courtesy of Naxos of America
Towards the end of last month, Profil expanded their catalog of significant archival recordings with a ten-CD album of orchestral music conducted by George Szell. During my student days, Szell was somewhat of a lightning rod during bull sessions about the performance of music. The running joke was to talk about how impressed you were with the way that Szell played the Cleveland Orchestra, suggesting that even the slightest gesture by any member of that ensemble could be attributed to Szell’s input. The conductor of the student orchestra at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was a Szell student, and we would hear about that in just about any course in analysis or theory that anyone took with him.
However, by the time Szell died, admiration for his meticulous precision was beginning to go stale, coming under attack for being too sterile. 2020 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Szell’s death, so this new Profil release provides an opportunity to set aside the extreme swings of the pendulum of opinion in favor of a less partisan assessment of both precision and expressiveness in his technique. Where repertoire is concerned, the lion’s share of the collection serves up familiar works by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms. However, what interested me more than the familiarity of the selections was the significant presence of two major twentieth-century pianists, Robert Casadesus (who died in 1972) and Leon Fleisher, now 91 years old and honored by San Francisco Performances this past February.
While I never met Fleisher, his was a formative influence in my approach to listening. For all of the efforts of my “official” teachers, one of my strongest memories involves a radio interview that allowed Fleisher to talk about the experience of performing under Szell’s baton. It remains one of the clearest accounts I have encountered that breaks down the many aspects of interaction among conductor, soloist, and ensemble and reassembles them in a manner that makes all the sense in the world. To this day Fleisher’s thoughts trigger my “little grey cells” (that “signature expression” favored by Hercule Poirot) whenever I am listening to a concerto performance.
Fleisher figures in five concerto performances in Profil’s Szell anthology. In “order of appearance” these are Mozart’s K. 503 in C major, Beethoven’s Opus 58 (fourth) in G major, Brahms’ Opus 15 (first) in D minor, Schumann’s Opus 54 in A minor, and Edvard Grieg’s Opus 16 in A minor. These are all meticulously disciplined interpretations, but there is nothing sterile about any of them. Whatever rumors may have prevailed during his lifetime, any accusations of Szell being dispassionate were woefully misplaced. Granted, there may have been moments in the four Mozart selections in this collection that could have been a bit more vibrant, perhaps enjoying the benefit of smaller string ensembles; but there was no shortage of subtlety when Szell put his heart into conducting Mozart. (George Cleve, co-founder of our own Midsummer Mozart Festival, was, like one of my own teachers, significantly influenced by Szell.)
Nevertheless, my own favorites tend to be found on the Haydn disc, which offers three symphonies: Hoboken I/88 in G major, Hoboken I/97 in C major, and Hoboken I/104 In D major. The booklet calls this last item “Salomon,” which is more than a little useless, given how many symphonies were written to support the promotional efforts of Joann Peter Salomon. Most of us probably refer to Hoboken I/104 as the “London” symphony, which is also rather inaccurate, but not as much! I also took great satisfaction in Szell’s approach to the two best-known symphonies by Antonín Dvořák, Opus 88 (eighth) in G major and Opus 95 (“From the New World”) in E minor.
As an overall assessment, I would say that these ten CDs are likely to get far more attention in subsequent listening experiences than any of my many recordings of Herbert von Karajan!
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