Derived from a 1963 RCA 4-track tape (Tchaikovsky) and 4-track tape from Columbia Records, 1963 (Rachmaninov), each of which had demonstrated considerable audiophile power in its own day, these classic performances, remastered via HDTT’s Symposium process, now approach aural ecstasies for the lover of Russian Romantic Music. And while I often relegate Eugene Ormandy’s interpretations to the merely “effectual,” his natural sympathy for Rachmaninov has ample means to stir our imagination.
The youthful Rachmaninov D Minor Symphony, especially its ferociously passionate, opening movement, seems tailor-made for Ormandy’s opulent, expansive treatment, allowing his Philadelphia strings, winds, and brass-battery sections their full range of expression, from massive, hysterical outbursts, to sweet, intimate, chamber-music settings for flute, oboe, clarinet, and strings. The deep, resonant bass line thoroughly projects what Rachmaninov sought in orchestral colors–especially in his persistent application of the Dies Irae motif–and we know that he literally dedicated compositions to this ensemble’s specific sound.
The Scherzo begins with the same mordant tone which opens the symphony, then it darkly skitters and shimmies under Ormandy’s light touch, reminiscent of music from the Tchaikovsky suites for orchestra. Again, the descending brass line points to intimations of mortality softened by tender memories and throbbing colors. Warm sound from the Philadelphia violas and cellos, even as the ‘march to the scaffold’ proceeds with buoyant energies. Excellent channel separation in the Scherzo allows the brass its antiphons against the insistent lulling of the strings. The woodwind and cello parts of the slow movement Andante harkens to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade or fairy-tale suites – a romance in occasionally nervous, melancholy colors. Elements of Mahler’s militant, unearthly irony saturate the last movement Tempestuoso, a heady mix of the ubiquitous Dies Irae sequence and Russian liturgical motifs, brilliant carillons, and fragments of marches and Russian peasant dances. The trumpet work, along with the stunning gong, more than indicate Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar Saltan as a kindred spirit of this colossal brew.
Charles Munch and his faithful Bostonians bring warm and sympathetic lifeblood to Tchaikovsky’s second-most popular score (after the 1812 Overture), with strong presence from flute (Doriot Anthony Dwyer) and harp. The fate motif climbs with graduated agony, the sheer patina of strings, high and low, over an ostinato tympani, culminate in a primal struggle between the forces of light and darkness. Munch moves the drama along briskly–no Celibidache stretching of the musical line into Turkish taffy–the ferocity of the warring families yielding to the familiar love theme, here unfolded like the theme from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, sans mannerism or undue eroticism. After the extended harp sequences, the agony resumes, here in Tybalt’s confrontational nature, which leads to the counterpointed deaths of himself and Mercutio. The lovers come tumbling down like Icarus–for had not love given Romeo “wings” wherewith to scale to Juliet’s “sun”? Though Munch’s reading borders on the metronomic, the intensity of the BSO woodwind and French horn line proves so athletically transparent as to demolish any platitudes, the arch cello line from the right channel swallowing up the sound space as the love theme and fate motifs absorb each other. Tchaikovsky, too, warrants his own ‘march to the scaffold’ in the last pages, which makes Berlioz the unnamed father of the entire album, a formidable Romantic pedigree, indeed.
[If you have a DVD player, by all means select the DVD-R version for its more transparent and open sonics. Even if your DVD player cannot be dissuaded from downsampling the 96K to 48K, you will still get improved fidelity over the CD version…Ed.]
–Gary Lemco
