by Edward Tatnall Canby
Canby Looks At Timeless Recordings
Heifetz, Piatagorsky, Primrose. Two Great Double Concertos: Brahms, Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, Op.102. Mozart, Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat, K. 364, for Violin and Viola. With orchestra under Alfred Wallenstein, Izler Soloman. RCA LSC 3228, stereo, $5.98.
EARLIER IN THESE pages I've spoken of that timelessness in recorded music which so dramatically compares to, shall I say, the timefulness of a live musical performance, precisely located at one point in time and space. In this period of plenteous record reissues, new qualifications to timelessness are showing up.
Sometimes the recording itself tells you its own time in terms of the music you hear. And it isn't necessarily the moment when the recording was made.
I have in mind a new stereo release on the regular RCA label. It is for all we can tell a brand-new recording. But it features three of those timeless stars which RCA has been giving us these 40 years and more. Heifetz, Piatigorsky, Primrose. Do those names march down recorded history! Could they have made a new recording? RCA doesn't say No. RCA doesn't say anything. Unless you take as an indirect clue, on the jacket, "Rerecording Engineer: Edwin Begley." Rerecording? Or the title, "Two Great Double Concertos." In record world jargon, "Great" usually means a reissue, like "Best of ' or "Legendary." The recordings are in stereo, you will note. Nothing about rechanneling. Another clue.
Well, is this a new recording? I'm avoiding the phone call that might tell me. It really doesn't matter, assuming the sound is okay, which it is. What matters is the music, which dates these performances very neatly. Not in calendar time but in style.
On this record, side 1 offers the big Brahms Double Concerto for violin and cello, with Heifetz and Piatigorsky and, on side 2, the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat, K. 364, for violin and viola, with Heifetz and Primrose. Both are played by anonymous orchestras, which adds to RCA's little mystery. Consider, first, the big Brahms.
It's played by an orchestra under Alfred Wallenstein. What, not the Wallenstein, the one who in the 1930s brought live classical music to the radio? That's the man. Of this performance, Life magazine said (when?), it "brings off Brahms with a rare shimmering brilliance." It is in truth a superb performance, the best I know.
And it comes straight out of a way of musical thinking that is now departed.
Might call it neo-classical streamlining.
Exactly what the doctor ordered for this particular Brahms-circa 1940. The Double, Concerto was Brahms' last orchestral work and, with two soloists, his thickest, darkest, heaviest, and most sprawling. Nobody knows how it sounded in the 1880s, though there were then doubts as to its practicality--it could sink of its own weight. We know that in the pre-WW II era, when electrical recording came to this sort of music, there was still no desire to "tighten it up," to modernize performance; for this kind of music didn't then sound old fashioned. Even on early 78 shellacs, with time at a minimum, the big Romantic pieces continued to take their own pace in the time-honored way, side after side. Not even the impact of jazz, Gershwin, Stravinsky, had produced any real effect on the familiar giants of symphony and concerto literature. Performance styles change slowly.
But a new era was on its way, nevertheless, and it finally arrived late in the thirties and on through the war period. At last, modern streamlining caught up with the classics! A most interesting change.
Suddenly, all the new young pianists were wearing crew cuts and had pronounceable names. (Polysyllabic Russian or Polish had been the pianistic norm.) They looked like Dick Tracy, these men, and they played a new, hard, driving, no-nonsense music, for the modern age. Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms came out in chrome. Music was lean and spare for a change.
The whole thing was very shorthair and very anti-Romantic; but this was, after all, the mid-twentieth century, and it figured, didn't it? About time, a lot of us thought. Tough, streamlined performing was the new thing. It could be beautiful; it often was. Moony Romantic poesy was decidedly out.
The big, old orchestral pieces got the treatment too. They were tightened up all along, dejuiced, their frumpy shapes smoothed and polished, their tensions jacked up to new voltages, their old fashioned eccentricities played 'way down. In this manner, Romantic music finally faced up to the age of the motor car and the Zephyr train.
True, a good many older musicians blithely ignored the whole business and went right on as before. (Some of them still do.) But Toscanini, whose music had always been in a hurry, was the hero of the day and it was his intense, economical style which became a norm for later years. Romantic music had made it into the new century.
Yeah, yeah. Look where we are now.
We've undone the whole thing. In those heady days, we wanted to get rid of Victorianism. We tore down all the old Victorian houses ("monstrosities") and we laughed at the zany horsehair furniture with the fringes, the cluttery décor, which we found inside.
Now we have Nostalgia. Victorian mansions are carefully being put back together again. Streamlining is out.
Clutter is in. Horsehair sofas are priceless, if you can find them. And in Romantic music we are going right back where we came from, only more so.
But by now, of course, the music isn't old fashioned. It's antique. A big difference.
Now, the young pianists sport long hair again, and play slo-owly, with pain and ecstacy written on their sensitive faces. Just like Chopin. It's amazing! Dick Tracy in longhair. Now we play the big orchestral pieces even more slowly, and heavily, than they used to play them. Some reversal! Now, we are once again all for eccentricity (i.e. doing your own thing) and emotionalism (read: sensitivity). There were immense musical benefits, mind you.
(There always are, in every style change.) Wagner is coming back.
Bruckner, Mahler, Sibelius, even Scriabin. These gentry took badly to streamlining. Their music never was economical to begin with, so why force the issue? Now, we feel, the only way to really recreate this big, fat music, and all the rest of it, is to give it its head, if I may borrow an expression from the age of the horse. And so, today, down with streamlining.
Back to the Double Concerto. What can we hear on this new but non-dated record? Simple enough. It is one of the finest examples of successful 1940s style streamlining that has ever been recorded. A stunning performance. But stunning in the manner of thirty years ago.
The music, again, is real heavyweight Brahms. Here, you will note immediately, it takes off quickly, flows right along smoothly, without a trace of lost motion, every note to the point. The two soloists are beautifully integrated into the orchestra, their music clean and economical, precise in pitch and rhythm and right up to time. No soloistic nonsense. No out-of-tune grunts and groans from the impassioned cello (as was the style of the earlier day), no heady violin swipes, passionately spewing musical sweat! All this is gone.
This music is neat, concentrated, efficient, slimmed out of all fat, and yet it remains warm and fluent. An absolute masterpiece of neoclassic discipline, and it goes a long way to prove how right we were in the 1940s.
You will remember that in those times, these three men were outstanding leaders in the performance world, among the younger and more forward looking influencers. It shows. That's what you hear on RCA, now in 1972.
How about side 2, Mozart? A briefer story, and not as favorable. Here Heifetz is joined by William Primrose and an anonymous orchestra (the same?) conducted by Izler Soloman. This, too, is a 1940s styling, but not a very successful one.
Mozart has had a rough time, these last 100 years or so. The Romantics patronized him, while giving adulation.
If only he had been able to write Romantic music, they thought. As it was, Mozart was a charming miniaturist, if ineffable (the word that usually turned up), and this idea persisted well into our own century. But in the neo-Classic, anti-Romantic 1930s, Mozart suddenly was rediscovered in depth. Here was a composer who came to us pre streamlined, ready to play! Mozart's classic restraint, his economy of emotion, his crystal clarity, were things the new age desperately wanted. And this is the way we played him. He was too pure, we felt, to be sullied by Romantic expression. His musical sense must be distilled out, the meanings underplayed, with delicacy. Thus, this man's music became the model for all that was new fashioned in performance.
Mozart pianists touched their concert grands as though they were made of glass and might break. Jewel-like sounds came forth, exquisitely shaped in miniature. Large orchestras played Mozart deliberately small. In an age of understatement, he was the archunderstater. For years we could not think of Mozart in any other way, and even today, most musicians, and listeners too, take this kind of Mozart for granted. But styles do change. As you must realize, Mozart has now gone Romantic.
The newest young Mozart pianists plunge into their concert grands, hair flying, and come out with the most startling sounds, like something by Schumann or Liszt. Wow! Try Peter Serkin on RCA. Impressive, if unsettling for older ears. This isn't the Mozart we knew. But it'll probably be okay, even so. At least, the poor man is life-size.
So what do we find via Heifetz and Primrose on RCA? The Sinfonia Concertante is positively gem-like, played with a puritan restraint that must be heard to be believed. If restraint is the thing, then here you have it. Heifetz' big violin sings a tiny song, pure as the driven snow, precisely tuned and exactly in time, with never a slur or rubato, a model of primness. From Heifetz, this is almost "Look, Ma, no hands." Primrose follows his every move in the intertwining viola part, as chaste as Heifetz himself. It is superb playing indeed, but need it really be so bleached out? Well, in Heifetz' world they have always thought so.
Two things really mar the performance.
First, the familiar Heifetz tone, that near-human violinistic cry, is still audible, though muted, and it is not what we expect in Mozart. Somehow, we hear Sibelius or Tchaikovsky lurking near. Much more important, the orchestra here is so "restrained" that the light of human intelligence fades to near zero. I have not for years heard such a rigid, bland, deadpan Mozart.
Give me an overblown performance any day! At least it would say something. This is 1940s streamlining carried to absurdity, if you ask me.
So you still want to find out when these two full stereo recordings were actually made? Well, it would be interesting to know, I suppose. But it wouldn't prove very much, when you come down to it. As I say, music on records is timeless. Dates of recording are incidental information, if and when available. When you play a record, it is always now. It is happening. And so the only real "date" is in the style.
That's Heifetz for you.
(Audio magazine, Oct. 1972; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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