MediciArts MM026-2, 77:58 [Distrib. by MediciArts.co.uk] **** [Distr. by Naxos]:
The recording of 22 August 1970 finds the 88-year-old Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) at the helm of the Netherlands Radio Symphony, leading a concert he would proceed to record in Hilversum for Decca’s Phase 4 Stereo series. Typical of Stokowski’s penchant for color experiment, he wanted three harps for the Franck Symphony, along with double English horn and contrabassoon. He wanted extra piccolos for the Ravel. And although the Netherlands players first objected to what they considered tampering with holy writ, they soon complied and even came to admire Stokowski’s sonic adjustments. Stokowski was no less qualified to direct Prokofiev’s 1938 film score Alexander Nevsky, having led the NBC Symphony American premier of the piece in 1943. The little 1927 Fanfare by Ravel is based on a commission from Rene and Jeanne Dubost, who asked ten composers to contribute brief pieces for a collective ballet.
Having grown up with the 78 rpm version of the Franck Symphony with Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra (1936), his plastic approach to the relatively four-square writing has always beguiled me. Played for its haunted, shimmering sonorities and Gothic symmetries, the Franck finds a sympathetic reading, broad and yearning for the mystical, as do the readings of the other great romantics, Furtwaengler and Mengelberg. The clarity of the woodwind line becomes no less expressive, even as the lower strings surge and froth in often Byzantine arabesques. Stokowski waywardly tugs at and releases the rhythmic pulse, overstepping subjective passion into overt sentimentalism, but the commitment of the interpretation never wavers. Gorgeous harp sound opens the ethereal Allegretto, the English horn enjoying just a slight ritard in the line to make us perk up. After a series of hazy, amorphously decorative interludes, the ritornello appears faster, the dialogues of muttering strings, harps, and woodwinds both diaphanous and nervously mesmerizing, shaded by hints at Wagner’s Tannhauser. Typical Stokowski exuberance and flamboyant energy mark the final Allegro movement, which despite its repetitiousness achieves a hearty, stamping peroration that ties up any loose ends from the previous movements and elicits rousing applause from the Dutch audience.
The Alexander Nevsky score takes its cue from the imminent threat of a Nazi invasion into Russia; and director Eisenstein’s vision of the 12th Century Teutonic Knights came from having seen the KKK portrayed by Griffith in The Birth of a Nation. The music’s sheer pageantry and orchestral separation of parts, like the harp glissandi and horn punctuations, allow Stokowski ample opportunity for panoramic display; and the Netherlands chorus, singing in Russian, enunciates expressively. The famed Battle on the Ice of the River Neva–which Eisenstein filmed partially by mounting cameras on the horses’ chests–provides a whirlwind of colossal, stereophonic colors, rampaging rhythms and clashing battery instruments, especially in the snare, kettledrum, and triangle. The intonation of the choir over the xylophone sounds like a raising of the dead, even as the cruel Teutons sink into the broken ice. As the heroic mist rises, we segue into the lament of a desolate lover looking for her fallen soldier, the poignant singing of Sophia van Sante (d. 2007) capturing the anguish of war with the same intensity Rosalind Elias contributed to the famed RCA Reiner recording. The last movement, Nevsky’s triumphant entrance into the liberated city of Pskov, plays as a Russian spring, a reawakening of both the land and its people. As intense a reading as this is, history tells us that the 24 August 1970 performance had to repeat the last two movements to satisfy its inflamed audience.
–Gary Lemco
