Search - Carpenter, Shostakovich, Gershwin :: Symposium Great Conductors: Leonard Bernstein

Great Shostakovich - misattributed Carpenter

Arthur Leonard | New York, NY USA | 12/29/2002

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Bernstein's 1945 concert performance of the Shostakovich 5th is a brilliant piece of work for such a young conductor directing what was then a very new piece. It is much more comprehending than Stokowski's then highly-touted American premiere recording. The sound on this transcription is just fair, with blasting at thickly-orchestrated loud parts.
On the other hand, there is an imposter here. The comprehensive listing of Bernstein's concert performances with NYP released by the Philharmonic a few years ago indicates that Carpenter's Sea Drift was not performed on that Jan. 1945 concert.
Further research indicates that the NY Philharmonic premiere of the piece, as announced on the air in a snippet caught on this disc, was actually directed by Artur Rodzinski in October 1944, and that broadcast was released years ago on an Italian CD devoted to Rodzinski broadcasts of American compositions.
The Symposium source for this disc seems to have been a wartime US transcription disc sent to England for broadcast to US troops. It's possible that the Rodzinski and Bernstein performances were packaged together on the same transcription disc for delayed broadcast to make up a one-hour program, and that announcement of Rodzinski was omitted. In any event, the performance is worth having on historical grounds."