BBC Legends 3: Conductor Eugen Jochum

Conductor Eugen Jochum (1961 photograph by Jack de Nijs, from Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

Eugen Jochum was one of those conductors talked about at moderate length among the classical music announcers at WTBS back when it was the call letters for the campus radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ironically, we did not give his recordings much exposure, because we did not have any of them! According to his Wikipedia page, his “strong suit” was the symphonies of Anton Bruckner with the orchestra music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms tied for second place. In an unexpected vein, he was also the conductor on the first recording of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana cantata.

Jochum is the featured artist on the twelfth CD in the latest BBC Legends release. Given the context of the preceding paragraph, the “program” for this album is “something completely different.” There are three selections, the first two of which are late symphonies by Joseph Haydn: Hoboken I/100 in G major and Hoboken I/101 in D major. These have both been given titles: “Military” and “The Clock,” respectively. The final selection is Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber.” The recordings for these performances were all made at the Royal Festival Hall. The Haydn symphonies were recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra on January 30, 1973, followed by the Hindemith performance with the London Symphony Orchestra on June 23, 1977.

Given the seriousness of Bruckner’s music, what may be most important about this album is that it has the most generous offering of wit (not to mention belly laughs) that I have encountered since I began my journey through this 20-CD collection. Of the two composers, Haydn is probably better known for his sense of humor; however, Hindemith’s approach to metamorphosis engaged a wit that was probably absent in his Weber sources. Nevertheless, it is important to observe that Jochum never tries to overplay any of the gags. His approach seems to be to grasp the dispositions of the two composers and then make sure that his ensemble accounted those dispositions in ways that would allow the audience to have reactions ranging from polite chuckles to overt belly laughs.