ARTS
Pursuit of excellence
Anthony Burgess
Toscanini Beethoven's complete sym- phonies (RCA VL 46020) Toscanini Wagner: Siegfried Act II/Idyll (RCA VL 46008)
Toscanini Wagner: Parsifal Act I/Act Ill (RCA VL 46009)
have always been dubious about apply-
ing the term 'great' to mere musical ex- ecutants, preferring to reserve it to the genuine creators, but, ever since the con- ductor's craft became an accepted art, and its practitioners worthy (though, I still think, doubtfully) of acclaim and worship, Arturo Toscanini has come closest to Meriting an imputation of greatness. I have seen as well as heard him at work, and a genuine artistic fanaticism dominated his frame, making him a terror to orchestral players. Weak sight was, with him, a bless- ing, for it forced him to contain the scores he interpreted. A double bass player, whose E string had broken, asked, in an interval, to be excused from playing in the rest of the concert and met merely a long silence from Toscanini. Then Toscanini broke the silence and said: 'I've been going through ,Your part. You don't use the E string in this half. You can play.' It was typical of the 41, an, but his exact memory of the written oYnamics in the score was a subtler and 'tore terrifying endowment. Nobody could „,et away with even a half-bar's slackness.
hen Eric Coates played the viola under Sir Henry Wood, he would, with his desk-
Partner, divide the bar, half each, if they (lid not find the work interesting. The two got away with it with Wood, but Toscanini would have heard the difference.
The present generation of conductors tends to denigrate Toscanini's achievement, finding him stiff, pedantic, lacking in a genial capacity to loosen up, yield to the moment's inspiration, try out defiance of the composer's tempi (as Siegfried Wagner did sometimes, though he knew better than aLnY man what his father wanted). It has to be said that Toscanini was never in his life satisfied with a performance and strove to improve, but only to the very well-trained ear will subtleties of difference between in- ise,rPretations be apparent. RCA has issued s rendering — with the NBC Orchestra which, in his later days, became his chosen instrument — of all Beethoven's sym- phonies (seven records) and two records of extracts from Wagner.
That an Italian should become perhaps the century's finest interpreter of Wagner is an apparent paradox only to be resolved when we consider Toscanini's repudiation of that musical slackness which, granting all to the voice and little to the instrumental ac- companiment, dominated the Italian opera houses of his youth, when he played the 'cello in the pit. He reacted in the direction of the Wagnerian aesthetic and stayed with it. One of the follies of the Nazi regime was to rid Bayreuth of Jews, which meant Toscanini's resignation and the loss of Bayreuth's finest conductor. Toscanini's refusal to play the fascist anthem at the first performance of Turandot in 1926 lost him his Italian passport (Roosevelt had to plead with Mussolini for its restoration). The man would never yield to the stupidities of the politicians, and he treated sloppy flautists as if they were defectors from the polity of beauty and truth. There was absolutely no compromise. It is useful, if not essential, to follow these recordings with the scores. You will see Toscanini's scrupulosity of observation of the most minuscule marking, though his translation of ppp and even pp into sound, or lack of it, often goes further than the composer might have envisaged. The Ninth Symphony is tremendous here, but the Eighth, which so many have treated cavalierly, comes through as a masterpiece of great originality. Wagner thought highly of it and worried about its tempi, and Toscanini always took Wagner seriously. The renderings of the Tristan Prelude and Liebestod, of the 'Forest Murmurs' from Siegfried, and of the Good Friday music from Parsifal are tributes to Wagner's own miraculous orchestration rather than (as must so often be the case with Brahms and Schumann) the conductor's right to sonic adjustment and the covering of weaknesses. You cannot talk of Toscanini's Beethoven and Wagner or his Mozart (an admirable Symphony No. 40 on RCA VL 46003), only of the ideal realisation — through painstak- ing study and thought — of what those composers heard in their heads. Carlo Maria Giulini may be thought of as a successor to Toscanini who has admitted the greater flexibility of Furtwangler. As a viola player he is notable for stressing inner string parts. He has not, like Toscanini, shown hostility to the post-Puccinian reper- toire, but he is dubious about modernity's treatment of the voice. His loving version of Rossini's Stabat Mater on Deutsche Gram- mophon, with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, and Terrani, Gonzalez, Raimondi and Ricciarelli as soloists, shows him at his best. Here is a Rossini who has left the opera house behind him but is still concerned with vocal 'casting' (he had Mario in mind, surely, for the tenor role). It is the unaccompanied choral writing and the fugal Amen that astonish and which Giulini serves with fine and ample warmth. Though the Latin text is something hard to persuade many Italians to take seriously (the 'dum pendebat' of the first stanza has become a euphemism for the penis, at least in Rome), the music has taken it as a pretext for some of the most moving vocal writing of the 19th century. 1 would quarrel with some of Giulini's tempi in Schumann's Third Symphony (Deutsche Grammophon, 2532 040), but his version of the Manfred Overture on the same disc is properly Byronic. The strings of the Los Angeles Philharmonic are pure silk.
To commemorate Stravinsky's centenary (17 June) Deutsche Grammophon has issued L'Oiseau de Feu, Petrouchka, Le Sacre du Printemps, Pulcinella and Jeu de Canes with Claudio Abbado and the LSO, a useful celebratory album (four records) with an agonised-looking Stravinsky on the cover defying the audience through his pince-nez. Abbado's Le Sacre has to stand comparison with Boulez's and, in the open- ing section, comes off the worse. (The high bassoon sounds too flutelike to be true.) He scores in the heavier passages. The Firebird sounds more like Rimsky-Korsakov than it should. Pulcinella is fine, with superb solo passages. Jeu de Cartes is not the most satisfying of Stravinsky's ballet scores (compare it, for human feeling, with Bliss's Checkmate, which dramatises a better game than poker): it is clever but dry, and it is played drily. The more I hear Petrouchka the less I can take it, except in the interior scenes which remind us of its provenance as a piano Konzertstuck, as music. Pastiche, citation, decor, its shape wholly resident in the stage action we have to remember. The LSO is in admirable form throughout.
© Anthony Burgess 1982
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