Sweet treat
RECORDS CHARLES REID
Listening to Georg Soil's Bruckner: Symphony No 8 (Decca SET 335-6, four sides), I imagined purists (rhymes with puritans) rolling up scan- dalised eyes at the coffee-cream and strawberry syrup he persuades the Vienna Philharmonic strings to extrude; and I said to myself, 'Dam- me, why shouldn't he?' Solti handles some of the fierce, brassy climaxes ar if in the thick of a Twilight at Covent Garden. As to sound and sentiment, affinities creep in with Elgar and even Puccini, as well as the obvious Wagnerian ones. While acknowledging the fine things Jochum and Karajan have done for the Eighth on other labels, I maintain that sweet teeth, too, have their rights.
George Szell and his Cleveland Orchestra, who recently had Edinburgh Festival audiences all but swooning, shake out of their sleeves a Mahler: Symphony No 4 (Columbia SAX 5283)
which certainly leaves me a bit short of breath. It isn't every day of the week one hears cor- porate virtuosity (sorry: what I really mean is the knack of thinking and playing together) and woodwind (etc) solos of truly aristocratic stamp from the same orchestra in the same piece. Two other records come from the same source. Szell's Brahms: Symphony No 2 (Columbia, snx 5284) again indulges elegance
of individual line without sending the architec- ture of the whole piece to pot, a thing that can easily happen. There are a score or so star re- cordings of this symphony in the shops going back to Walter, Toscanini, Furtwangler and to
a sound-quality which, let us charitably say, made us lick our lips at the time. The same goes
for Brahms: Piano Concerto No 2. Rudolf Serkin, Szell and his orchestra (css 72557) give it glow, bigness of build and judicious tempi. From Ashkenazy, Zubin Mehta and the Lon- don Symphony Orchestra (Decca sxt. 6309) it gets craggier and more lyrical treatment. On Ashkenazy's side the treatment is burningly individual. But no freakishness, no kicking over of traces. If asked to assess the merits of either recording in relation to those of Rubinstein, Arrau, Katchen, Richter, Gilels and a baker's dozen more I should run a mile.
While on symphonies let us see what Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra have been up to. His Scotch Sym- phony: Mendelssohn (CBS 72572) is a non- idiosyncratic joy, with that sort of richness in the string tone which, when heard in the con- cert hall, makes perfect strangers wink cordially at each other for very gratitude. His and the NYP'S Prokoviev: Symphony No 5 (css 72607) takes the score's highlights, grumps and levities and makes something like an organic whole out of them. This, it must be allowed, isn't the easiest thing on earth to bring off, though Alex- ander Gibson comes pretty close to it in his version of No 5 with the Scottish National Orchestra, now issued as an HMV Concert Classic (sxLP 20099) with a fill-up at each end —Shostakovich's Festival Overture and Kaba- levsky's Colas Breugnon Overture.
Final symphonic pairing. Let no true Ruch- maninov believer (we are few but fervent) be Put off Symphony No 1 (Ormandy and Phila- delphia Orchestra, css 72571) by any such non- sense as that the composer destroyed it (or thought he had) when it flopped in 1897. This is first-rate fruit cake out of the loved old oven. I find it significant (and not in the least uncom- plimentary) that the opening of the finale has been used for two years as a signature tune for the sac's Panorama on TV and is regularly heard by ten and a half million viewers. Instant, slap- on-the-back vitality was what the producer wanted, evidently. It's something that Rach- maninov had lots of, although hordes of pro- found thinkers haven't yet wakened up to the fact.
Companion issue, historically considered, is: Stravinsky Conducts Symphony in E flat Op. 1 (CBS, SBRG 72569). Orchestra: Columbia Sym- phony. The sy,Aphony, inevitably, is Igor's own. He started it at the same age as Rachmaninov started (and finished) his, twenty-three, but took two years over it. Conventional, four- movement plan abounds in the sort of music any cleverish Russian student under Rimsky's thumb might have been expected to write, nay, to be blamed for not writing, in the early 1900s. I'm thankful it wasn't sent to the shredder if only for the brilliant neo-Mendelssohn Scherzo. Diaghilev used to have this played as an interlude at his ballet nights.
Previous page
