Pristine Audio PASC 146, 55:00 [www.pristineclassical.com] ****:
The Pristine reissue of Karl Goldmark’s Rustic Wedding Symphony (1876) under Robert Heger (1886-1978) proves a significant event, if only for splendid sonic restoration of this wonderful reading by engineer Mark Obert-Thorn. The original American Victor “Red Seal” shellacs, recorded January-October 1929, elicit such vivid colors as to make us doubt the age of this “golden age” performance! In five movements, Goldmark’s Symphony seems more an extended dance-suite or symphonic poem on pastoral subjects, opening as it does with a huge dance-variation; then it proceeds to a Bridal Song, Serenade, “In the Garden” slow movement, and last, a Final (peasant) Dance. Goldmark well absorbed the symphonic conventions of his admired Mendelssohn and Schumann, and his music found a friend in Johannes Brahms.
For at least two generations, the preferred readings (from LP days) were those by Sir Thomas Beecham and Leonard Bernstein; of more recent vintage comes a Naxos production led by Stephen Gunzenhauser. The Vienna Philharmonic under Heger’s deft hand–he was a master composer of and leader of opera–generates a positive, poetic warmth that belies both age and the limits of recording technology for 1929. The lovely Bridal Song, with its simple turn the musical line, captures our fancy for naïve innocence and bucolic sincerity. The Serenade–a gentle scherzo–trips in carefully modulated, Mendelssohnian balances between strings, horns, and woodwinds. The metrics propel the music in a cross of laendler rhythms and folk idioms that Goldmark imbibed from his native Hungary.
A kind of Alpine insouciance permeates this clever music. Listen to the excellent string articulation prior to the transition from the trio back to the da capo. In the Garden projects a mystique all its own: a devotional hymn to nature, certainly; it also bespeaks a mastery of harmony and orchestration that sounds–like the music of Humperdinck–utterly Wagnerian or Brahmsian, without recourse to anything like direct quotation. Heger indulges in all sorts of “period,” stylistic devices, particularly string slides and Viennese lilts, that rather add to the luster of music conceived when the Romantic tradition was in full tilt. The spirit of Breughel infects the spirited last movement, a contrapuntal tour de force as it opens with raucous energy in strings and woodwinds, the VPO string basses on fire. Episodic, the tune keeps interjecting itself in the form of an impish ritornello vying with its secondary tune, a tripping tune in staccati. The lovely theme from In the Garden returns of a pedal bass–a curious variation on Beethoven’s cyclic style–then the rondo of the finale picks up, display music now in colorful, chromatic variation. A series of rising scales take us to a sweeping, modulated figures–variations again–of the theme for a grand, rousing coda, music devotionally and enthusiastically rendered for all time.
Heger recorded the two overtures of Franz von Suppe in January 1929 (the 11th and 23rd, respectively). Like all Suppe overtures, they reveal a strong Slavic influence, tempered by the Viennese side of gypsy style. Eminently virtuosic, they permit an orchestra to strut its stuff–a facet of which Karajan was well aware–with sudden, terraced dynamics and wild, vivacious rhythms and crescendos that both Rossini and Offenbach could envy. In Pique Dame the snare drum and wickedly pungent rhythms quite pick us up by both arms and reel us around without obeisance to propriety. After the whirlwinds, a simple, woodwind tune over sting pizzicati emerges, perhaps mock Leo Delibes. But fear not, the respite is only temporary. The last pages hurl us through the rafters, a performance to rival those of Constant Lambert and Jean Fournet for devilish excitement. Gypsy and Viennese schlogobers merge delightfully in Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna, music that Lambert and Beecham owned–in spite of Karajan–until this thrilling inscription came my way. A combination of hymn, march, and circus music, the overture proceeds to show of the VPO strings, brass, cymbals, and woodwinds to bravura advantage, the crescendos colossal, the spirit thoroughly unbuttoned. A disc that makes vintage record-collecting fun at every note!
–Gary Lemco
