Search - Mussorgsky, Dukas, Toscanini :: Toscanini Conducts

A Must For Toscanini Collectors!

09/17/1998

(4 out of 5 stars)

"For a number of years, Serge Koussevitzky had the performing rights to the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". As late as 1936, when the Philadelphia Orchestra recorded the orchestral version of the piano suite under the direction of Eugene Ormandy, an arrangement by Lucien Caillet was utilized, not Ravel's edition (which Koussevitzky recorded in 1930.) By the late thirties, other conductors were allowed to play the Ravel edition, and Toscanini's broadcast from January 29, 1938, done just weeks after his first NBC concert, is preserved on this Iron Needle release.The conception of the Maestro as presented here is dramatically different from later performances, which culminated in the fast, intense powerhouse reading of 1953 that appeared on a Red Seal LP and is now in the RCA / BMG Toscanini Collection CD series in exceptionally fine sound. In this 1938 concert, however, the Maestro viewed the piece as a more monumental work, and he provides a brooding, dark, and rugged account, deeply inflected in phrasing, and invested with microfine dramatic pauses and agogics, never exaggerated and "telegraphed" like many other conductors, but just on the line of permissability. The sound is -- unaccountably for this label -- in genuine, glorious single-channel MONO! The source material was probably an "in house" acetate disk recording, but it probably was not taken down in Studio 8-H's control room, for it is just a bit dull compared to the best 1938 archival Toscanini material sonics (such as his Schubert Second on Dell'Arte CD.) Yet there is full bass, and a reasonably wide dynamic range without a heavy sense of straining by an electronic limiter, so that the climaxes have plenty of body and impact. Those who are familiar with the famed Studio 8-H sonics will find them represented here in spades: dry, tight, and without almost any sense of "air" or reverberation. Furthermore, the mike placement is closer than in later NBC programs in the forties, which began to sound more like a natural concert hall perspective. However, the clinical nature of the recording enables a microscopic view of detail, and (listening with my eyes closed) I could almost see the instrumentalists disposed before me: one can hear the nuance of every note, as Toscanini demanded.The Dukas opera "Ariadne and Blue-Beard" is no longer in the modern repertoire, but Toscanini apparently revered it (he had memorized the score and texts to a hundred major operas, and retained all the details to the very end of his long career!) The 1947 broadcast performance of the suite is the most extensive series of excerpts we currently have on commercial recordings, and the music is indeed colorful and affecting, the closing pages with orchestra and chorus in full cry being quite poignant, beautiful, and moving in the most eloquent Gallic manner. The broadcast was made with the RCA ribbon mike in the "Johnston" position, so that there is an excellent balance and some sense of a real acoustic; this has been 'enhanced' by the addition of artificial reverberation and digital delay, which attempts to simulate stereo (the Mussorgsky above is in genuine undoctored mono.) If you put your preamp in L+R mono mode, you will get a better and more solid monophonic balance that is not too far from the original archeck disk recordings (as evidenced by the old Toscanini Society private LP release.) There are high frequencies up to 9 or 10 kHz, so the recording sounds almost hi-fi. One wonders why Iron Needle bothered with the phony stereo, and laments that they did not make this disk a bit longer by adding another work or two from the broadcasts of the late forties. 4 Stars; I would give it 5 if fake stereo had not been used in the Dukas, and if a little less "Cedar" processing had been employed to reduce treble noise."