1953 photograph of Pierre Monteux at the Metropolitan Opera with director Peter Brook (from the Cleveland Press, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
At the end of this past October, the Universal Music Group released a 24-CD box set of the complete recordings of Pierre Monteux in Europe released on the Decca label. Here in San Francisco Monteux is best known for having conducted the San Francisco Symphony from 1936 to 1952, after which much of his attention was devoted to the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the Fifties. However, Monteux began to shift his attention to Europe and the earliest of the recordings in this collection were made in 1956.
As I have done with other collections, I plan to examine this new release in a series of articles, organized by music history, rather than Monteux’ career during the last decades of his life. Like the collection itself, I shall begin with the First Viennese School as represented by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert, along with two earlier composers (neither Viennese), Johann Sebastian Bach and Christoph Willibald Gluck.
The heart of this portion of the collection consists of all nine Beethoven symphonies in performances by both the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. There is also a second recording of the Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major made with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the early Sixties (before Queen Beatrix conferred the “Royal” title). Given that we are about to plunge into a one-year celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday, the timing of this release is appropriate. On the other hand many listeners are likely to feel swamped by the abundance of Beethoven recordings being released and the attention given to all nine of the symphonies.
It is therefore worth calling out the virtues of the Monteux recordings in this domain. He is clearly familiar with all nine of the symphonies, which should be expected of any conductor. However, his familiarity goes down to the details on the score pages and then rises above that level in seeking out just the right expressive rhetorical gestures to endow all of those details with more than enough significance to draw and maintain the attention of the serious listener.
The same can be said of the other composers in this group, all of whom are represented much more modestly. Schubert gets only the D. 759 (“Unfinished”) symphony in B minor and the D. 797 incidental music for Rosamunde. Having had to sit through what felt like an interminable account of D. 797 during a concert performance, I was much relieved to have Monteux remind me that there are many virtues in these pieces that had eluded me at my last encounter. Where Haydn is concerned, he sticks to two of the most familiar symphonies, Hoboken I/94 (“Surprise”) in G major and Hoboken I/101 (“The Clock”) in D major. Both of these are given crisp attention to phrasing that compensates for the oversized ensembles playing the music.
The Mozart selection, on the other hand, is sort of a “family vanity” piece. The K. 314 flute concerto in D major is part of an album featuring flute performances by Monteux’ son Claude. The other selections are the Bach BWV 1067 suite in B minor and the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euricide opera. Here, again, Monteux is working with larger resources than would have been intended; but clarity is again his strong suit, allowing his son to shine in optimal light.
My guess is that there will be many readers that will take a nothing-new-here reaction to these selections; but, when it comes to appreciating a composition’s capacity for expressiveness, Monteux is up there with my other favorite conductors that consistently bring fresh perspectives to their interpretations.
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