Search - Leos Janacek, Dmitry Shostakovich, Jascha Horenstein :: Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5; Leos Janacek: Taras Buba

Horenstein's Hair-Raising Janacek

Thomas F. Bertonneau | Oswego, NY United States | 10/11/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"It's not that there are no satisfying contemporary recordings. There are. Some of them boast absolutely spectacular sound courtesy of digital technology. And yet, so much of today's music-making seems routine; the excitement of discovery has gone out of it and, anyway, faithless postmodern types no longer acknowledge the possibility of transcendental revelation. Maybe that's why, in order to recapture the psychic "kick" that I used to get from just about any classical music LP when I was a high school kid thirty years ago and stereo was still relatively new and vacuum tubes had not yet completely vanished - maybe that's why, I say, to reanimate that old gooseflesh, I turn increasingly to archival recordings as the specialty companies reissue them on CD. I know not what precise words will convince the uninitiated that, despite the snap-crackle-pop from pitted 78rpm surfaces, a 1930s Abendroth or a 1940s Furtwängler (or even, yea! a 1950s Klemperer) can catch fire the way no up-to-date performance can. As my old dissertation adviser Eric Gans (UCLA French) says, there are declarative truths that require propositions and there are ostensive truths to which one can only point. I point you, then, to one of a batch of recent reissues on Vox that give us vintage 1950s performances by Jascha Horenstein (1898-1973), in particular to the coupling of Shostakovich 5 with Janacek's "Taras Bulba." Horenstein, German-speaking but Russian-born, briefly an assistant to Furtwängler, an exile from Nazi Germany, qualifies as one of the great independents among conductors, exacting, ingenious, impractical, never finding a tenured post, and yet acknowledged as pioneer in bringing late-romantic and early modern repertory to audiences in a persuasive manner. (He blazed an early path on Vox for Bruckner and Mahler.) "Taras Bulba" presents difficulties and even a crystal-clear digital "take" with a crack ensemble can flag. Finding the right pacing to work up to Janacek's precipitous and brief climaxes is the trick, and Horenstein has divined it. By the way, there's no snap-crackle-pop here; these are magnetic tape recordings from the early 1950s, monophonic, but close to high fidelity. "The Death of Taras Bulba" indeed raises my hackles pleasurably. Shostakovich 5 was not, when Horenstein made this recording, familiar fare. True - Volkov's Shostakovich memoir hadn't yet given us the irony that interpreters now bring to this score. What Horenstein does find is the dark electricity of the First Movement and the bleak pathos of the Largo. If he treats the Finale as a Stalinist triumph, who cares, the rest of it is so superb. Visit also the two Brahms symphonies (1 and 3) that are part of this Horenstein-Vox release."