by IRVING KOLODIN
THE GERMAN TRADITION FOR a conductor, a name such as Carlos Paita suggests certain immediate advantages. It defines, if not a precise national identity, a largely Mediterranean heritage, and it provides an indication-as do the names Fausto Cleva, Nello Santi, or Enrique Jorda --of a particular stylistic bent and musical predisposition. The fact is, however, that al though Carlos Paita has just been honored by a second release on London, the two records, taken together, contain more Wagner than anything else, and no Italian or Spanish music whatsoever.
Part of the reason for this is that Paita's background is rather more cosmopolitan than his name indicates. He is a native of Buenos Aires, with Hungarian blood on his mother's side to balance the Italian heritage on his father's. In point of origin, at least, he is thus a co-equal of Daniel Barenboim and Carlo Fe lice Cillario among today's musicians, and, among yesterday's, of Ettore Panizza, who conducted many famous performances at the old Met. Considering the range and direction of talents covered by these names, one might assume that the culture of Buenos Aires is as widespread and diversified as that of New York-and one would be right. The city's official language is Spanish, but its electrical system was long operated by English engineers and technicians, and it has the largest German-speaking population of any community in South America.
I first encountered Paita's work on London SPC 21035, an early 1969 release devoted wholly to Wagner: the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan, the overtures to Meistersinger and The Flying Dutchman. And it was indeed wholly devoted to Wagner, with little distracting intrusion of the conductor's personality as "intermediary." A close attention to his direction of the Tristan excerpts, for ex ample, led to the discovery that Wagner's own directions have a sobering effect on him, that he takes seriously such admonitions as "Nicht eilen" ("Do not rush") and "Sehr all mahlich zuruckhalten" ("Very gradually held back"). The response of the New Philharmonia to Paita's direction left no doubt that he is a conductor with an intoxicating effect on an orchestra.
Such a combination of virtues argued that London had found something special in Paita, but the silence that followed the release of that first disc, among rumblings and rumoring of such complications as a monumental temper, the burdens of supporting a wife and six children, and other nonmusical considerations, led to the conclusion that he was per haps too special for the sometimes inflexible requirements of the recording studio. Per haps. But the recent arrival of the second London disc (SPC 21095), this one devoted to Beethoven's Leonore No. 3, the Berlioz Roman Carnival, the Brahms Academic Festival, and the Wagner Rienzi overtures, con firmed beyond doubt that, whatever else he may not be, Paita is a master of the German tradition.
This may strike some as wildly improbable for an Argentinian who first set foot on a German podium in the mid-Sixties as director of a program for the Stuttgart Radio. Much of his activity since has centered in the Low lands, first in Brussels, where he was conducting at the time of his first London recording,
--- CONDUCTOR CARLOS PAITA: he listens to Wagner
and more recently in Holland. This, however, does not put him outside the German tradition, or cut off access to it, any more than his South American origins did, for the tradition can-and does-flourish almost anywhere.
It can flourish in Denmark, for example, as well as it can in Germany itself, as a group of four recordings recently released by a company calling itself First Edition gives evidence: one of the recordings-by Fritz Busch-was made in Copenhagen, and the other three were made in Germany by Rich ard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwangler, and Paul Hindemith.
As a warm admirer of Busch, in New York as well as in Glyndebourne, I would rate the disc devoted to him the most illuminating and welcome of the four. Phonographically, he is of course enduringly famous for his Mozart recordings from Glyndebourne, which have had world-wide impact. In America, he is best known for his post-World War II seasons at the Metropolitan, during which he organized memorable performances of Verdi's Otello and Donizetti's Don Pasquale, as well as of Wagner's Lohengrin and Tristan and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.
He did not, however, during several guest engagements as a conductor with New York orchestras, address himself to anything like such a pillar of the German tradition as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and if he did so elsewhere in this country,--say, at the Cincinnati May Festival-it had no resounding aftermath. But he did in Copenhagen, and the echoes of that performance are now public property, thanks to First Edition FER-4. The date was September 9, 1950: the cast included the choruses and orchestra of the Danish Radio, soprano Kerstin Lindberg-Torlind, mezzo Else Jans, Tenor Erik Sjoberg, and baritone Holger Byrding. The soloists have no international fame of which I am aware, but they (or perhaps their descendants) can take pride in their participation in a performance that will give this generation of record listeners a rounder appreciation of Busch's abilities than was possible even while he was alive (he died, all too prematurely, in 1951 at the age of sixty-one). It is a performance noble in breadth, pulsating with emotion, and always responsive to the rigorous musician ship ingrained in all the brothers Busch-violinist Adolf and cellist Hermann as well as Fritz-and perpetuated by brother-in-law Rudolf Serkin.
The applause at the end affirms not only the audience's response to the performance's musical qualities but its origin as a live broadcast as well. Those versed in the new art of tonal restoration (a twentieth-century parallel to the older ones of painting and sculpture restoration) know that a pre-1960 orchestral-broad-cast recording almost inevitably yields better listening results than can be expected from a studio-made disc of the same period. Through the artful intercession of audio consultant David Sarser (a one-time violinist with the NBC Symphony who lent his recording skills to preserving the conductorless performances of that orchestra before it disband ed), First Edition has thus been able to rescue from limbo one of history's great performances of the Ninth. It belongs, among other famous "non-recordings" of the work, beside the celebrated version perpetuated on disc from the reopening ceremonies of Bayreuth in 1951, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Otto Edelmann being among the soloists under conductor Furtwangler.
Some may prefer the Busch Ninth to the Furtwangler, others the Furtwangler to the Busch, but no objective listener could deny that both are legacies of an on-going German performance tradition. Each propounds a point of view and articulates a hierarchy of musical values that were in being when the two men were growing up in the early years of this century. Thanks to the preservation of these live performances, each has been able to shed illumination on a subject that can never be wholly clarified by a single intellect or one individual's emotional resources.
The results have everlastingly enriched our lives. (First Edition's FER-2 offers Furtwangler performances with the 1929-1933 Berlin Philharmonic of Wagner's Tristan Prelude and Liehestod, the first-act Prelude of Lohengrin, and Siegfried's Funeral Music from Gotterdammertmg, plus Mendelssohn's Heb rides and Midsummer Night's Dream Overtures, but these have later, better-sounding counterparts. On FER-3, Hindemith conducts his Concerto for Orchestra several others of his works; on FER-1 , Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel, the Japanese Festival Music, and two others.
First Edition Records can be reached at 200 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.) IN the Nazi upheaval of the Thirties, Busch renounced his conducting post in Dresden though he was more "Aryan" than Hitler himself-and never returned to Germany, where Furtwangler maintained an uneasy position of prominence until his death in 1954.
As it turned out, the German musical tradition has been more durable than its individual em bodiments, great as they were. Paita, for ex ample, acquired at least some of his touch by accidents of propinquity: Busch made his last visit to the Colon in Buenos Aires in 1946, and Furtwangler's travels took him to South America in the early Fifties. By then, Paita's early training as a pianist had led him into conducting aspirations, and he was an avid attendant at several Furtwangler concerts in Buenos Aires.
But just how much of Paita's capabilities can be deduced from a mere two discs bearing his name? Enough for me to venture the judgment that they are broader than the demonstrated capacity to direct half a dozen overtures well. In short, I hear enough to persuade me that Paita is not only a conductor aware of the German tradition, but a conductor in the German tradition. I would further risk offering the opinion that any manager intrepid enough to investigate would find that the rumored "temper" is probably greatly exaggerated, that he is a conductor who would yield rich dividends to any orchestra with which he performed.
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