Swedish, after all, is the language he spoke, and in which he wrote most of his large quantity of songs.) There is a part of that life experience, given such eloquent voice, that is a part of me, and probably of everyone I know, which accounts in some measure for what gives the music its particular power -- in the same way that I can identify with and be nourished by the "Czechness" of Smetana (to whom we're going to be returning one of these weeks, by the way) and Dvořák.

In the real world, nationalism is usually a double-edged sword, sometimes bringing liberation, all too often bringing mayhem and destruction. In the hands of great artists, however, it can help us sort out who we are and what we're all doing here.

UPDATE: WE NEED A BETTER SIBELIUS 5TH FINALE

I've watched that Salonen clip of the finale of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony a bunch of times now, and each time it leaves me less happy. We see the guy looking very pretty, flapping his arms earnestly, as if he thinks it will make something happen, only not a whole lot does. So here are the three conductors I mentioned above: Sir Alexander Gibson (1926-1995, as far as I know his last recording of the piece, from his Chandos Sibelius symphony cycle, not currently listed at sane prices), Kurt Sanderling (born 1912, from his East German Deutsche Schallplatten/Berlin Classics cyclewith the Berlin Symphony), and Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990, from the cycle he was working on for DGat the time of his death, having recorded Nos. 1, 2, 5, and 7).

Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82: iii. Allegro molto


Scottish National Orchestra, Sir Alexander Gibson, cond.
Chandos, recorded in 1982


Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Kurt Sanderling, cond.
Berlin Classics, recorded December 1971


Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond.
DG, recorded live, September 1987

POSTSCRIPT: SIBELIUS'S LONG SILENCE

I guess we need to say something about those final, er, 30 years, after the symphonic poem Tapiola, in which Sibelius essentially composed nothing. It clearly wasn't from want of trying, and seems to have amounted to a gigantic case of writer's block, as in the similar if less extreme (but still extremely public) case of England's Edward Elgar. We might also factor in a changed musical environment in which the composers didn't feel able to perform -- and that both composers had, consciously or not, exhausted the musical language available to them, as I've been suggesting happened generally over the course of the middle of the 20th century.

TO GO OUT ON A LESS HIGHFALUTIN' NOTE . . .

In the form of a "where'd that come from?" moment, rather as we did with the Scherzo capriccioso of Dvořák, here is the Intermezzo, which despite its name is the first movement of Sibelius's little Karelia Suite. Although there happens to be a perfectly fine Ormandy recording, let's listen for once to somebody else. Here is the Estonian-born Neeme Järvi, an eminent Sibelian, with the Göteborg Symphony, from another of those amazing-value Trio sets, this one on DG,innocently called Sibelius Tone Poems, but in fact gathering not just Sibelius's many wonderful symphonic poems but lots of occasional and incidental and other music, a full 214 minutes' worth of his nonsymphonic orchestral works.


Karelia Suite, Op. 11: i. Intermezzo
Göteborg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, cond.
DG, recorded Dec. 1992

BONUS: THE REST OF THE OISTRAKH-ORMANDY
SIBELIUS VIOLIN CONCERTO

In case you're wondering about the rest of the Oistrakh-Ormandy recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and perhaps wondering how different it is from the Neveu-Süsskind performance. I happen to have the first two movements right here:


i. Allegro moderato


ii. Adagio di molto

QUICK HITS: SIBELIUS BASICS

Let's start with that above-cited Järvi DG Trio set, which takes care of so much of Sibelius's nonsymphonic orchestral work, including Finlandia and The Swan of Tuonela, in such fine performances at such low cost.

For the symphonies, if you want to go for all seven, there are a number of excellent choices. The beautifully recorded Maazel-Vienna Philharmonic setholds up remarkably well. Or you might tread more gently, starting with the Philips "twofer" setwell-filled with Colin Davis's lovely Boston Symphony recordings of the four most approachable symphonies, Nos. 1, 2, 4, and 5; then you can add the companion "twofer,"which not only contains the missing symphonies (Nos. 3, 6, and 7, of course) but throws in Davis-London Symphony performances of the Violin Concerto (with Salvatore Accardo), Finlandia, The Swan of Tuonela, and Sibelius's last symphonic poem, indeed last real composition, Tapiola. My word, a "Basic Orchestral Sibelius" right there!

For the Violin Concerto, the Oistrakh-Rozhdestvensky video performanceis available commercially from EMI, along with video performances of the Brahms and Tchaikovsky concertos. The Oistrakh-Ormandy Sibelius recording is available (without The Swan) in a weird but worthwhile Sony coupling,with the utterly unrelated recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto by Zino Francescatti with Bruno Walter conducting the Columbia Symphony. By the way, if anyone has any suggestions as to how to file this disc, which doesn't properly belong under Beethoven or Sibelius or Francescatti or Oistrakh, I'd be grateful for them. Really. I can never find the damned thing. I didn't find it for this project until I'd given up.

Let me just suggest one other recording of the Violin Concerto, in part because I see it's available dirt-cheap ($6.98 list!): a smoldering, rather Neveu-like performance by the lustrous-toned Ida Haendel,with the Finnish Paavo Berglund conducting the Bournemouth Symphony.

For a sampling of the songs, you might try this CD by the Finnish baritone Tom Krause,which offers 25 songs by Sibelius and 8 by Richard Strauss, though presumably without vocal texts. Let's say you can dig those up online.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

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In which we find out how that Beethoven concerto movement ends, and recall a story about David Oistrakh

Yes, that night at the Royal Albert Hall David Oistrakh and Sir Adrian Boult really did get through the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. (You can access the clip of the first half of the movement here.)

by Ken

In this week's Sunday Classics I offered a clip of the first half of the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto as performed by the great Soviet violinist David Oistrakh with Sir Adrian Boult conducting, in London in 1968 -- the year Oistrakh turned 60. I hadn't intended this as a cliffhanger, but I was pleased to hear some expression of interest in the clip. It's a genuinely lovely performance of one of Beethoven's loveliest creations. The second half of the movement is posted above.

Oistrakh was, obviously, one of the great violinists of the 20th century. It's hard to point to any aspect of the violinist's art in which he reigned supreme among his peers. At the same time, there was no aspect in which he was in less than the top group, and he may have been the complete package -- a comfortable blend of technical and interpretive excellences.

And as I think can be heard in his sweet, supple phrasing in the Beethoven concerto, he had a good soul. Which set me to remembering a story told by another Soviet-born violinist, and another of the 20th century's finest musicians, Rostislav Dubinsky, the founding first violinist of the string quartet formed in 1946 by four students at the Moscow Conservatory, which eventually, many years and two personnel changes letter. Despite a great deal of internal turmoil, the Borodin Quartet remained one of the great string quartets the world has known until Dubinsky and his wife, the outstanding pianist Luba Edlina, emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1976. (Dubinsky and Edlina settled rather comfortably at Indiana Universty School of Music in Bloomington. With a fellow émigré based in Montreal, cellist Yuri Tulovsky, formed the Borodin Trio, which also ranks among the finest chamber ensembles of which we have recorded evidence. You may have noticed how frequently I recommend recordings of theirs.)

It's impossible to appreciate the lives of Soviet artists without some understanding of the conditions under which they were controlled by the Soviet regime. In 1989 Dubinsky published a remarkable book called Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker's State. It's a book so filled with invaluable information, not to mention remarkable stories, that I'm appalled to find that it has been out of print for eons. Worse still, at the time of my last move eight years ago, my copy disappeared and since then I've been forced to repeat some of those stories from memory. Now I've found a reasonably priced replacement copy, so I can give you this story about Oistrakh as Dubinsky told it in the book.

While still a student at the Moscow Conservatory, Dubinsky in 1946 formed a string quartet with three fellow students. Upon graduation they faced the arduous ordeal, as a quartet made up of three Jews and a half-jew (the cellist Valentin Berlinsky), of establishing themselves in the climate of virulent anti-Semitism of the postwar Soviet Union. In 1950, Dubinsky writes, the quartet concentrated on preparation for the auditions for an international quartet competition in Prague.

Four quartets were entered in the competition, from which the top two finishers would go to Prague. There was an all-female quartet, which Dubinsky and his mates knew had to be taken seriously because of the patronage of the members of the celebrated Beethoven Quartet, who -- although they were not Communist Party members -- had strong ties to the government cultural apparatus, which ruled all aspects of Soviet culture, including the careers and lives of Soviet artists. Then there was a quartet from Leningrad which faced the same handicap of being made up of four Jews, and another from Georgia, which although an unknown quantity wasn't thought to be serious competition. The 20-member jury, made up of musical figures from Moscow and other parts of the Soviet Union, including several Moscow Conservatory professors known to the quartet and the members of the Beethoven Quartet, would be controlled by the chairman, "the cultural tsar Anisimov."

On the day of the competition, there were curious no-shows among both the jurors and the competitors. "The Georgians, we were told, would not be coming to Moscow." And one of the conservatory professors scheduled to be on the jury, none other than Oistrakh, was reported sick.

Dubinsky's quartet played first, then had to remain while the other two participating quartets played. Dubinsky, in a state of high nervousness, returned to the auditorium in time to hear the last of them, the women's quartet. He provides a vivid description:

Their manner of playing was familiar, even though I was hearing them for the first time. It was (as we called it) a "coarse-ground" style. It came into fashion in Moscow after the war, when traditional playing was branded "non-Slavic" (read "Jewish"). This new style neglected everything that is so attractive in quartet playing: flexible ensemble, refined phasing, variety of colors. In their place was something else, insolent and smug. You wanted to cover your ears.

(This description, by the way, covers all the recordings I've heard by the lionized Beethoven Quartet.)

Once the playing was concluded, the players remained while the jury deliberated upstairs. In time, two of their professors came down. "It's all right. You are the best," one whispered to Dubinsky and Berlinsky. The other was equally reassuring.

Then the quartet's violist, Rudolf Barshai (by the time the quartet officially became the Borodin Quartet he would have been lured away, but went on to become one of the world's best-known solo violists and then an admired conductor), brought news. The professors had spoken to them during what turned out to have been a break called by the jury chairman Anisimov.

That's when Aslamazyan and Gusikov came down and congratulated us. But Anisimov and the Beethovens remained upstairs for a consultation. When everyone got together again, Anisimov made a speech. About how the Ministry of Culture and the conservatory serve Soviet art, that their aims are mutual, that in the future there will be other competitions and, therefore, a mutual understanding is required . . . on and on, the same old stuff. In short, he suggested a new vote. Everyone got the message: now the girls get first place and we're second.

Barshai also reports that Professors Aslamazyan and Gusikov disagreed, "but the Beethovens did their job." It's all puzzling, but seemingly trivial in the long run. After all two quartets are going to Prague, and they have finished in the top two.

However, in the morning Barshai shows up at Dubinsky's home with news that explains the curious second vote that reversed the order of finish. "Anisimov called the jury together again, but this time he spoke about the friendship between all our nationalities." Going instead of their quartet would be the Georgians, who didn't even play. But they have a powerful patron in "the lousy film director" Mikhail Chiaureli, who "makes movies about Stalin, drinks wine with Beria, and, by the way, is the Georgian first violinist's uncle. Presumably nobody needs to be reminded of the particular connection at the very top that a Georgian quartet might have.

Barshai explains that "yesterday all Moscow was talking about us, and Oistrakh was looking for us all evening."

I thought he wanted to congratulate us. Far from it! He didn't even mention the competition. He invited us to play the Chausson concerto [Chausson's Concerto for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet] with him and [pianist Lev] Oborin. He said they would change the program and print up a new poser. "Right now," Oistrakh said, "I just want your names to appear on posters. Give my regards to the whole quartet." I understood everything. That's why he wasn't on the jury -- he didn't want to be mixed up in this dirty business.

Famous as Oistrakh was, all aspects of the professional life of a musician in the Soviet Union depended on the good will of the Culture Ministry, making this act, or rather a series of acts (his withdrawal from the jury would certainly have been noticed) on his part of almost unimaginable defiance, one might even say of aggravated effrontery against the cultural dictatorship, and an act of considerable courage. Not surprisingly, Dubinsky never forgot it.

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Sunday Classics: There are few life forces more powerful than the musical instincts of a talented, well-grounded musician

"Neptune, the Mystic," the seventh and last movement of Gustav Holst's ever-popular orchestral suite The Planets, is conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, whose association with the piece spanned 60-plus years, including its first public performance, in 1918.

Holst's imagination was driven, not by planetary astrophysics, but by the mythological associations of the planets' namesakes. In the liner notes for his circa 1967 EMI recording, Sir Adrian had this to say about "Neptune":

In this final movement every instrument is directed to play pianissimo throughout, and the tone is to be "dead", except for one moment near the end, when the clarinet plays a succession of notes which might almost be called a tune in this otherwise tuneless, expressionless, shapeless succession of cloudy harmonies, suggesting as it does an infinite vision of timeless eternity. We spoke of the end but this is inaccurate, for if it is possible for a piece of music never to finish, this is what happens here. A slow, irregular swing between two distant chords fills nearly every bar of the 3+2 meter, and imperceptibly we become conscious that female voices have joined the orchestra. Soon the instruments gradually melt away, and the voices carry on with the two swaying chords, whose diminuendo is prolonged until we wonder whether we still hear them or only hold them in our memory, swinging backward and forward for all time.

by Ken

Recently I mentioned to a friend that I had found -- for $1.99! -- a used copy of the CD of that Boult Planets recording. (It's a good thing it was only $1.99, or I probably wouldn't have bought it. I mean, a CD with a mere 50 minutes of music?) It turned out that I was confused about what I had actually bought -- a fortunate confusion we'll come back to in a moment -- but in this state of confusion I recalled to my friend how important that Angel LP had been to me.

"Everyone had that," he said. And I have no reason to doubt that everyone did.

You have to understand that as a record listener I'm a compulsive multiple-version collector, I guess because I'm so far from believing in "definitive" performances that not even the most exceptional performance seems likely to encompass anything like the range of possibilities built into any truly substantial piece of music. Still, in the case of The Planets, although a few other versions came my way from one source or another, I never felt any strong impulse to seek others out.

I mentioned to my friend that the Boult Planets as freshly reheard seemed even more remarkable than I remembered. People tend to be impressed by the parts of the piece that make the most obvious impression, but those are relatively easy to make sense of. Only the most doltish conductor could fail to "get," for example, the indomitably rousing "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity." But no other conductor I've heard can rivet you the way Sir Adrian does with the hauntingly more intimate sections -- like "Neptune," for one.

(Actually, Sir Adrian points out a trap in "Jupiter" in his liner note. The bustling main theme eventually evolves into a famous broadly lyrical tune. He notes that the composer's daughter, Imogen Holst, a prime champion of her father's work, "has warned us against linking the slow middle section with the patriotic words with which it was later associated. The tune as it stands reflects the good humour of Jupiter, no more, no less." And he has already recalled the composer's description of Jupiter as "one of those jolly fat people who enjoy life." How many conductors of "Jupiter" understand any of this? Contrary to popular impression, Boult was not prone to sentimentalizing.)

I guess I've had Sir Adrian (1889-1983) on my mind since I wrote last week about his ravishing yet disciplined late-in-life recording of Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending, another now-40-year-old recording that sounds as fresh and vibrant today as it did when it was made. Well, maybe I was thinking not so much about Sir Adrian himself as about conductors like him, by which I mean the kind who don't usually pop into mind in discussions of "great" conductors, but whom you consistenly return to, over a wide range of repertory, for the almost unfailing pleasure of their thoroughgoing musicianship.

In the course of thinking about writing about Sir Adrian, or about conductors like him, I started pulling out CDs of his I could think of that I have, including naturally the $1.99 Planets. Imagine my surprise to see that the orchestra credited is the London Philharmonic, and you'd think EMI would know, whereas I remembered pretty conclusively that "my" Boult Planets was recorded with the New Philharmonia. Eventually I pulled the Angel LP off the shelf, for the first time in a long while. It didn't take long to figure out that they're in fact different recordings. Somehow I've managed all these years, I guess because of my satisfaction with the New Philharmonia version, to remain ignorant of the fact that Sir Adrian had yet another go at The Planets, with indeed the LPO, his old orchestra of the '50s, in 1978-79, his final year of recording, when he was approaching his 90th birthday.

I got another surprise when I took a closer look at the jacket of the Angel LP, though this was something I must once have known: that Sir Adrian wrote his own (excellent) liner notes for it, from which I've already quoted above. He started by writing about his association with the piece, beginning at the beginning, before it had ever been performed. He noted that he had corresponded with the composer before meeting Gustav Holst (1874-1934) in 1917. Soon afterward he had his first hearing of The Planets, in an "excellent" two-piano arrangement. And then:

One day in the autumn of 1918 [Holst] rushed into the office where I was doing my war work: "Adrian, I have got to go to Salonika quite soon for the YMCA. Balfour Gardiner, bless him, has given me a parting present consisting of Queen's Hall full of the Queen's Hall Orchestra for the whole of a Sunday morning. We are going to do 'The Planets' and you have got to conduct."

Up to this point, Holst had always felt uncertain as to whether he would ever hear The Planets. Hitherto he had always been accustomed to write appropriate music for special purposes, and it was only here that for the first time he allowed himself everything he wanted: an apparently impossibly large orchestra in a work of symphonic proportions, from one who had hitherto been rather thought of as a miniaturist.

It was on the morning of September 29th, 1918, that I first met the Queen's Hall Orchestra, led by the veteran Maurice Sons [meaning, in our lingo, he was the concertmaster], and this was for me too a new and exciting adventure. We planned to rehearse for nearly two hours, and to play the work straight through at 12 o'clock, by which time a large audience had assembled, consisting of several generations of St. Paul's School [the girls' school where Holst was director of music] girls, and all Holst's professional and other friends, including many music critics, and Sir Henry Wood [the leading British conductor of the time, famous now as the founder of the Proms concerts] himself.

The work instantly made a deep impression. There were enough members of the Board of the Royal Philharmonic Society present to invite me immediately to repeat most of it at one of their concerts in the following winter, and the score was engraved in a very short time by the enterprising firm of Goodwin and Tabb. My copy was inscribed by the composer as follows:

[reproduced in Holst's own handwriting]
This copy is the property of

Adrian Boult

who first caused the

Planets to shine in public and thereby earned the gratitude of

Gustav Holst

The composer himself conducted the first recording of the work at a time when recording techniques were still pretty crude. It was still in the days of 78s when the BBC Symphony Orchestra recorded a performance which I hope came very near the composer's intentions. It has been my privilege to repeat this experience with other orchestras, and now I hope that those who remember earlier performances will find that this later version, my fourth, with all the wonderful technical improvements which have now been introduced, still sounds faithful and authentic.

Boult was understandably closely associated with British music, for which he clearly had a natural empathy. But that natural empathy ran deeper and wider. I don't know how to say it any better than that he just had music inside him, busting to get out. And in what most everyone refers to as that remarkable "Indian summer" of his career, dating from EMI's resumption of an active recording program with the then 77-year-old conductor in 1966 and lasted roughly a dozen years, music lovers would eventually be reminded just how wide that musical empathy ran.

You can get a taste of Sir Adrian's Elgar (and yes, he was already "Sir Adrian," having been knighted in 1937) from this clip. In it he introduces the celebrated writer-broadcaster J. B. Priestley, who makes an eloquent appeal to the audience to support the survival of the London Philharmonic, at the time threatened with dissolution. Then Boult returns to conduct Elgar's jaunty Cockaigne Overture, of which, frustratingly, we hear not much more than the first minute and a half.

(The clip, by the way, is from a 1943 British film, Battle for Music, but this excerpt presumably dates from about 1939, since Priestley must have been anticipating Britain being drawn into a new world war, "There'll be dark days and dangerous nights ahead of us. Soon we may be fighting for our lives, and that's all the more reason why we should have all the courage and inspiration, the noble refreshment of the spirit that music can give us, and in short why we must save the London Philharmonic Orchestra." On the subject of war, I might mention that Sir Adrian begins his Planets liner note on the opening movement, "Mars, the Bringer of War," with the observation: "It is worth remembering that the composer wrote this in the summer of 1914 and so had no experience of what it describes.")

Brief as the Cockaigne excerpt is, we can see that Sir Adrian's conducting technique consisted of almost nothing that's visible beyond the extremely long baton. He insisted that the great conductors of his youth he modeled himself after essentially didn't move on the podium. Yet there is nothing static or neutral in the vivid orchestral playing he elicits.

We can observe the same thing, some 30 years later, in the most standard of standard repertory, as Sir Adrian conducts the opening of the first movement of Beethoven's Violin Concerto in 1968 with the great David Oistrakh as soloist (Sir Adrian was one of the great musical collaborators, with both instrumental soloists and singers):



(Among Sir Adrian's EMI stereo recordings, incidentally, is one of the great recordings of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, with the great Czech violinist Josef Suk.)

Not surprisingly, EMI recorded Boult in a ton of Vaughan Williams and Elgar. But as enthusiasm built for these products of his advanced maturity, EMI grew bolder in its repertory choices for him. Of course, in his half-century of professional conducting he had conducted most everything in the Western classical literature, old and new. But now he got to do such things as the complete Brahms symphonies (including the Alto Rhapsody with Janet Baker) and the two serenades, all the traditional Wagner orchestral excerpts, and perhaps most treasurably the complete Bach Brandenburg Concertos, all not only competitive with the best-ever recordings of this much-recorded music, but reflecting the unique wisdom of all those decades of living passionately with the music.

Again, I don't know how to describe the special quality I'm talking about except in terms of innate musicality. To me, there aren't many forces more powerful than the musical instincts of a talented, well-grounded musician, which I hold in something like awe.

A friend once asked me -- as a matter of fact, it was the very friend of the above-noted Boult Planets conversation -- what my favorite recording of Schubert's "Great C major" Symphony was. I thought for a bit, then mentioned that William Steinberg had made a wonderful recording during his custodianship of the Boston Symphony (in 1969-72, with the orchestra's management unable to agree on a successor to Erich Leinsdorf, he acceded to its request that he watch over it, while retaining his longtime music directorship of the Pittsburgh Symphony), and of course there's Josef Krips's stereo remake with the London Symphony. My friend got upset. Apparently I was supposed to nominate one of the Great Conductors. Toscanini or Furtwängler would have been acceptable answers. But Steinberg? Krips?

What can I say? It's not that I don't have worlds of admiration for Toscanini and Furtwängler. But these are the conductors I'm more likely to gravitate to. (Sir Adrian, by the way, made an outstandingly beautiful recording of the Schubert symphony.)


QUICK HITS: BOULT'S PLANETS ET AL.

(INCLUDING A TOSCANINI NOTE)

I don't find any recent trace of "my" Boult Planets, the c 1967 New Philharmonia version, except via download from Amazon UK. Shockingly, although there have been a couple of EMI editions, like this one, of the 1977-79 LPO version paired with Sir Adrian's London Symphony recording of Elgar's Enigma Variations, I don't find any indication that 1978-79 Planets is available now in any form except as one of Arkiv Music's authorized (but premium-priced) "custom" reproductions, of the Planets-only EMI Studio edition.

To my chagrin, I can't find any sign of recent availability of Boult's Brandenburgs, and while the EMI Brahms symphonies have been on CD in various couplings, again I don't see any recent listings. However, the two serenades, the Academic Festival and Tragic Overtures, the Haydn Variations, and the Alto Rhapsody with Baker (which, no doubt on the strength of Baker's name, seems to have been reissued in 20 or 30 different couplings) are all packed into a generous EMI "twofer" set.

On a happier note, the beautiful Boult Wagner orchestral excerpts seem readily available. If you can find the three separate EMI Studio CDs at reasonable prices, grab them. However, leaving very little out, EMI was able to squeeze the rest into a moderately priced two-CD setthat should be self-recommending.

Toscanini note: The Philadelphia recordings made listenable

Side note: Having mentioned Toscanini in connection with the Schubert "Great C major" Symphony, I want to make sure you know -- as I didn't until recently -- about the miraculous 2007 restoration wrought by the Sony BMG Classics technical people on the previously barely listenable recordings the maestro made in 1941-42 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Something terrible apparently happened to the 78 masters, and with the 1942 wartime U.S. recording ban, it not only wasn't possible to continue the Toscanini/Philadelphia series, it was impossible to remake the presumed hopeless material. Previous releases have left no doubt that these are specially lovely performances, with orchestral textures and subtleties contrasting particularly with Toscanini's NBC Symphony recordings, but the technical defects made it almost impossible to listen to them.

I don't know how the miracle was accomplished, but in this latest issue, where all the material fits on three CDs, the recordings sound just fine for their time. In addition to the most beautiful of the Toscanini recordings of the Schubert symphony, there's a similarly lyrical Tchaikovsky Pathétique plus shorter works by Debussy (La Mer), Richard Strauss (Death and Transfiguration), Respighi (Feste romane), Mendelssohn (Midsummer Night's Dream excerpts), and Berlioz' "Queen Mab Scherzo" from Roméo et Juliette. If you've tried to listen to this material, you won't believe the difference.


EVEN QUICKER HITS: BRAHMS
AND VERDI BOXES FROM DG

I wish we could talk a little more about these, but you don't really want to go into it now, do you? I didn't think so. And I don't know when we'll be able to get back to them, so let's just take note of two more super-economical big boxes, both from Deutsche Grammophon, covering repertory we've talked about recently. Of course there are only rudimnetary notes and no printed texts for the vocal works, but again, look at the prices.

Brahms, as I noted in our three-part quick look (part one, part two, and part three), set himself almost impossibly high standards, and two of his favorite tricks were abandoning or outright destroying works at any stage of compositiong which didn't meet his standards. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the historical trend to writing fewer but more elaborately considered works (already evident in Beethoven's output, and both reflected in and advanced by Brahms), DG has been able to offer the complete works on 46 CDs -- not necessarily all that well filled. (For example, the two piano concertos, both about 50 minutes, occupy CDs by themselves.)

It should go without saying that the quality of the performances varies, but these are all A-list performers from the DG roster (you can find a breakdown of the contents and performers here), and the overall level is blessedly high. At the moment, Amazon is still offeringthis set at an astonishing $62.97 -- plus tax, of course, but with free shipping.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about Verdi's ability to look unflinchingly at the problem of evil. DG has produced a set that unquestionably has a split personality but is still worthwhile: the 21-disc "Verdi: Great Operas from La Scala/Various." (You can find a list of the cast principals for all the performances here.)

One personality is the five Verdi operas DG recorded at La Scala between 1960 and 1964: Rigoletto conducted by Rafael Kubelik, Il Trovatore by Tullio Serafin, La Traviata by Antonino Votto, Un Ballo in maschera by Gianandrea Gavazzeni, and Don Carlos by Gabriele Santini (the first recording of a five-act version) -- by no means uniform in approach, but in general building performances through a grounded understanding of the shape of an Italianate musical phrase.

Then there are recordings from the later series conducted by Claudio Abbado, made between 1986 and 1991: Macbeth, Simon Boccanegra, Aida, and the Requiem. (Curiously, in the booklet the Traviata with Renata Scotto, Gianni Poggi, and Ettore Bastianini -- from 1962, I believe -- is listed among the Abbado peformances and dated "5/1976," making one wonder if a different performance had at some point been intended, though I can't think what. A previously unreleased recording, perhaps? If so, it remains unreleased. Of course, it could just be a screw-up.) The Abbado-conducted performances have their attractions. They're very pretty in a lot of ways, but unfortunately mostly in the same several ways -- for example, a soft, lyrical mode that sounds like a lullaby and is misapplied to most of the music that gets this treatment. And while Abbado seems to have had some effect on his singers, he doesn't seem to have provided much help to any of them in getting inside their roles. For example, baritone Piero Cappuccilli does some prettier-than-usual soft singing, but again it's that lullabylike mode that hardly ever has anything to do with what's going on.

I might mention that there is an Abbado Verdi Requiem that I like quite a lot: a 1982 Edinburgh Festival video performance that seems to me much more alert to musical and dramatic content, orchestrally, chorally, and in the work of the vocal soloists.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The updated list is here.

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