Search - Beethoven, Toscanini, NBC :: Symphonies 3 & 8

Arguably the Finest American Eroica of All Time!

09/18/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

"When Toscanini approached the podium of the NBC Symphony at Studio 8-H in Radio City on October 28, 1939, he may have carried in his astonishing brain (along with the words and music of a hundred major operas, and the texts of innumerable chamber, solo piano, and orchestral masterpieces dating back to the early baroque era) the most penetrating and convincing conception of the Eroica symphony of any conductor who has ever appeared before an orchestra in the United States! And the dedicated young members of the NBC ensemble, who had worked together for only about two years, rose to match the Maestro's brilliant vision with playing of flawless cohesion and intensity.Yet the Maestro continued to revise his opinions about the tempi and phrasing of the piece throughout nearly twenty future performances up to the culmination, the patrician December 1953 NBC broadcast. Soon the measured, deeply inflected, and gravely tragic Greek drama that unfolds in many passages of the 1939 broadcast was to become streamlined and depersonalized, and played with a stricter adherence to a single tempo for each movement.But in 1939, Maestro employs the "tempo rubato" style of conducting that was the norm for the early part of the century: yet his variations around a single tempo marking are always less extreme than self- indulgent conductors like Mengelberg or Furtwaengler. The phrasing in this nonpareil NBC broadcast is consistently plastic and natural, with an almost theatrical rhetoric which is nevertheless constrained by Toscanini's essentially classical approach. To the Maestro, the work was 'not Napoleon, not Hitler, but Allegro con brio!' This, however, does not imply an impersonal and faceless lack of emotional involvement: one hearing of the shattering slow movement of this broadcast will crystalize one's view of the expressive possibilities inherent in the music, and most other conductors' renderings will seem somewhat flat, or overly histrionic, by comparison.The original 78 rpm set, which I owned, was a nightmare to audition. Not only was the sound only slightly better than the tinniness of a telephone, but also one of the repeated horn call passages in the Scherzo movement was actually cut not during the "playing grooves" of a disk side, but on the spiral lead in! One had to "drop" the needle at the very edge of the disk several times to get it to 'catch' and play all of the musical notes! I gave up trying to enjoy the set directly from the shellac disks, and dubbed it to tape: it took several attempts to get the Scherzo copied correctly in order to edit a continual presentation! Previous issues, like the old Olympic/ATS LP, were made from the shellacs, and had varying amounts of success with this crucial transition point, but the problem has been totally eliminated in this new transfer.The present CD issue demonstrates the phenomenal benefit of obtaining "official" RCA source material rather than 'knock-off' bootleg disks: Seth Winner, the archivist at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Toscanini Legacy collection, was able to obtain pristine copies of "in house" transcription disks made by NBC engineers right in Studio 8-H (or on the premises at Radio City before the signal entered the long- distance broacast telephone lines.) Cut at 33.3 rpm with wide-band equipment that captured highs up to about 8.5 to 9 kHz, the acetates feature wider dynamic range, full bass, and less filtered coloration than the best copy of the commercial 78s.One almost imagines for extended passages of the broadcast that a magnetic tape source and not a mechanical disk has provided the superb, rich, highly- present sound (impossible, for tape technology was limited to experiments in Britain and Germany in 1939.) Yet the sound approaches the quality of early- fifties LPs! Only the slightest occasional small ticks and pops about 35 to 40 dB below the loudest peaks are audible, and Winner and RCA producers have wisely decided not to use crude computer software to eliminate them.If I had to select ONE Toscanini record for posterity out of the huge and astonishing legacy of the conductor, it would be this very performance and recording! Only the lack of the first movement exposition repeat reminds one that we continue to inhabit the Earthly domain of humanity and not the Heavenly realms.The Eighth symphony commercial 78 rpm recording from 17 April 1939 is the disk-mate, and one's elevated mood is soon punctured by the wiry, noisy, and distorted sound of the original shellac disks, among the very worst of the 78 sets from Studio 8-H. Not only is the sound aggressively hard and tight, but also there is a fuzzy intermodulation distortion and "suck out" of detail caused, I would assume, by some cutting disorder (I have heard such evidence of what is known as "audio crossover distortion" in many other RCA shellacs produced from the late thirties through the mid-forties.) At least my own efforts with a set of the original shellacs was no better, and was -- in fact -- not as satisfactory as this modern transfer.The first movement repeat is employed here, investing the work with a more imposing architecture than the usual traversal. Yet Maestro is quite unyielding, and presses on urgently throughout the reading. The more expansive broadcast performance of 8 Nov 1952 (unreleased as yet on ANY medium) preserves a more sunny and genial Toscanini interpretation, though it is slightly marred by an instrumental "clam" in the finale. Otherwise, one prefers the tighter but effective commercial 1952 recording session released in Vol. 4 of the RCA / BMG Toscanini CD Collection."

Off the chart

Gerald L. Trett | 12/18/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I write to endorse the extraordinary claims made for this performance in the musically and technically knowledgeable review posted above. Like that reviewer, I grew up on the original shellac version whose technical butchery of the live performance could not conceal the musical marvel Toscanini wrought in 1939. I especially commend this reissue to younger listeners who know Toscanini only through his less-expansive postwar recordings and wonder what the shouting is all about. It's all here on glorious display: utter precision, complete control of a magnificent orchestra playing at the top of its bent, driving but never driven tempos, and a searing intensity no other conductor ever brought to this masterpiece.The reviewer is careful (and right) to call this an "American" Eroica, in the sense that it avoids Central European self-indulgence. The symphony is one of those masterpieces that come to life in quite different guises, given a conductor who has a conception. Klemperer's Eroica is a granitic, monumental statue of a hero; Walter's, a romantic quest; Toscanini's is Promethean fire that brings me out of my chair stomping around the room shouting "Yes!" "You pays your money, you takes your choice."If this performance did not exist, my choice as the ONE irreplaceable recording of a Beethoven symphony would be Toscanini's New York Philharmonic recording of the seventh; as it is, we don't have to make that choice. We have both: they are transcendent musicmaking of a kind that seems to have vanished. Incomparable."