'Perfect' Beethoven Unseasonable Mendelssohn

...Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream may be an unseasonable topic, yet it is welcome at any time of year, and maybe never more than when the Arctic gales are howling Two new versions have been released one with Eugene Or-mandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Judith Blegen and Fredenca von Stade, soloists (RCA ARL 1-2084), the other with Andre Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra, Lilian Watson and Delia Walhs, soloists (Angel S-37268) Previn's performance is complete and the songs are sung in English Ormandy has included all the "concert pieces" but shaved off about six minutes from the music accompanying dialogue, his singers sing in the original German...

...A final footnote Abans Books has recently issued Arthur Rackham's first illustrations to Shakespeare's play For those to whom Rackham is an article of faith, this sumptuous facsimile (reproduced from the original manuscript), with its iridescent coloring and exquisite calligraphy by Grai-ly Hewitt, is just the thing to peruse while listening to Mendelssohn For those who judge Rackham's uneven genius plate by plate, on the other hand, the rachitic goblins are a far less pleasing accompaniment than Dover's score...

...In the Ode to Joy, with the superb Wiener Smgverein at his disposal, Karajan returns to the colossal scale Unexpectedly and inexplicably (since this is a studio recording), the boisterous orchestra at times overbalances the chorus, leaving the sibilants to hiss, the plosives to spit, and no sustained tone to bind them As for the soloists...

...Jose van Dam leads off with an intrepid, exalted declamation of the bass recitative and first statement of the choral theme And Peter Schreier's light tenor works to good effect m the heroic solo that conventionally falls to robuster singers who cannot manage it nearly so well When Anna Tomowa-Sintow and Agnes Baltsa join the men in the quartets, though, the four seem to be celebrating rather chaste, schoolmis-tressy ecstasies...

...The songs as Mendelssohn set them lose badly in translation to Shakespearean English Annoyingly, syllables have to be added and dropped m awkward places Thus to fit the phrase of the lovely German "Eiapo-pei, the English "lullaby" must be puffed out into "lalullaby", in the finale, the fames' chorus falls a syllable short, and their tune is curtailed of its witty octave jump While Ormandy's recording might seem preferable for the songs alone, the diction of the soloists and especially of the women of the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia is very faulty, and Judith Blegen has trouble with what ought not for her to be taxing tessitura Previn not only has better singers, but his Finchley's Children Musical Group makes a spnght-lier bunch of fairies than the Philadelphia ladies Otherwise a choice is difficult to make Previn's dynamic range on the glittering overture, a masterpiece of orchestration and melodic invention, is unnecessarily restrained Moreover, the precise, un-tender attack he chooses prevents the four chords that open and close the movement from hanging like painted lanterns, as they can and should Still, the total effect is light and balmy Ormandy's phrases in the overture breathe easily, and the "neighing" passages really neigh In both recordings, the cymbals in the March of the Fairies sound with delightful whist precision Ormandy gives the agitated Intermezzo depicting Herrma's anguish in the wood great mystery and amplitude, but Previn's account of the Scherzo has more lilt and bite Both launch into the Wedding March, properly, as though it had not been played to death a thousand times Yet overall, neither tells the final word about the miraculously graceful music Toscanini's 1947 recording on RCA (VIC-1337e) with the NBC Symphony is faster, lighter, purer, and in every way the most enchanted performance one could ever hope to hear Sadly, it is not complete, not in stereo, and very hard to find The full Midsummer Night's Dream score appears in a Dover paperback of Mendelssohn's Major Orchestra/ Works At every hearing the music's jewel-like manufacture reveals new facets of the highest artistry, and to see the exact and elegant fitting greatly adds to one's appreciation The Dover book reproduces scores a century old, the instrumentation is not indicated after the full distribution is laid out at the start of each section, the vocal parts are set on the little-used C-clef, and there are hilarious misprints in the English text But the folio-size pages are neatly laid out and a pleasure to read...

...On Music 'PERFECT' BEETHOVEN, UNSEASONABLE MENDELSSOHN BY M.ANATOLE GUREWITSCH HERBEART VON KARAJAN has recorded the nine Beethoven symphonies for the third time (Deutsche Grammophon 2740 172?0) It is his second complete set with the Berlin Philharmonic, and it is perfect "Perfection," as the word applies to the unparalleled work of Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic, means something quite specific, it has to do with discipline Some seasons back, a full house of music lovers straggled into Boston's Symphony Hall in the teeth of a storm to find the disconcerting spectacle of the Berlin Philharmonic tuning up in a ragbag collection of unmatched blazers, turtle-necks and blue jeans The house lights dimmed, and as the audience shuffled, an announcer explained that the musicians' full dress was by a roadside in a van, stopped by the fierce weather, but happily, the instruments had arrived in good time With the audience's indulgence, he concluded, they would perform as they were Maestro von Karajan bestrode the podium, he loo in multi, albeit immaculately turned out, and the music began In spirit cvciy man on stage was weai mg while tic The marooned van was rescued in time for the following evening's performance, and the musicians and their celebrated head then presented the aristocratically Prussian, impersonal appearance that accords with their playing The music that night was essentially the same as what is heard on the new Beethoven album As then, the technical mastery is beyond question, and the control never fails Every attack, every phrase, every harmonic progression receives its precisely apportioned weight in a carefully surveyed design No angularity, no idiosyncrasy, no sudden abandon distorts the predetermined formal balance In this lyricism purged of rapture, this grandeur purged of immensity, some ears cannot discover a heart or soul But few of the innumerable conductors who throw themselves into the symphonies as if to reenact Beethoven's own Promethean miracles of creation can show as much as Karajan and his orchestra The Ber-liners do not relive the composer s inner struggles and triumphs, instead they present without distraction the symphonic torms in which he captured them Emotional content is not thrust on the listener, yet all is there, implied From Side 1, beginning with the Adagio molto of the First Symphony, to Side 16, the titanic Ode to Joy that closes the Ninth, the concentration and execution in the orchestra keep to a consistently stratospheric level The intonation at each dynamic level is a marvel—the pitch does not stray at the threshold of inaudibility or at the peaks of thunderousness The blaring trumpet calls of the opening of the Eroica (No 3) vibrate without shattering In the third and fourth movements of the great Fifth Symphony the double basses buzz through the depths of the fugato with euphonious agility, in the second movement of the Ninth the pistol shots of the timpani are piercing and resonant, yet do not reverberate so as to cloud the bracing battlefield air The instrumentalists' individual perfections blend in an orchestral texture of blissful transparency Even in the most whirling and most harrowing climaxes, the sound is never opaque The engineering of the set does the orchestra's achievement full justice The clarity is exemplary, and the stereo separation does not so much separate as integrate spatially, it shows as Apollonian a sense of balance as Karajan himself Indeed, listening to all nine symphonies straight through one grasps that the set is designed not to have high points Of course it has high points (and low points) nonetheless, not least because the symphonies themselves ha\e their special peaks The Eroica and the Fifth stand out with special force In their opening movements, each marked Allegro con brio, karajan takes a breathtaking tempo, building tremendous drama at a wild clip The passion refutes the critics who charge that Karajan s work is invariably and exclusively "cerebral' —as do his renditions ol the Marcia tunebre of the Eroica, with its strong and lottv ac cents ot grief, and ol ihc creamy, pro-to-Mahlenan melodies ol the Tilth s Andante con molo The Pastoral (No 6) seems a bit longwinded, however, the Storm movement has true ferocity, yet it does not make up for the tedium of the preceding movement ("Merry Gathering of Country Folk"), played without a hint of the earth The most wonderful single movement may well be the Allegretto of Symphony No 7 It rises through beautifully graduated crescendi and ebbs through equally haunting decrescendi, its heartbreaking melody flowing from the darkly oppressive opening against the measured, ticking accompanying voices Here Karajan demonstrates that the highest expressiveness can dwell m the simplest rhetoric Karajan leads the first movement of the Ninth with great drive The majesty the tempo marking calls for is there, as well as an unsettling eenness in the octave leaps of the strings—the movement as a whole taking, as it must, the grand sweep of tragedy The stampeding voices of the peculiarly Slavic-sounding second movement unleash a still wilder propulsion Unfortunately, Karajan plays the long third movement (Adagio molto e can-tabile) at his most measured and least emphatic The effect turns out to be somewhat detached The expansive lines are not quite able to counterbalance the blockbusters that have come just before...