Search - Ludwig van Beethoven, Spoken Word, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart :: All Beethoven

SOME MOZART AS WELL

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 10/16/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Nothing is said about any remastering of the historical performances here, and the sound confirms that. Only the first disc is `all Beethoven', consisting of a live broadcast concert in 1944 plus a rehearsal of the Coriolan overture in 1946. The second disc dates from 1936 and preserves a broadcast in which Rudolf Serkin made his American debut in Beethoven's 4th concerto and Mozart's last piano concerto. None of the sound is marvellous, but the 1936 recording, although rather dim and distant, is not as bad as it might have been. Far and away the best recorded sound is given to the 1944 performance of the Beethoven 4th concerto, and that is just as well because so far as I am concerned it is the greatest performance of a Beethoven concerto that I have ever heard in my life.



This opinion is unlikely to command universal agreement. The account of the Beethoven G major that Serkin and Toscanini gave to their Carnegie Hall audience on two successive evenings in 1944 is completely out of step with the way the work is usually performed nowadays, but since I first acquired it on vinyl in the gold Toscanini edition some decades ago it has been the only performance of that great work that I have even been able to listen to. Beethoven himself was the soloist in the first performance, and a contemporary account tells us, according to Tovey, that he took the first movement `at a tremendous pace'. This baffled Tovey, and it baffled me until I heard it done here. The speed is still perfectly reasonable for an `allegro moderato', but it is much faster than usual - faster indeed than in the 1936 version. It made me realise that the G major concerto is a virtuoso composition, perhaps Beethoven's only virtuoso work for piano, or maybe indeed for any instrument. `Virtuoso' is a term referring to a style, not to the degree of difficulty. The 5th concerto is probably every bit as difficult, but I don't find it (or, say, the Hammerklavier sonata), virtuoso in manner. 30 years after I first heard it, I am still thrilled by Serkin's eagerness and exuberance in his first entry after the long orchestral introduction. Everything is just right and more than right for me here, and if I pick out, say, Serkin's brilliant filigree work after the return of the main them, or his terrific playing of the cadenza, these are only examples. Indeed just before the piano's main entry the way Toscanini handles the antiphonal woodwind phrases in those Beethovenish four repeated notes is as exciting as anything the soloist does, and the very recollection of it has me reaching for the off-switch when I listen to the passage swooned over in the usual way. The slow movement is perfect (on any view of the work I'd have thought) and the finale again makes the normal run of performances intolerable to me, culminating in a thrilling tally-ho conclusion. Rhythmic sense has as much to do with the effect throughout as speed or technique, and I'd guess it had a lot to do with the strong and lifelong personal bond there was between conductor and soloist. They never performed together again, and Toscanini never gave this concerto again. I imagine he knew what a classic they had created here.



The rest of the 1944 concert consists of the Coriolan overture (in sound bad enough for the dreaded studio 8-H of unhappy memory) plus a couple of oddities for strings. First we have the great cavatina from the B flat quartet op 130, and the sub-standard recorded quality makes me unwilling to be too categorical in reviewing it. The pace is too fast for my own general liking, and the great climactic phrase of the main melody, which from the bow of Adolf Busch hits me in the solar plexus each time I hear it, comes across as not much more than pleasant lyricism. However the contrasting section, marked `beklemmt' (heartbroken) sounds as if it was pretty memorable. The other string item is a confection consisting of the fugue from the 3rd Rasumovsky quartet preceded oddly by the introduction to that quartet's first movement. The fugue is taken at a furious lick, and I suspect this performance was taken by the Emerson quartet for their model. I like it like this, but neither these oddities nor the overture is what this disc is about. If this was the whole concert it was rather a short one, but after that concerto performance I can understand why.



The first disc is rounded off with an amusing clip of Toscanini rehearsing the Coriolan overture. This is much better recorded than at the 1944 concert, but Toscanini's is not my favourite account of this work from that period. There is a performance by Fuertwaengler from Berlin in 1944 that will put it in the shade if you can find it. On the second disc you will find Serkin's debut concert in America, with Toscanini again but the NY Philharmonic, introduced by an announcer using the American equivalent of the refined and deferential BBC diction of that era. Toscanini programmed the Beethoven in the first half of the concert and the Mozart in the second. This surprised Serkin, but the reason was that Toscanini thought his soloist might be nervous and could get over that easier in Beethoven than in Mozart. The occasional bar goes missing from the Beethoven, and the performance is less spectacular than in 1944. The liner-note makes a certain amount of the issue of the speed in Mozart's slow movement, where Toscanini was convinced that the composer had prescribed 2 beats, not 4, to the bar. This has proved correct. The tempo seems much as we are used to it nowadays, but at the time the work was hardly played, and record-collectors were accustomed to a funereal account from Schnabel. All in the name of progress clearly, and this disc is obviously of historical interest more than anything else. The whole set is mainly of historical interest except for one item. Guess which."