Koussevitzky 2: Brahms and French Pioneers

In yesterday’s article about the first two-CD album in the Maestro Risoluto box set of recordings of Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I had to justify Robert Schumann appearing as a “guest” among the First Viennese School composers. In the second two-CD album the second CD is devoted to four French composers, each of whom took a forward-looking approach to composition. In “order of appearance,” those composers and their representative selections are as follows:

1. Hector Berlioz: the Opus 9 concert overture “Le carnaval romain” (the Roman carnival), based on music from the opera Benvenuto Cellini
2. Claude Debussy: “La mer” (the sea)
3. Gabriel Fauré: three of the four movements from the Opus 80 suite based on incidental music composed for the play Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck
4. Maurice Ravel: the second suite of excerpts from the score for Michel Fokine’s ballet “Daphnis et Chloé”

The first CD is devoted entirely to the music of Johannes Brahms. There will probably be many that view this composer as too “old-fashioned” to rub shoulders with any of the more adventurous French composers. However, Arnold Schoenberg thought otherwise, making his case in an essay he wrote in 1947 entitled “Brahms the Progressive.” While this essay never explicitly cites Brahms’ Opus 90 (third) symphony in F major, anyone familiar with the music will probably appreciate the “progressive” elements in the score, both in the individual movements and in the overall structure. To be fair, however, this symphony is coupled with violinist Jascha Heifetz performing the Opus 77 violin concerto in D major; and I doubt that even Schoenberg could make a case for that being a progressive composition!

Where my own listening is concerned, I find that, even with any shortcomings in either recording or remastering, I am very comfortable listening to Koussevitzky’s approaches to the four French composers. Koussevitzky left Russia after the 1917 Revolution. After visits to both Berlin and Rome, he made Paris his base of operations. He launched a concert series called, modestly enough, Concerts Koussevitzky, which provided a platform for the music of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel. It was only natural that his affinity for ambitious French music would follow him to the podium of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Personally, however, I feel that his attachment to “progressive Brahms” is just as important. In the course of my own listening experiences, I have found that the Opus 90 symphony tends to get the least attention of the four that Brahms composed. One could make a case for enigmatic qualities that tweak, and possibly unsettle, attentive listening. The recording in this collection suggests that Koussevitzky was aware of those qualities and preferred to relish them, rather than worry about making them more “accessible” to his listeners.

Where progressive matters are concerned, however, it is worth noting that Schoenberg himself had little respect for Koussevitzky. This is probably due, in no small part, to the fact that Koussevitzky never included any Schoenberg composition in any program that he prepared and conducted. As will be evident in the track listing for the last of the albums in this collection, his enthusiasm for twentieth-century composers never acknowledged any departure from conventional tonal grammar and rhetoric. Personally, I respect Schoenberg’s indignation; but I do not allow it to interfere with my approach to performers that clearly made a convincing case for other priorities.