Profil Releases Horenstein “Reference Recordings”

courtesy of Naxos of America

Tomorrow Profil will release its latest anthology project. This is a ten-CD collection of performances conducted by Jascha Horenstein given the title Reference Recordings. I am not quite sure what that title was intended to denote (or, for that matter, connote); but it would be fair to say that the overall content provides a valuable survey of music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Ludwig van Beethoven at one end at Béla Bartók at the other. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page set up to process pre-orders even as I write this.

Horenstein was one of the first conductors to seize my attention seriously, going all the way back to when I was in secondary school. I was given the long-playing recording of his interpretation of Beethoven’s Opus 125 (“Choral”) symphony by an uncle that had just purchased the Columbia box set of Bruno Walter conducting all nine Beethoven symphonies. (He was not particularly interested in whether different conductors would interpret the same score in different ways.)

The recording I received seemed to have come from some record club. On it Horenstein led the “Pro Musica Symphony,” which was the name that the Vox label used to get around the fact that the Vienna Symphony Orchestra had signed a contract in Philips in April of 1952. The vocal soloists on the album were soprano Wilma Lipp, alto Elizabeth Hoengen, tenor Julius Patzak, and bass Otto Wiener, singing with the Wiener Singverein, the chorus of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (society of friends of music) in Vienna, which dates back to 1812.

After Vox reissued this recording on CD, I was motivated to write an article about Horenstein for Examiner.com. That recording is not included in the Profil anthology; but the other Vox reissue I discussed, that of Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major is part of the collection. This is the earliest of the “reference recordings” in the collection, and listening to it remains as exciting as the experience had been with my first encounter.

After my move to Palo Alto, I experienced another “trigger event” that reminded me of my past enthusiasm for Horenstein. There was a radio broadcast of an archival BBC recording of Horenstein conducting Gustav Mahler’s eighth symphony in the Royal Albert Hall on March 20, 1959. That recording was released as a two-CD set by ICA Classics, prefacing the first movement of the symphony on the first CD with a twenty-minute conversation with Horenstein conducted by Alan Blyth. The recording of the symphony was subsequently chosen to lead off the first BBC Legends anthology produced by ICA, but without the interview. I wrote about that collection on Examiner.com but saved the original two-CD release to keep the interview.

The Mahler eighth is not included as a “reference recording.” However, there is an equally compelling account of the third symphony in D minor, which is roughly on the same imposing durational scale as the eighth; and there is also a recording of the first (“Titan”) symphony. However, the most significant “point of reference” is that of the very first recording made of the Kindertotenlieder cycle in 1928. The vocalist is Heinrich Rehkemper, accompanied by the Orchester der Staatsoper Berlin. In addition to this generous share of Mahler, the collection also includes a Pro Musica Symphony recording of the 1890 version of Anton Bruckner’s eighth symphony in D minor.

All of this is still a relatively modest representation of an impressively rich account of repertoire. Most imaginative is a “Faust project” album that Horenstein recorded in 1956 with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra. The first track is devoted to Richard Wagner’s “Faust Overture” (a concert overture with no connection to opera). This is followed by Franz Liszt’s “Faust Symphony” in three movements, each of which is a character study of Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles, respectively. Wagner is also represented by the opening prelude to Lohengrin and the usual concert coupling of the very beginning and very conclusion of Tristan und Isolde.

From a personal point of view, I have to say that the most compelling selections were the two early pieces by Arnold Schoenberg. The first of these is the string ensemble version of the Opus 4 “Verklärte Nacht” (transfigured night). While the purist in me prefers the original string sextet, I decided to follow the string ensemble score for this one. I realized that there was much to be gained from the revised version, and Horenstein clearly grasped all of the significant details in this revision.

Opus 4 was followed by the Opus 9 chamber symphony in E-flat major. This also has an orchestral version, but Horenstein conducted the original version for fifteen solo instruments. (I assume this was the case because all the string passages were played by solo instruments.) No matter how many times I listen to this piece, I continue to have trouble getting my head around it; and, once again, I resorted to score-following. This was still a challenging undertaking, but the clarity of Horenstein’s interpretation made reading the score less of a scramble than it had been on previous occasions.

There is much more I can write about the remaining selections. A total of fourteen composers are represented in this collection. However, I would like to believe that, by now, the reader has a clear sense of my enthusiasm for this collection and the extent to which that enthusiasm is for a conductor that was as much at home with twentieth-century repertoire as he was with the more familiar nineteenth century.