Toscanini conducts MOZART = Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat Major; Symphony No.
29 in A Major, K. 201 – Rudolf Serkin, piano/New York Philharmonic/NBC Symphony
Orchestra (K. 201)/Arturo Toscanini
Pristine Audio PASC 164, 47:34 [www.pristineclassical.com] (download or CD-R) ****:
From the moment announcer Jim Fassett tells us that Arturo Toscanini and his guest
soloist Rudolf Serkin are returning to the podium, we know that Andrew Rose has
restored, from this New York Philharmonic concert of Sunday 23 February 1936, a
significant moment in music history. Fassett’s epithets of “lyrical expansiveness” and
“seldom performed” to describe the B-flat Concerto already suggests the relative
unfamiliarity of this work to the Philharmonic audience. The actual restoration, moreover, as Andrew Rose provides the details, came at a heavy price of labor in order to repair considerable damage wrought upon the acetate original, which had lost several sections of music at various points in the concerto. Yet, the finished product, aside from decisive crackle and a brief jump near the end of the first movement, reveal little of the painfulre-birth of this marvelous document, a fateful collaboration in Serkin’s evolution, his having been weaned away from the singular influence of Adolf Busch.
Unlike the famed collaboration in the Beethoven Fourth Concerto between Serkin and
Toscanini, there is relatively little of the “clipped” phrasing that came to plague both
artists in later realizations of musical scores, what conductor Termirkinov once
characterized as the “snip, snip” method. Serkin’s tone proceeds fluid and agile, the
interchange with the NYPhil winds and strings linear and graceful. Both men take a refined leisure in the Larghetto movement, savoring Mozart’s elastic line – whose tranquil elasticity suffers some mars from the damaged condition of the tapes. A music-box clarity permeates Serkin’s rendition of the keyboard part, a simple song that occasionally broadens into a lilting serenade. The final Allegro extends the music-boxsonority, but now it becomes playful, skittish, coy, a delicate, bemused moment from Jane Austen. Piano and bassoon enjoy their colloquys, as do the strings, flute, and French horns. The strength of Serkin’s trill was and continues to be an audible legend. The last pages run with a silken wind, Mozart at his most effervescent and facile, diaphanous Toscanini.
The A Major Symphony, K. 201 in Toscanini’s reduced-orchestra realization (from
Studio 8-H, 3 September 1944) well anticipates more “modern” approaches to this
otherwise inflated, all-too-stodgy score, especially in Toscanini’s exceptionally brisk first movement Allegro moderato, which Beecham, Scherchen, and Fricsay tend to drag. A light, lithe transparency permeates the effect, muscular, unsentimental, driven. Nothing ‘rococo’ or effete in this reading, which for my money, only Cantelli exceeds!
Despite some cramped sonic definition, the Andante moves with that same, fluent confidence which allows Toscanini to reveal the inner workings of the woodwinds and the resonant tissue of the low strings, with no sag in the upper voices. The wonder of the Menuetto is Toscanini’s ease of transition to the trio and back again, the stunning linearity rife with inner, martial flutterings. Dotted rhythms and charming syncopes mark the last movement, Allegro con spirito, articulated and etched with gentle fury in the horns and string pedal. The plastic, momentary counterpoint already hints of the Mozart of the last three symphonies, Toscanini assigning to the fleet figures a sense of an epic
lying just beneath the surface.
— Gary Lemco
