Fritz Busch Conducts = DVORAK: Carnival Overture, Op. 92; BRAHMS: Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53; CHOPIN: Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21; BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 – Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Dvorak)/Marian Anderson, contralto/Claudio Arrau, piano/ New York Philharmonic Orchestra/Fritz Busch
Guild GHCD 2354, 78:20 [Distr. by Albany] ****:
For those devoted to the often superlative musicianship of Fritz Busch (1890-1951), Guild restores the Metropolitan Opera House concert of 10 December 1950, given for Human Rights Day Declaration for the United Nations, which featured speakers Charles Boyer and Judith Anderson. The two missing pieces by Busch are David Diamond’s Centennial Fanfare for brass and percussion, and the Benvenuto Cellini Overture of Berlioz. Sir Ernest Macmillan led five excerpts from Messiah (with baritone John Brownlee), but they, too, seem not to have survived the recording process.
The disc opens with the only surviving document from Fritz Busch’s appearance at the Edinburgh Festival, the 26 August 1950 rendition of the Carnival Overture of Dvorak, a furious affair, fast, powerful, uncompromising. After a shattering of the opening chords, the sound textures settle down enough so we can savor the colors Dvorak presents in the second of his “Nature, Life, and Love” sequence of symphonic poems.
Marian Anderson (1897-1993) is in virile–dare I say “masculine”–form for the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, a brooding, haunted performance. The Male Chorus of the Scola Cantorum appears via Hugh Ross. The pace is quick, in the Toscanini mode, but Anderson’s diction and vocal projection equal or surpass her various, inscribed performances with Monteux, Ormandy, and Reiner. Busch himself had performed the piece with Kathleen Ferrier from Copenhagen in 1949, and that inscription may still be the preferred version.
Enter Chilean great Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) for the Chopin concerto, a soloist not always to Busch’s taste, as Arrau left Nazi Germany late in the regime, 1940, while Busch had left at its outset, in 1933. Despite the temperamental vagaries of the collaboration, the performance bristles with muscular excitement and purposeful direction, Arrau’s long lines, his clean balances of poetry and power masterfully executed. The orchestral tuttis themselves become quite explosive, demand for Polish liberation without a word of patriotic rhetoric. After a thoroughly lyrico-dramatic Larghetto, a resolute Allegro rondo concludes, perhaps a bit too serious for some auditors. But none can deny the digital, pearly proficiency at work at the keyboard, nor the firm conviction in the orchestral tissue. The furious applause has opened well before the last notes have decayed.
The “essential” Fritz Busch emerges in Beethoven’s resounding Fifth Symphony, a colossus of a rendition on a par with the best of another demonic German, Erich Kleiber. This survives as his only inscription of the work. Driven with an ineluctable fury and girth–but no less sensitivity in the relatively quiet passages–the performance will doubtless warrant comparison with Toscanini’s various readings. But I would venture to look to the contemporary reading of this vital symphony that the Philharmonic made with Vittorio de Sabata (1892-1967) for anything like the kinetic will-power inherent in this crushing, heroic interpretation. Highly recommended!
–Gary Lemco
