Sunday Classics: Karl Ridderbusch as the King in "Lohengrin" -- this is what's called "shouting"???

ELSA has appeared in a very simple white garment and overwhelmed the assembled nobles with the purity and innocence of her bearing. Now KING HEINRICH tries to get, well, anything at all out of her regarding the disappearance of her little brother Gottfired, which she is accused of being responsible for.

KING HEINRICH: Are you she, Elsa of Brabant?
[ELSA nods her head affirmatively.]
Do you recognize me as your judge?
[ELSA turns her head toward the KING, looks him in the eye, and then affirms with a trust-filled gesture.]
Then I ask you further:
Is the charge known to you,
which has been brought so weightily against you?
[ELSA glances at TELRAMUND and ORTRUD, shudders, bows her head sadly, and affirms.]
What do you have to say against the charge?
[ELSA through a gesture: "Nothing!"]
So you acknowledge your guilt?
ELSA [staring sadly for a long time around her]: My poor brother!
ALL THE MEN: How wondrous! What strange behavior!
KING HEINRICH: Speak, Elsa, what do you have to confide to me?

by Ken

Can't somebody get that damned Ridderbusch fellow to stop ferchrissakes shouting? (This is a very tiny joke, which I'll explain in a moment.)

This two-minute-plus extract comes from what is still my favorite Lohengrin recording, the 1971 DG studio version conducted by Sunday Classics stalwart Rafael Kubelik. In it we hear Karl Ridderbusch in his matchless prime as King Heinrich and Gundula Janowitz singing Elsa's single line, one of the most haunting lines in opera, "Mein armer Bruder. (I had thought of doing a collage of maybe ten singers singing it, but do you have any idea how much time editing such a thing would have taken?) If there are two more beautiful, riveting minutes of music anywhere in the recorded annals, I don't know what they are.

Since we last dipped into Lohengrin, this past February in the "Remembering Eugen Jochum" posts that included excerpts from his 1954 Bayreuth performance, I've gotten hold of a CD edition of the Kubelik-DG recording, which I had only on LP and open-reel tape, and my admiration is if anything greater than ever. I think the Act I Prelude is an excellent example.

WAGNER: Lohengrin: Prelude to Act I

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded April 1971

We've heard some beautiful performances of the Lohengrin Prelude. In that February post, for example, we heard one by Sir Adrian Boult. But I'm not sure I've ever heard a fuller, more pulsing-with-life one than Kubelik's. And this is true of the Lohengrin performance as a whole. I'm not sure people generally appreciate just how difficult an opera this is to make musical and dramatic sense of, and Kubelik's performance has a riveting continuity I've never heard matched in a lifetime that has included a lot of Lohengrin performances. (Curiously, Kubelik's 1967 Bavarian Radio broadcast Meistersinger, which acquired a legend before anyone without archival access was able to hear it, and which to my ears turns out to be crashingly ordinary, is praised to the skies by the online cognoscenti.)


IT WAS, IN FACT, A BIZARRE ONLINE REVIEW OF THIS
RECORDING THAT TRIGGERED THIS SERIES OF POSTS

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Sunday Classics preview: Three "K"s -- remembering three conductors who were great artists

The gossamer "Ballet of the Sylphs" from Berlioz's Damnation de Faust is played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelik in this 1950 EMI recording, from a four-CD Kubelik "Portrait," one of the treasures that came out of my nearly 17-pound Berkshire Record Outlet carton this week.

by Ken

I'd been good for so long. Oh sure, I usually scanned the new classical overstock and cut-out listings on the Berkshire Record Outlet website most every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and sure, I dumped stuff in my shopping cart. But that didn't commit me to anything, and I figured that by and large the things that interested me would interest enough other site followers that they would soon enough go out of stock -- "soon enough" in this case being "in time to protect me from actually buying them."

Every now and then, something appears that (a) I really want and (b) I know can't remain in stock very long. Which happened just recently with a CD issue -- finally! -- of the not-quite-complete series of Beethoven string quartets recorded by the Paganini Quartet for RCA Victor between 1947 and 1953. Not only have these never been on CD; I'm not aware of them ever being reissued on LP. And in fact, all the LP copies I've ever come across have been really chewed up. They may not have sold a huge number of copies, but the people who bought them apparently played the heck out of them.

What that means, when there's an item I really want, is that I have to take a look at my shopping cart, to see what might still be available. And apparently it had been long enough since my last order that, even though yes, a fair number of things I'd dumped in had indeed gone out of stock, there was a heckuva a lot of stuff still poised for purchase. I started studying the list like it was a work of scholarship, or maybe a primary source document. I tried everything in my powers (which unfortunately include only a small store of willpower) to jettison items to get the order down to manageable size. But still there remained something like 46 other items (CDs and DVDs, many of them of course multiple sets). What could I do? The flesh is weak.

I won't tell you how much the order came to in dollars, but in weight it came to nearly 17 pounds. Since it arrived earlier this week, andI've only begun to sift through the treasures. But I noticed a number of samplings from conductors of a sort I'm especially fond of.

It goes back to a point I was making just last week, contrasting performers who think they can assemble performances by tacking bunches of notes together following some rules they think they've found in some book or article with performers who understand that the only way you find you way inside a piece of music is by finding how and why it moves from the inside.

We've already heard a morsel from one of our "three 'K's," Rafael Kubelik's "Ballet of the Sylphs,' above, and we'll hear another Kubelik tantalizer in a moment, along with samples from our other conducting "K"s.

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Sunday Classics preview: Mahler's view of idyllic youths turns them upside-down

Tenor Robert Dean Smith sings "On Youth" from Mahler's Song of the Earth, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink, in November 2006 (part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Haitink's association with the orchestra).

MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth):
iii. "Von der Jugend" ("On Youth")
[English translation by Deryck Cooke]

In the middle of the little pool
stands a pavilion of green
and of white porcelain.

Like the back of a tiger
arches the bridge of jade
over to the pavilion.

In the little house friends are sitting,
beautifully dressed, drinking, chatting;
several are writing verses.

Their silken sleeves slip
backwards, their silken caps
perch gaily on the back of their necks.

On the little pool's still
surface everything appears
fantastically in a mirror image.

Everything is standing on its head
in the pavilion of green
and of white porcelain;

Like a half-moon stands the bridge,
upside-down its arch. Friends,
beautifully dressed, are drinking, chatting.

by Ken

As I explained last night, heading toward tomorrow's Sunday Classics post, we're working our way backwards through the three tenor songs (Nos. 1, 3, and 5) of Mahler's Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde), starting last night with the last of them, "The Drunk in Spring" ("Der Trunkene im Frühling"). Tonight we come to the shortest of the song symphony's six movements, No. 3, "On Youth" ("Von der Jugend"), which typically lasts 3-3½ minutes -- though tomorrow we're going to hear the longest as well as most remarkable performance of the song I've ever heard.

For this song I promised you a story, of "the special personal identification that opened this song up for me -- or perhaps opened me up for this song." Here goes. Once upon a time there was this person I really hated, I mean loathed. He wasn't just a personal doodyhead but, in my view, a professional disgrace and menace, who built a wildly successful career on a bedrock of intellectual dishonesty and laziness and, generally speaking, fraud. For me he embodied everything that was wrong with the universe. I would be embarrassed to recount the horrors and torments I wished on him.

I had, of course, known Mahler's Song of the Earth for ages by the time this blight on humanity befouled the general cultural life and beclouded my own personal life. And I had never paid all that much attention to the briefest of its six movements, also the most self-consciously Chinese-sounding (all of the poems set here, of course, are based on Chinese originals, as translated by Hans Bethge in his collection The Chinese Flute), the third movement, "On Youth." (In the orchestration of this song in particular, bear in mind the title of Bethge's edition.) It presents an utterly idyllic picture of a group of perfect, clearly elite youths huddled together in their pavillon of green and of white porcelain, in the middle of that lake, with the jade bridge -- those perfect friends sitting drinking and chatting, and writing their verses.

Suddenly, during one fateful hearing, the succeeding image registered with me in a way it never had before. It's the "mirror" image of the perfect friends in their magically perfect pavilion, an image in which they and their pavilion and even the jade bridge are all upside-down. And I was seeing my nemesis, that most hateful of pavilion insiders, suddenly upside-down. Suddenly the song seemed to be giving me, not the charmed insiders' perspective, but the clearer-eyed, solitary outsider's view. And suddenly all those perfect friends seemed faintly ridiculous. No, not faintly ridiculous, downright preposterous.

I would love to be able to say that henceforth my nemesis ceased to torment me, that his existence no longer drove a stake through my heart me as it celebrated the injustice of this stinking universe. Um, afraid not. That upside-down reflection didn't diminish the corrosive reality of his undeservedly charmed existence, or improve my blighted existence. It didn't cure my rage over the cosmic unruliness and unfairness of the universe. And yet, somehow it was all changed. Somewhere, I understood, there was official recognition of all that injustice.

I don't say that my "interpretation" of the song is "correct." I don't even know what that would mean. I just know that ever since, "Von der Jugend" has been for me one of the most bittersweet and yet somehow redeeming strains of song on this earth.

We hear two notably different musical views of our little enchanted pavilion. It's not a matter of tempo (the timings are eight seconds apart), but of vigor of attack and tone. First, in what we might call "aggressive" mode, we hear the German tenor Waldemar Kmentt, possessor of a remarkably full lyric tenor that, when under control, as it pretty much is in this performance, could also be a remarkably fine, even supple lyric tenor, but one that was at least as likely to be sufficiently out of vocal whack to cause the listener notable distress. (This is from a generally first-rate live Das Lied conducted by Rafael Kubelik, who unfortunately never made a commercial recording of the piece, with Janet Baker doing some of her loveliest recorded work in the alto songs.) Then, as promised, we hear Richard Lewis with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, in what we might call "reflective" mode. (This is from the same recording out of which we heard Maureen Forrester's haunting "Farewell.")

MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth):
iii. "Von der Jugend" ("On Youth")

Waldemar Kmentt, tenor; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. Live performance, Feb. 27, 1970

Richard Lewis, tenor; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Richard Lewis, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded Nov. 7 and 9, 1959


IN TOMORROW'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

We finally reach the opening of Das Lied, the most substantial of the tenor's songs, "The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of Earth," and do some reflecting on the three songs.

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Sunday Classics preview: Before "Prague Spring" was a political reawakening, it was a music festival

KUBELIK COMES HOME: In 1990 Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996), already in retirement for five years because of debilitating physical ailments, set foot on Czechoslovak soil for the first time since 1948, and was reunited with the Czech Philharmonic, of which he had been principal conductor at the time of his exile. Honoring tradition, they opened the Prague Spring festival, of which Kubelik had been one of the founders, with Smetana's epic cycle of symphonic poems, Má Vlast (My Country). Here they play the first 7:07 of the beloved second movement, Vltava (The Moldau); you can find the concluding 4:26 here.

by Ken

To most people "Prague Spring" now probably suggests first the remarkable political liberalization wrought by reformist Czechoslovak Prime Minister Alexander Dubček from January to August 1968, when the Soviet overlords called a halt to it. But the political movement borrowed its name from the music festival founded In 1946 as part of the rebirth of the Czechoslovak republic, which had been overthrown by the Nazis in 1938-39. The country's leading orchestra, the Czech Phiharmonic, was celebrating its 50th anniversary, and one of the founders of Prague Spring, which had the patronage of President Edvard Beneš, was the orchestra's then-32-year-old principal conductor, Rafael Kubelik, who naturally enough conducted the festival's opening concert.

In February 1948, Beneš's Communist partners in the Czechoslovak coalition government staged a coup and took sole power. When Kubelik left the country to conduct for the first time at England's Glyndebourne Festival, he made the painful decision not to return -- until his homeland was liberated. As Wikipedia tells the story, he told an interviewer: "I had lived through one form of bestial tyranny, Nazism. As a matter of principle, I was not going to live through another." In 1953 he and his wife were stripped of their citizenship, and for the next 32 years he crammed about as much as can be crammed into a conductor's career.

Wherever he went, the uncommonly mild-mannered -- and accordingly increasingly loved -- conductor played the music of his homeland, above all his great compatriots Bedřich Smetana and Antonin Dvořák. As early as 1952 he recorded the national epic of Czech music, Smetana's Má Vlast (My Country or Fatherland), the 75-minute-or-so cycle of six symphonic poems depicting places and moments in national history, in (of all places) Chicago, where he spent three productive but not terribly happy seasons, 1950-53, as music director of the Chicago Symphony.

Here's how Kubelik's Moldau sounded back in 1952, as recorded by Mercury's ahead-of-its-time recording crew:



Kubelik went on playing Má Vlast all over the Western world, and recording it: in Vienna, in Boston, in what became his longest home base (with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra), Munich. (It was from his recording of Dvořák's complete Slavonic Dances with the BRSO that we heard him, as our mystery conductor, conduct the E minor, Op. 46, No. 2, while the mystery violinist who played the Kreisler arrangement of Dvořák's "Humoresque" was his father, the legendary celebrity violinist Jan Kubelik.)

By the time Kubelik's seriously compromised health forced him to retire from conducting, in 1985, he probably imagined that the long-hoped-for return to his homeland would never happen. Then came the wave of political change that convulsed the Soviet empire, and in 1989 the Czechoslovak Communist government fell. Not even another health crisis could prevent his return home for -- what else? -- Prague Spring 1990.

For both Kubelik and his countrymen, the emotional impact of that return is almost impossible to overstate. I remember video highlights of an almost unbearably emotional outdoor concert that featured at least Vltava -- The Moldau (the river that runs through the Czech capital, Prague, as known by its respective Czech and German names), the second of the six symphonic poems that make up Má Vlast, and one of the best-known pieces ever written for orchestra.

For the opening of the Prague Spring festival, there wasn't much question what Kubelik would conduct. It was a now well-established tradition that the opening concert featured Má Vlast. An audio recording of that concert has been released,but as far as I know, not the video recording that presumably exists -- it looks as if you can piece it together on YouTube. (A CD was also releasedcoupling Dvořák's New World and Mozart's Prague Symphonies.)

I mentioned last week that we were going to be coming back to Smetana. Sunday is the day.


BONUS: KUBELIK'S COMPLETE MA VLAST

Here is the complete 1952 Kubelik-Chicago Symphony-Mercury Má Vlast.


i. Vyšehrad
ii. Vltava (The Moldau)
iii. Šárka
iv. From Bohemia's Meadows and Forests
v. Tábor
vi. Blaník

[You can move from movement to movement by hitting the fast forward or rewind button.]


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

Here is the current list.

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