First Toscanini Recordings Now Downloadable

courtesy of Naxos of America

When it comes to a comprehensive digital account of the conducting career of Arturo Toscanini on recordings, the “gold standard” is, unquestionably, the 2012 release by Sony Music Entertainment of The Complete RCA Collection. This consists of 72 volumes filling 84 CDs along with a DVD of Peter Rosen’s film Toscanini: The Maestro. However, this CD release had been preceded in 2007 by a single CD on the Symposium label entitled The First Recordings: 1920–1926, which is still available for purchase through Amazon.com. About two and one-half months ago Guild Music Limited created MP3 digitizations of the sixteen tracks on this album, and Amazon.com has made them available for both streaming and download. When downloaded, the MP3 album includes an eight-page booklet featuring an extended essay by Robert Matthew-Walker providing historical context for the sixteen tracks.

For those interested in completeness, all but one of those sixteen tracks can also be found in the complete RCA collection. The one unique track is the second recording on The First Recordings of the Scherzo movement from the incidental music that Felix Mendelssohn composed for a performance of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This selection appeared twice on the Symposium album. The first was recorded at the RCA studio in Camden, New Jersey, when Toscanini brought the La Scala Theatre Orchestra to perform and record in the United States prior to the re-opening of the opera house in 1921. The recording that is not included in the RCA collection was made early in 1926 at Carnegie Hall at the beginning of his tenure conducting the New York Philharmonic. This latter recording was made by Brunswick; and Matthew-Walker is a bit lame in comparing it with the earlier La Scala recording, writing “the performance is no mere carbon-copy in terms of interpretation, though the differences are minimal.”

I wanted to offer a generous account of the context behind the Symposium release for the benefit of those wishing to learn more about Toscanini’s career as a conductor. Calling the RCA collection the “gold standard” is no mere cliché. There was an almost awesome breadth to Toscanini’s repertoire, and any effort to cite compositions that he did not record would amount to pedantic nit-picking. On the other hand that complete anthology is not available for download from Amazon.com, which, in my own humble opinion, seems entirely reasonable. Thus, Guild Music Limited has provided a valuable download opportunity for those interested in “early Toscanini” and are willing to tolerate the shortcomings of recording technology a century ago. This is not to dismiss the digital remastering achievements of Peter Reynolds, but it is difficult to enhance signals that were not picked up by a microphone in the first place!