On Music
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
MUSIC By Albert Goldman Two German Orchestras: Hamburg and Bamberg LONDON has recently introduced a series of recordings drawn from the Telefunken catalogue and designed to sell in this country...
...Most performances of the Eighth make one wonder what this symphony is about...
...Listening to this kind of playing, one realizes how much passion and how much character we have been forced to sacrifice in perfecting our incomparable orchestras here in America...
...Although the series as a whole cannot be regarded as anything more than a commercial venture, an experiment in selling stereo cheaply, two of the orchestras whose work has now been made available to the public are of quite exceptional interest...
...An instrument is not a human spirit...
...The other German orchestra which is to be heard in the new Telefunken series is the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra...
...The musicians perform with incredible freedom and spontaneity, more like a gypsy band than a highly disciplined symphonic orchestra...
...This contrast is so obvious that it requires no slackening of tempo or softening of articulation to make it effective...
...Evidently they have been influenced by the American style of symphonic playing...
...A jet flame of inspiration has burnt the crust of familiarity off these famous pieces and released the spirit within them...
...However, the traditional German balance of strings and woodwinds has been preserved—strings which play with powerful inflection and great intensity of tone, woodwinds which answer in a more relaxed style, with a mellow, open sound...
...The superiority of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances to his pretentious and bombastic symphonies should be evident to anyone who listens to the Bamberg performance of eight of the Dances (TCS18015...
...What we crave is the fundamental style...
...Keilberth's strength is his identification with the tradition...
...One would guess from the spirit of the playing that the members are young men with a fresh view of the standard repertoire...
...German orchestras have a tendency to swoon over the lyric passages, losing all the tension built up in the dramatic sections...
...The Hamburg State Philharmonic Orchestra, till now unknown to American listeners, is obviously the best orchestra in West Germany—far superior to the RIAS ensemble and much more vital and exciting than the postwar Berlin Philharmonic...
...There is, of course, some simplification in this interpretation, but we have had enough of nuance in Beethoven...
...It has become a perfect companion to the clarinet, with a full firm tone no longer to be described as nasal...
...One sees a new and less satisfying significance in our favorite metaphor for the orchestra...
...Keilberth often allows it to impede the forward thrust of his otherwise able performance...
...Our woodwind players apparently have secrets of tone production which are not known abroad...
...MUSIC By Albert Goldman Two German Orchestras: Hamburg and Bamberg LONDON has recently introduced a series of recordings drawn from the Telefunken catalogue and designed to sell in this country at exceptionally low prices ($1.98 mono, $2.98 stereo...
...his weakness is his unwillingness to depart from the tradition where it is unsound...
...The most impressive of the new releases is a performance of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony (TCS18004) under the direction of Josef Keilberth...
...Toscanini disturbed our traditional sense of Beethoven by playing the symphonies in a lean, sinewy style which was exciting without being enjoyable...
...There is the same thrilling immediacy of response, the same clear, light texture, the same impersonal unity of ensemble...
...In former years, before the war necessitated its removal from Czechoslovakia, this organization was known as the German Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague...
...The typical pattern of a Beethoven first movement is an alternation between loud, dramatic passages led by the strings and soft, lyrical responses delivered by the woodwinds...
...The best German conductors keep this mannerism in check...
...The European oboe still sounds thin and reedy and unsteady, while in America this instrument has changed its character almost completely...
...Keilberth has given us again the old Beethoven—powerful but never violent, grandiose but not overblown, and fundamentally good-humored...
...Unfortunately, these woodwinds are not of the quality we are accustomed to in this country...
...Keilberth and his men give the work a straightforward reading which makes it sound like the product of a vigorous and healthy imagination with nothing queer or cranky about it...
...The old name is practically a definition of the orchestra's unique character—half-German and half-Slavic, and therefore ideally suited to the music of Dvorak, which is a sort of translation of the Slavic folk idiom into the language of the German symphony...
Vol. 43 • February 1960 • No. 5
