by EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
Wagner: Gotterdammerung. H. Von Karajan. (Soloists, Berlin Philharmonic.) Deutsche Grammophon 2716.001 (6 discs) stereo ($35.88.)
I can swim full length in Wagner, given the occasion--I have never got over the great Met shows of the 1930's that I attended as a youngster, complete with Melchior, Flagstad, et al. Those were the days. Since then, Wagner has declined in spite of much modernization at Beyreuth. My samplings of recorded Wagnerian singing over the years have sort of shocked me--such feeble stuff!
I'm here to say that Von K., not my favorite conductor in general, has really done it. There's no question about it at all-the big flow, the grand line, the hypnotic, all-out musical soul-drenching, is back. And superbly adapted to records, if one discounts the jolting side breaks, which in big Wagner are as bad as they used to be in shorter 78 rpm recordings. (There just isn't anywhere to stop in Wagner, short of an Act.) It has been a good thirty years since I've heard such white-hot, glowing Wagner from an orchestra. The orchestra is best here. Von K. chases after the orchestra every second. The orchestra is his power-instrument. It incandesces.
But the man has chosen excellent soloists. And he lets them sing-which few conductors as dynamic as himself are able to do. They sing beautifully, intelligently, in tune. And though they are a gentler breed than the old heroes and heroines, in a way they get more out of the music in terms of subtlety, if not the grand impact. An excellent set of big basses. Some superb contralti and soprani and a tenor Siegfried who at least sounds a bit like Melchior-he has that Heldentenor brass so necessary to the Wagnerian music, though not really of Melchior's steely temper. (But so much better than the milky, weak-kneed tenors of a dozen years ago who had the gall to sing such parts!)
An entirely matured and perfected stereo technique weds the sound to the action and the voices to the orchestra in what strikes me as a near-ideal fashion, the singers limpidly clear and undistorted, at a safe distance so that the orchestra comes through full strength, the motions spare (stereo movement is pretty clumsy at best) and the directionality precise but casual and wholly subordinate--as it should be. No ping-pong Wagner, please. Splendid job! And I assume it applies to the other Von K. Ring recordings already out. I haven't swum in them yet--I've been bogged down in Baroque.
WHO ARE THE SINGERS? (I knew you'd ask me that). I was about to say, if you're interested, go to your record store and find out. A lot of them--Brilioth, Stewart, Kelemen, Ridderbusch, for the men, Dernesch, Janowitz, Ludwig, Chookasian, Ligendza, Rebmann, Moser, Reynolds for the ladies, covering the trio of Rhine Maidens and the trio of Norns along with the principal characters: Dernesch as Briinnhilde and Janowitz as Gutrune, both stalwart musicians of fine sensitivity. The uncouth trio who conspire against Siefgried are splendid in their basshood, real characters as well as musicians; the fated Siegfried, dizzy fair-haired boy-hero, is perhaps more real in Brilioth's brassy but slightly uncertain voice than it ever was in the Melchior days of total tenor power. I liked him. After all, Siegfried is a ninny when you come down to it. He's no Joe Namath.
Performance: A, Sound: A
Bernstein conducts Strauss Don Quixote. New York Philharmonic. Columbia M 30067 stereo ($5.98.)
There are many right and useful ways to interpret the big scores; Bernstein has his and it riles some people. Take him or leave him is best-for the Bernstein way has a lot to recommend it.
I'd call it musical loving kindness. He positively fawns over a work like this, savoring each sentimental detail, as though to say, now listen to that-isn't it lovely? True, it goes on and on, this one, and he fawns and fawns But is a tougher approach really any better? Or a slicker one? For the former, try RCA's old Reiner version with the Chicago (LSS 2384); for slickness there's always Ormandy at Philadelphia, out of the Columbian era (MS 6515).
Strauss, indeed, is often tough, more often than tender, especially in these huge early tone poems. "Don Quixote" is somehow a hard-toned work in spite of the gentle Don--I never could feel that young Strauss liked him very much. The work, moreover, really sprawls. In 1897 they didn't expect conciseness; what went over as modern was realism--the baaing of sheep, for instance, so gratingly portrayed here. And so the Don moves from adventure to adventure and the "script" tells you exactly what is going on from moment to moment-if you can find your way. I never can. I get bored.
"The Don spies an empty boat lying oarless on the river bank." Hmmm. Now just what should I listen for there? Oars? An empty boat? "The Don and his servant are blindfolded and persuaded to mount a wooden horse. "Ah-so. Velly intlesting. "An army approaches slowly " Ah yes, a march. But what about this: " in a vast cloud of dust." Musical dust? OK, you go look for it! And so it continues.
The tough-minded conductors try desperately to pull all this musical claptrap together into a coherent whole, like a Beethoven symphony. They plug the Themes, accentuate the Significances, work up the tension, look for the grand sweep. All to no purpose, I say. Just makes the music more banal and even more dated.
Bernstein, you see, is all soft and his Strauss is warm and colorful. Everything gets its musical chance, and the gorgeous orchestration really comes through.
The solo instruments surrounding the chief cello play their hearts out (and are very nicely balanced with the orchestra); the Don, via his cello, turns out even more sentimental than you thought, even simpatico. So it all ends happily, hours and hours later.
The excellent cellist is Lorne Monore, the viola and violin are William Lincer and David Nadien.
Performance: B+, Sound: B+
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe--complete ballet. L'Orch. de la Suisse Romande, Ansermet. Everest 3278 sim. stereo ($4.98.)
Debussy: Jeux; Poeme Danse; Six Epigraphes Antiques. Ernest Ansermet, L'Orch. de la Suisse Romande. Everest 3285 sim. stereo ($4.98.)
Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Dohnanyi: Vars. on a Nursery Theme. Julius Katchen, piano; London Philharmonic Orch., Boult. Everest 3280 stereo ($4.98.)
It isn't certain whether the classical record biz is going kaput-it has threatened to die many times before--but one thing is sure: this is the age of the reissue. Records, as these columns often note, are timeless and spaceless. Here's the new slant to that! Everest has somehow got hold of the whole great early London catalogue, of just renown, in the era just before and just after the stereo revolution. Here are a few of the offerings, including two of the incomparably well performed Ansermet recordings with his own orchestra, more or less developed for him by British Decca in the postwar days. (Decca is, of course, London over here.)
These aren't bottom-priced discs, at least as of the list price, but they do undercut, necessarily, the new ones. How London came to dispense with its own great early recordings, instead of applying them as other companies do to its own "Legacy"-type label, I do not know. Nor, particularly, do I wish to find out. Politics, politics! Suffice it to say that, some extremely curious phasing problems aside, Everest is doing a reasonably proficient job with the reissuing, and thus a musically notable series of older first-line recordings is once more available. (Ansermet did some of the items again--no matter. His earlier recordings for London are musically his very best.)
The pre-stereo recordings are given the stereo simulation treatment here in what seems to my ear to be a new and different format, most curious. No longer the simple roll-off of highs ,on one side and bass on the other-not too bad an idea, at that, for many older recordings. This is more subtle and seems to involve a species of reverse phasing in the high end, if not the all-over. When the two channels are combined into mono (as per switching on preamp) the entire high end vanishes! Weird. Those who plan to play these discs in mono-not many of us-would do best to try one first before investing in a batch.
The pre-stereo 1950 Londons in this reissue are somewhat bright and scratchy in the stereo playback; I remember them as a bit that way in the first place. The stereo jobs, the earliest London stereo releases back around 1960 or before, are smoother and more oily in the sound.
Katchen, by the way, is casually listed as "an exclusive London artist" on the back of his record, though London is nowhere else mentioned on any of the discs, as far as I can see. Everest, as always, merely prints off the original notes without change!
Assuming that this is a legitimate authorized release of the London material, I find it odd that Everest has omitted the great name Maybe London wouldn't let them.
Performances: B to A, Sound: B to C+
Scriabin: Eight Etudes, Op.42; Sonatas Nos 5, 7, 9. Ruth Laredo, piano. Connoisseur Society CS 2032 stereo ($5.98.)
Crash, Wham, bang, sock!!! As I listened to the wild, impassioned noises of these late-Scriabin sonatas, 1907 to 1913, I was once more impressed with the strange nature of those years and how their deepest levels of unease, in the face of coming World War I, so often emerged in this kind of Messianic, super-passionate ultra-Romantic music.
Not merely Scriabin. Look at early Schoenberg--"Transfigured Night" and Strauss, the operas Salomé and Elektra. And Mahler in his immensities of cosmic inspiration, and early Bartók (refined in his much more economical later violence). Yes, an age is expressed in the individuals it throws out of its turmoil. In ours, is it John Cage? Maybe the rap goes elsewhere--Angela Davis, perhaps.
The eight middle-period Etudes are relatively mild and sophisticated; you'll hear them as good old fashioned late-Romantic pieces in comfortable keys, like a good Etude should. (They were more radical than that in their day.) But the three Sonatas, including the "White Mass," No. 7, and the "Black Mass," No. 9, are something else again. To absorb these, I think, you will have to be turned on to cosmic inner forces and you should be far into astrology and mysticism. Otherwise it's going to sound like the ravings of a far-out madman-and Scriabin was pretty far out by that time. He was already the "translator" for cosmic messages of superhuman import; he went out in a rowboat on Lake Geneva and preached to fishermen, who must have been slightly surprised. Cosmic, and yet very much of that period in the involved but dated harmonies and the ultra-Romanticism, so passionate that the piano almost busts itself. Full of "Scriabin chords," vaguely related to early-Stravinsky chords and early Schoenberg, too, though much more wild-eyed.
Connoisseur's piano recording and the pianist herself make for a technically superb sound, if one that is not exactly dulcet on the ears. Here, there is extreme percussion and an enormous dynamic range; the piano is ugly as often as lovely, and perhaps by intention. It is an uncompromisingly close, dry sound but there isn't a trace of distortion, even in the loudest passages, and the background is quiet to an uncanny degree.
One of those ultra-up-to-date records where you flounder trying to find a reasonable volume setting: start at the beginning as you would for an average piano disc and about thirty seconds later the roof falls in. Frankly, I can't stand the stuff. No matter--it's impressive.
Performance: B + Sound: A
Weber/Dusik. (Weber: Trio in G Minor, Op.63. Dusik: Trio in F Minor, Op.65.) Bernard Goldberg, flute; Theo Salzman, cello; Harry Franklin, piano. Turnabout TV-S 34329 stereo ($2.98.)
Now here is the way a classic trio should play on records. Three performers, playing chamber music and making it sound like chamber music in spite of big liveness and lots of space in the recorded product. Good. All three instruments, in fact, are almost more than real, very flutey, cello-ish, pianistic.
Quite an uncanny sense of their actual presence. No distortion whatever and fully Dolbyized for that velvety background. (The cello is strangely wiry, but this could be the actual sound of the particular instrument.) This record doesn't sound like a recording. And that's a compliment! Weber is, of course, the famed opera and overture composer of the turn of the 19th century. Dusick is better known in the Germanized spelling, Dussek ("Doo-shek" I think is the Czech sound of it). He was very well known in his day, if a second-line composer in our later view.
You guessed it. Or maybe you didn't. Dusik wins, hands, bows, and fingers down. A really splendid, heartfelt, rich piece, out of the Beethoven era but full of a Dvorakian charm and grace. We sense that in this music we are hearing Dusik at his all-out best--this is no quickie work but a real labor of musical love. You'll like it.
Weber, potentially a much bigger man, is just as clearly turning out what Dr. William B. Ober in his engaging program notes barely manages to avoid calling a potboiler. (He couldn't say that, after all.) Weber was an opera man, a big-drama man, apt with a clarinet, an orchestra, a virtuoso piano. This chamber-music stuff did indeed cramp his style. There are fine flashes of Weber melody and a lot of sheer originality. But half the time one hears Weber somehow saying, now what'll I do next?
Performance: B +, Sound: B +
The Classic Trio Beethoven: The Complete Piano Trios. Istomin-Stern-Rose. Columbia M5 30065 (5 discs) stereo ($29.98.)
This praiseworthy Bicentennial product is almost all good; but any buyer would naturally want to know its main characteristics before investing in so much of the same thing. I herewith oblige.
Three seasoned professionals, not elder statesmen of their art yet, but all of them veterans of a million big concerts, travelers on the jet circuit, soloists. Their association, like many another including the once-famed "Million-Dollar Trio" over at RCA, is that of three soloists coming together as equals to form a sort of super-trio. They began, in fact, almost ten years ago and have "concertized," as the phrase goes, ever since. Thus-much hoopla in the accompanying verbiage. And a definite kind of performance as a trio.
You can guess. Three big men, accustomed to the big-time concert and festival, regularly playing for large audiences. Dedicated, intense, perfectly rehearsed, apt at projecting their music "live" before vast seas of faces. What happens in a close-up recording situation?
Eugene Istomin comes out best in this somewhat cramped environment--perhaps because Columbia has put him well in the sonic background, at a fair distance. (Shades of old-fashioned 78 rpm days!) The piano part indeed is the leading part and he plays with verve, excitement, perfect phrasing, always on the tip of his toes, if I may so speak of his fingers. Superb. Beethoven's violin and cello still hang on surprisingly to the older tradition in which they were mere added parts to decorate a piano piece. Beethoven was, after all, a pianist.
But why, oh why, does Columbia insist on placing the big-toned Stern violin so close to a nearby mike, and the solid toned Rose cello similarly, where its bottom sound is exaggerated? Rose is OK, but Stern's playing--as we hear it in this form--is always verging on the strident and at best is metallic, edgy, scratchy. I kept praying for more space, just a bit more distance, to turn a wiry sound into a beautiful one! Only in the suave slow movements does Stern really come through at his 'best. I'd call it an astonishingly injudicious microphone placement, considering Columbia's very long experience with this sort of thing.
The basic fault, however, is larger--it is the very bigness of the Trio's concept of the music. Here we are listening to a large-scale concert performance at small-scale range and we cannot forget it for a moment. Out there, behind us, is always that sea of faces. Up here, close-up, is the sweat, the energy, the projection, the drive. They can't help it.
It's exciting. It's splendid Beethoven. But it isn't living room music. That, in modern terms, is what chamber music should be.
A prolific album, generously including such extras as one of the early "WoO" works (with two remarkably fine movements out of three) and the charming late-period "Kakadu" Variations.
Performance: B +, Sound: B
Carl Maria von Weber: Piano Sonatas No.2, Op.39, No.3, Op.49. Dino Ciani. Deutsche Grammophon 2530 026 stereo ($5.98.)
Some record companies really know how to record the piano. D-G does! Also, often enough, our own RCA. Others incomprehensibly miss out, even the biggest companies. 'Nuff said. Why? Even the tiniest outfits can do it right and often do, right alongside D-G, et al.
What you must at all costs avoid is (al a tubby, bottom-heavy sound (mike close to the sound board) and (b) percussiveness, the kind that makes weak pickups buzz and sets off the chinaware on the mantelpiece. For fifty years we've had that kind of recorded piano and we still get it. Not on this record. And what a velvety silence in the background!
Carl Maria may have been a big drama man and hence not much of a chamber music composer but the piano was his own instrument and, in his day, it was beginning to turn heroic (though there was still a surprising amount of harpsichord twang in its bass strings). So the piano sonatas, somewhat erratic and wandering, manage nevertheless to achieve the big, dashing effect that is his best idiom and a good deal of that delicious melody and harmony which we associate with the large-scale works. That's what you hear in these sonatas.
As for young Dino Ciani, I keep fumbling over names from another age when I hear his. Dino Grandi, Count Ciano. Remember? That was long before this one was born. He is a sensitive young pianist with the new flair for warmly Romantic playing of today's young, a bit episodic in his approach, minus the grand line of the older Romantic players, but very well suited to this somewhat episodic music. Nice. And such a superb piano sound! Thanks, D-G.
Performance: B +, Sound: A
Max Reger: Vocal Works. Max Van Egmond, bar., Junge Kantorei, Berlin Symphony Orch., Joachim Martini. Telefunken SLT 43114-B stereo ($5.95.)
The German Late Romanticists-if you can call them that-are beginning to make a mild foray in our direction these days. Awhile back, I found Pfitzner surprisingly interesting. Max Reger, a big man in his day in his own territory, was nine years younger than Richard Strauss and now seems both more "modern" and yet infinitely more dated.
To be sure, Reger died in 1916; whereas old Strauss went on ineffably composing right through WW II. A batch of choral works here plus music with baritone solo, rather splendidly performed by a good soloist and one of those highly disciplined German youth choirs, plus the Berlin Philharmonic. The choir was founded, the quaint English notes say, by the Lutheran Church in order to get away from too much "barock" (i.e. Baroque) yet to avoid the "new song"--that's what it says--which was then coming into vogue. Now I wonder whether that could mean rock music?? Whatever it was, they avoided it all right, for the kids do seem to like Reger and really whale into him. Bet they listen to rock on the side.
Performance: A, Sound: B-
(Audio magazine, Jan. 1971; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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