by EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
Berlioz: Les Troyens. Vickers, Veasey, Lindholm et al., Wandworth School Boys' Choir, Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Colin Davis. Philips 6709 002 (5 discs) stereo ($31.82).
I was in a way reflecting history when I found myself unable to get through all ten sides of this immense opera in one evening. It was never performed in its own time, a century ago; not until the late 1950s was the whole thing produced in a piece as Berlioz wrote it. Here, it is recorded complete for the first time in the notable Colin Davis Berlioz series. In effect, this is a brand new Berlioz work--his last, a quarter-century after the familiar "Symphonie Fantastique."
The four-hour-plus span of the music was actually normal for the modernist of that day. "Les Troyens" is contemporary with Wagner's "Tristan," which is longer, and far from the first of Wagner's enormous productions. But what a difference! For one thing, France was much more conservative in its established national opera. French opera styles have always been rigid, as Mozart had found to his cost some ninety years earlier. Wagner too. "Tannhäuser" was a Paris flop at about the time "Les Troyens" was completed, in spite of revisions to fit French taste. (Wagner flatly refused to insert the traditional ballet!) Thus we can ascribe the failure to stage "Les Troyens" ( except in a truncated two-evening version) simply to French conservatism in high places-which Berlioz himself had predicted. But there are profound differences, even so, between this monster and the parallel Wagnerian operas. In a sense, Berlioz is much more difficult to take in toto, so to speak, in one sitting. It has an altogether different sort of continuity.
The Wagnerian music drama is one huge, muscular whole, an architectural super-construction welded into a piece out of interwoven themes, the famed Leitmotiv fabric that unites voices and orchestra into one huge, continuous-flow mass of suggestive sound, carrying the senses along hour after hour in a vast sonic flood, a veritable Mississippi river.
Mixed metaphors! No matter. For Wagner, one needs a dozen metaphors all at once. Typically Germanic.
But France has never really tuned itself to these gargantuan workings, in any of its arts. Where Bach wrote vast orchestral suites and huge variation structures like the Goldberg Variations for keyboard, Rameau and Couperin composed their French suites as assembled collections of beautifully made miniature pieces, and the same with variations. So too, oddly enough, with the great Berlioz in the heyday of immensity in music. A huge Berlioz work is huge in length and cumulative impact, but not in its structure, which is classically French, an assembled series of smaller pieces.
Indeed, "Les Troyens" is almost compulsively classical, for a last work by such a composer-it harks back to the jointed recitative and aria format of earlier operas, avoiding any show of Leitmotiv structure, scarcely even allowing a continuous flow; the music still breaks up into separate "numbers" approximately à la Gilbert & Sullivan (if we may take a musically poles-apart example). Thus"Les Troyens" isn't easy to follow in its grand lines. It is a vast variety show, yet deadly serious, a long sequence of "scenes" each more or less independent of the others; the inner continuity is a matter of subtlety and will not really hit you until the numberless recitatives and arias are familiar and in the memory. How long will that take? All the time you can spare! Fortunately, the recorded medium is ideal for this type of music. Play as much as you want at a time, with the libretto in hand (the language, again unlike Wagner, moves along smartly; the action is expanded naturally, at a normal "living" tempo, rather than by slowing-down as in Wagner). Quit when you must-it's OK in this music. Take it up again later.
The impact does not depend on cumulative, unbroken, hypnotic listening as in Wagner. It will hit you just as well with intervening breaks for relief.
To tell the truth, I found a good deal of the music somewhat vapid in impact, the intensity not really backed by enough sheer musical content. It often happens, or seems to happen, in Berlioz, whose harmonic pallette was, actually, as rigidly limited as that of Mendelssohn. I found that the big, climactic scenes-the holocaust of the fall of Troy with the Trojan women committing suicide right and left, the final immolation of Dido, forsaken by Aeneas in Carthage-left me cold, or lukewarm. Much horror, many diminished seventh chords, more melodrama than most of us can take these days, though not a fault of Berlioz since this sort of thing went down well in the nineteenth century. The quieter scenes are more easily digested, and those of glorious pomp and circumstance. The horror scenes are overdone, as we hear them.
A superb, if unique, performance, out of that curious British affinity for French music that goes back through Sir Thomas Beecham, who did great Berlioz in his day. It is hard to imagine a better-tailored rendition of the sense of the huge work, with a classic restraint which is precisely right for French music (would we ham it up!) and yet enough tension to project everything that Berlioz has to offer. Even the vocal sounds are somehow French, though the French accents are a bit dim, to put it mildly. The two chief ladies, Cassandra in the first part (Bent Lindholm) and Dido in the second ( Josephine Veasey) are triumphantly good. Their joint foil, Aeneas ( Jon Vickers) is a somewhat nasal disappointment--but perhaps only too accurate to the conception of that hero, a rather colorless pawn of the gods (exactly as in Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" of the middle 1600s ), who shows very little character of his own.
The album is winning every known prize for excellence, and surely deserves it on every ground, both musical and technical.
Performance: A Sound: A-
Wilhelm Backhaus-Beethoven Sonatas Nos. 16, 22, 27. London CS 6639 stereo ($5.98). Wilhelm Backhaus Memorial (1908, 1927, 1938). Parnassus 3 mono ( 130 Arnold St., Staten Island, N.Y. 10301).
Readers of Our October issue (p. 64) will note that I used the present tense in describing Wilhelm Backhaus as "the grand old man of the recorded Beethoven Sonata." No-he did not die between the writing and the publication of those words; he was already dead. But his records were still coming forth, brand new.
Like the Columbia discs of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the RCA discs of the Boston Symphony.
As has often been observed in these columns, recordings are in a special sense timeless. 99 per cent of them have no specific connotations of any particular moment in time (or, for that matter, in space) as we actually listen. They exist basically in the present; for that is their impact on us. They are happening as we listen. And they happen again as we listen again.
Thus the "present" in terms of new recordings is always to some extent the past and, more often than not, we listeners do not even know--or care--how far, or in what circumstances. Reviewers often thus refer to the past in the present tense, because that is the way we listen. Do we say "Shakespeare is the greatest English dramatist," or "Shakespeare was. . . ..? Does it make much difference? Welhelm Backhaus died in mid-1969, with his record-making career (in both senses of that term!) still up to date in full ffrr stereo. It covered ( covers) a time span of more than sixty years, the longest ever. The first of the above records is a new release--Backhaus is still coming out with new material and his career in its disc form is not yet completed. The second disc, the Memorial, includes an item from his first set of recordings, put down into wax by the acoustic process in the year 1908. Unbelievable! He was then 24.
For general comment on the current London ffrr Backhaus in stereo see again my review of October. It applies to the sense and "feel" of this later issue in the series, the sonatas No. 27 (Op. 90), No. 22 (Op. 54) and No. 16 (Op. 31, No. 1)--the same elderly Backhaus, in his eighties, a bit clumsy but astonishingly vigorous and Beethoven-wise in an elder statesman way.
The Memorial album is, of course, an LP reissue of early electric and acoustic 78s. In sonic quality the recordings aren't too good, as old piano recordings go; one hears little distinction between the Brahms of 1927 and the Schumann of 1938. But the sense of the playing is easy to get, and the quality of the younger Backhaus pianism. Yes, his finger technique was fabulous in those years, rivaling perhaps Hoffman. Top musicianship, too, a sense for the grand line and flow, as in the later recordings.
Also a few mistakes here and there ( they were let pass on 78s, remember), again as in later recordings! The mannerisms of an earlier time are also apparent--young Backhaus takes "liberties" with strict printed time values in the style of the day, reminding us of Cortot, of Mengelberg, or any number of pianists on the restored player-piano recordings. Nobody plays that way now. Styles of playing do change.
The fluency and "rightness" of the very early Chopin (Fantaisie Impromptu Op. 66) and the big Schumann Fantasia in C (Op. 17) are immediately striking. It was an age when such music could be played naturally, within the still-modern Romantic movement. The 1927 recording of the Brahms "Paganini" variations, still a pianist's showpiece today, is played with an almost French lightness and speed-Brahms with a touch of Chopin. Enlightening.
The LP restoration, obviously a labor of love ( with pages of typed-out annotation), may or may not be "authorized" but who can object to a reissue that otherwise might never be made? I'd ask for a bit more scratch and a bit less filtering. Some of us prefer a faithful rendition of the older discs, even including the scratch. ( The 1908 Chopin has a curious ringing background sound which must be from the original turntable's mechanism, judging from its frequency range.)
Performances: A, Sound: B-; C
Zukerman Barenboim. Mozart Violin Concertos No. 4 in D, No. 5 in A ("Turkish"). Pinchas Zukerman; English Chamber Orch., Barenboim. Columbia M 30055 stereo ($5.98).
"Genius meets genius" says Columbia in its best pompous style. Two of today's "most acclaimed" musicians. Perhaps these inspired words put me off to begin with. Ugh. Who isn't acclaimed, these days? But there is more that is disturbing here, perhaps because, just maybe, our older ears are all wrong and this new style Mozart is nearer to the "original" than the Mozart we have been accustomed to. I'm frankly in two minds about it. I recognize the change, and recognize what it gets away from-the old "neoclassical" way, the too-precious Mozart, making of his music a sort of miniaturized collection of gem-like bits, as compared to "real" music like, say, the Tchaikowsky Violin Concerto. That, surely, was a false approach ( and we must remember that Tchaikowsky worshipped Mozart). But what do we have instead of the old gem-like miniature perfection? We have what seems to me a lack of any real style. These youths (22 for the violin, 28 for the conductor) bring Mozart up to full size and bigger. Not a bad idea in itself. They bring out every bit of implied emotion, overtly. Not so good. But even more, they somehow apply an indeterminate mixture of playing styles, now suggesting Tchaikowsky or Lalo, now Beethoven, now what-have you. Mozart's undeniable innovations are played up relentlessly-the slow introduction, ultra-slow, played for all its worth, for instance, the cadenzas drawn out unconscionably and all out of proportion, each of the undoubtedly serious bits of sudden chromatic expression done up like Brahms, portentously, pointing up the Significances. And yet that over-all tension of melodic shape and of harmonic structure which makes fine music out of these concerti is lamentably missing; the phrasing of the melodies is for my ear haphazard and unconsidered, therefore lax. ( Long notes in the violin, short ones in the orchestral repeat of the same phrase, for instance). And there is the matter of tempo. Yes, perhaps it used to be too fast; now it goes snail-like. The "Turkish" minuet lumbers like a Bach Stokowski fugue, the opening movements which should sparkle are merely neutral, neither sparkling nor heavily serious, the intense successions of key--change harmonies in the development sections seem slack and casual, as though they weren't going anywhere. The whole slowed-down flow lacks shape and continuity.
Generally, the new Romantic approach is a healthy reaction to past excesses in a lot of classical music, I'll admit. We covered up too much, resorted to a kind of refined, rarified polish that younger musicians find as distasteful as so much else in the older point of view. The trouble here, again, is that a definite approach is replaced by a fuzzy one in terms of artistic coherence. Merely being honestly, openly, unashamedly Romantic isn't enough-even for Romantic music, let alone Mozart.
I probably exaggerate. You'd better try out this Mozart for yourself. After all, both young artists are top technicians and the English Chamber Orchestra is England's best.
Performance: B, Sound: B
Salute to Percy Grainger from Benjamin Britten. Peter Pears, John Shirley-Quirk, Ambrosian Singers, Viola Tunnard, Engl. Chamber Orch., Britten. London CS 6632 stereo ($5.98)
Here's one of your Anglophile friends or your own British self, a curious (from the American viewpoint) reverence by a top group of pros in the British musical world for one of their own. Percy Grainger is "acclaimed" over here mainly for that dreadfully sprightly little tidbit the "Shepherd's Hey," but in his long life Grainger produced a great deal more than that, though virtually all of it was concerned with British folk music of one sort or another. The assorted settings on this record-with no less than Benjamin Britten in charge-range from "Shepherd's Hey" itself sounding remarkably insignificant, to a grandiosely humorous "What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?" and a sorrowful "Willow Willow," that superb song which inspired the G & S satire, "Tit-Willow" in "The Mikado." Grainger was an early folksong enthusiast, of the Vaughan-Williams, Holst, and Cecil Sharpe generation. His "innovations"--they need quotes today-were in the use of assorted chamber-sized instrumental groupings for the setting-forth of country folk tunes in proper concert music garb. He is wholly of the school that took it for granted folk song must be transformed into "classical" format, and it is precisely this which so thoroughly dates him, at least for Americans. The more so in that his very professional settings are, nevertheless, somewhat derivative, over-lush, overdone (as we hear them) and out of that Elgar-Delius school of British music which has never made much headway with our ears, here on the American continent.
Performance: B, Sound: B
Thomas Schippers-Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. (Concerto in For Two Pianos; Concerto in G for Organ and Strings.) Thomas Schippers, Barbara Biegen, pianos; T. Schippers, organ; N.Y. Philharmonic, Vienna Baroque Ensemble. Columbia MS 7427 stereo ($5.98)
This brilliant, high-styled Schippers record-he both conducts and performs, in both concertos-puts old Bach's somewhat introspective middle son into modern concert-hall perspective, à la Philharmonic Hall, a setting that is unusual for this composer, who doesn't often nib elbows with Brahms, Rachmaninoff & Co. It works well, even if the proverbial purists will wince at some of the Romanitcized playing and the theatrical piano style in the double concerto. C. P. E. Bach can take it and even benefits. For many ears, this big concert sound will for the first time bring out the essential seriousness and profundity of the composer.
The two-piano Concerto is a glossy product of the New York Philharmonic--all mink, so to speak. The Organ Concerto comes from Vienna and a palpably less-grand, more-intimate orchestra of the sort that in fact is technically right for the music. The organ, too, is of a Baroque sort. But the Schippers touch is enough to tie the two performances together in style and approach.
Performances: B, Sound: B-
Schumann: Symphony No. 3 "Rhenish"; Overture to Goethe's "Faust." New Philharmonia Orchestra, Klemperer. Angel S-36689 stereo ($5.98)
Schumann as conducted by the grand old maestro, Otto Klemperer, is as we could anticipate--largely conceived, solid, massive, and very Germanic. It is also slower than I seem ever to remember hearing this "Rhenish" music. Altogether an unusual treatment, since for many a year the trend in Schumann has been towards streamlining the old fashioned Romanticism for a newer century.
The Klemperer Schuman makes an interesting comparison with that of Bernstein, who in his own special way has restored a good deal of the old-time Romantic feeling. Bernstein, a few years ago, resurrected the original ultra-dense scoring of this symphony, long since put aside in favor of pared-down and simplified orchestration. Klemperer's version aims at somewhat the same end, a legitimately massive, thick sound, as ponderous as the 1850s could make it.
Bernstein's is warmer and more impulsive in detail. Klemperer sticks to the grand lines and the ineffable poetry.
A dividend, worth hearing, is one of those not-too-successful Schumann overtures which, mostly, lie un-played around the central Schumann literature of symphony and concerto. First recording of the "Faust" opus.
Performance: B +, Sound: B
(Audio magazine, Dec. 1970; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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