George Szell conducts Bedřich Smetana – NBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra – SOMM ARIADNE 5032 (74:34 complete contents listed below) [Distr. by Naxos] ****:
Hungarian conductor George Szell (1897-1970) came to settle in the United States of America rather indirectly, having been on tour in Australia in 1939, when the outbreak of WW II and the conditions in Europe necessitated that he and his wife demur on their planned trip to Scotland and Holland, two venues where he held symphony directorships. With no conducting engagements immediately forthcoming, Szell assumed some teaching posts and filled his time with the project of orchestrating Smetana’s First String Quartet of 1876. The orchestrated chamber work became a concert standard, as Szell made his debuts in Boston, San Francisco, and Cleveland, 1943-1953. On this disc, however, we have the world premiere performance and recording with Toscanini’s NBC Symphony on 8 March 1941, a version that employs the full range of instrumental colors that includes not only strings, but brass, woodwinds, percussion, and timpani. Szell instantly established himself as a master of the baton, whose clarity and precision imposed a palpable discipline upon each ensemble he led.
The program begins with an aroused performance (8 MRCH 1941) of Smetana’s Overture to The Bartered Bride, the 1866 opera that helped the composer in his ambition to make the Provisional Theater in Prague a true reflection of the Czech national character, divesting its all-too-German associations. The music bristles with the electric excitement of running gossip in the strings, exploding into a marvelous folk pageant. Szell adds a few ritards of his own, but nothing slows down the precise, whistling intonation of the NBC, with crackling accents from flute and trumpets.
We next visit the NBC Symphony (13 January 1942) under Szell in Smetana’s 1859 treatment of Friedrich Schiller’s play Wallenstein’s Camp, set during the 30 Years’ War. This live concert reading appears to be Szell’s only interaction with the score, set as an overture for the three plays Schiller created on the subject. A busy crowd scene yields to a spirited dance, dominated by the trombone and tuba protests of an inflamed monk. He assaults the army by calling them by the names of their enemies, but he is mocked. A night scene ensues, marked by woodwinds and plucked strings, but an awakening trumpet call rouses the army to march to their appointed destiny, led by General Albrecht von Wallenstein. The rich militarism of the piece, especially its lamusst four minutes, reverberates with a brazen energy Smetana likely borrowed from Berlioz, especially his Op.15 Funeral and Triumphal Symphony.
The ever-present Vltava, the Moldau, from the symphonic cycle My Country (8 March 1941) has Szell in luxuriant, lyric form, much in the Toscanini tradition, the horn and strings glossy in their etched precision. The village dance following the hunting scene has a muscular tensile strength and beautifully graduated dynamic range. The night scene achieves the kind of refined stasis and haunted atmosphere more akin to Vaclav Talich than Toscanini, and it makes us recall that Szell’s affinity for Czech music had already made its mark in 1937, with the recording of the Dvorak Cello Concerto with Pablo Casals and the Czech Philharmonic. The scene with the Rapids intensifies all energies, and the resultant, polyphonic admixture almost proves too much for the Radio City sound system. The concluding chords, drawn from the cycle’s opening The High Castle, remind us that, to our detriment, Szell never led a complete performance of Smetana’s revered Ma Vlast. The NBC narrator incorrectly identifies Szell as Czechoslovakian.
From Bohemia’s Meadows and Forests offers a virtual, Impressionistic pageant, a la Van Gogh, wherein the eye confronts Nature’s bounty in an opening thrust of pure colors. The Boston Symphony at Symphony Hall (19 January 1945) has Szell in command, presumably at Serge Koussevitzky’s invitation. At first, the acoustic feels askew, perhaps due to microphone placement; it soon composes itself so that strings and winds may warble and coo appropriately. The string canon soon involves the upper instruments, forming a collective, pantheistic hymn. The rendition feels a bit over-streamlined to my taste, having been the beneficiary of performances by Talich, Ancerl, Kubelik, and Fricsay. The militant phase of the score, however, enjoys the same, fervent buoyancy we hear in The Bartered Bride Overture. The hymn tune, in antiphon, leads to a thrilling coda in dense texture, using the opening materials.
Szell debuts (8 March 1941) his orchestral transcription of Smetana’s agonized biographical quartet as the fulfillment of what he conceived as a moral and aesthetic obligation: “I considered all of the objections to such tampering with a composer’s work, and I arrived at the conclusion that. . .it was almost a duty to arrange ‘From My Life’ for orchestra. The thematic material seems to me to call for the bigger, richer symphonic treatment.” Szell did record for CBS (26 April 1949) his treatment of the quartet, with the Cleveland Orchestra (issued on a 7-CD Sony set). In conversation with Leonard Bernstein, speaking of George Szell – particularly his way with Schumann – Bernstein quipped that Szell had a penchant for turning everything into a march.
Smetana
The intensely vivid first movement of the Smetana Quartet, Allegro vivo appassionato, certainly assumes a dire, militant violence by way of the enlarged orchestral texture. But the secondary theme no less reveals a dreamy, nostalgic reminiscence for a bucolic vision. The second movement, Allegro marcato a la Polka, compels Szell to add brass, the trumpets in concert with the timpani, to invoke a robustly syncopated, country dance whose string Trio section exerts a silky, gypsy flavor. Szell preserves the opening solo cello for the Largo sostenuto, the most romantically intimate of the movements, although one could argue that the maddening high E in the Vivace finale could not be anything but personal. Szell projects a kind of military, wind serenade section for the middle of the Largo, followed by a pastoral, that seems to nod to aspects of Beethoven’s Eroica slow movement. Potent aggression marks the opening of the last movement, quickly becoming another Czech dance-serenade, only to be rudely interrupted by the mental instability and tinnitus brought by the late stages of syphilis. The Szell orchestral patina resounds with the influence of Richard Strauss, Szell’s musical mentor. The quiet ending conveys a tragedy for the man Smetana and for music.
—Gary Lemco
George Szell conducts Bedřich Smetana =
The Bartered Bride Overture;
String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor “From My Life” (orch. Szell) –
The Moldau;
NBC Symphony Orchestra 8 March 1941/
Wallenstein’s Camp;
NBC Symphony Orchestra 13 Janury 1942/
From Bohemia’s Meadows and Forests;
Boston Symphony Orchestra 19 January 1945/
