Taken from 2-track Everest tape, Leopold Stokowski’s famous 1958 inscription of Tchaikovsky’s tone-poem Francesca da Rimini with members of the New York Philharmonic (playing at Lewisohn Stadium) has had CD incarnation on the
Dell’Arte label as well as Everest itself via Omega Record Group (now out of print). This Symposium-processed remastering beats all I have heard prior, giving us extremely pointed definition just where we want to hear it, in the blazing brass and creamy strings, invoking the torments of Hell and the agonized nostalgia of passions tender and criminal. The balletic elements of the score–oboe, harp, piping flutes, and echoes in the strings, both arco and plucked–gain in sonic texture but also in the sterling presence of the admixture of instrumental choirs. Stokowski’s cello line alone makes us not “abandon all hope” for further repetitions of this richly layered listening experience. The remembrance of good times in the presence of misery, as recounted by Francesca as she witnesses her lover Paolo forever blown by the insatiable winds of passion, carries power and pathos, at once. By the end of the mighty tone portrait, the howling winds leave us bereft and fascinated to return, even if it means our own confrontation with sacred pain.
The Hamlet Fantasy substitutes a solo oboe to introduce the love-theme, where a clarinet served in Francesca. An emotional reaction to Shakespeare’s “tragedy of thought,” the piece alternates a martial “call to action”–that might stand for either Hamlet or young Fortinbras–with introspective, lyrical episodes that suggest Hamlet‘s interchanges with the hapless Ophelia. Despite my having heard the Boston Symphony under Stokowski in this same piece, this inscription from New York sets an irreproachable standard for tempos and phrasing. As remastered by HDTT, the surging middle section, its pathetic voicings in strings and brass that weep for Hamlet’s murdered father and fallen mother, achieve a firm resolve as Hamlet’s hot blood awakens. The lower brass section, tuba and contra-bassoon, thunder imperiously, swirling as if Hamlet, too, could be found among the dismal shades of Inferno. The final section of martial stretti, trumpets ablaze, has the Stokowski Sound in full fettle, the snare drum the least aspect of a volatile, pointed reading that has been an archetype of its kind for fifty years.
The 1958 reading of the C Major Serenade for Strings with the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch (1891-1968) would not have been my first choice for HDTT remastering; I might even prefer the earlier BSO inscription under Koussevitzky for sheer beauty of string tone. Still, the Boston patina of strings certainly benefits from Munch’s having served in the violin section of the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwaengler. Lucid and unsentimentally projected, the four movements of the serenade glide by, with a particularly strong line in the third movement Elegie. The Russian Dance, with its polyphonic stretti, shows off the kind of streamlined discipline the BSO could achieve in divided parts, arco and pizzicato. Tchaikovsky had Mozart in mind when he conceived the piece–his favorite Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546–and Munch transfers the melancholy Tchaikovsky’s exalted strands to the Mozart ideal of transparency and grace in good order.
— Gary Lemco
The Everest reissues of 1996 still stand as some of the best reissues of classic Golden Age audiophile masters on CD; to my thinking many are even better than the average Mercury or RCA CD reissues. The masters for this one were 35mm film, which always produced superior sonics, and Sony Classical’s Super Bit Mapping was used to squeeze the hi-res material into the compromised 44.1K/16-bit CD format. HDTT’s DVD-R versions aren’t limited by that and therefore are the obvious choice if your DVD player passes 96K sampling rate material. Francesca and the Hamlet Overture definitely surpass the excellent Everest CD in all quarters. The impact of Stokowski’s dramatic approach is conveyed to the utmost in Francesca. I agree with Gary in having preferred another selection instead of the Serenade for Strings – my choice would have been the third work on the Everest CD – Scriabin’s all-stops-out Poem of Ecstasy – but it may not have been available on a prerecorded tape.
— John Sunier
