Toscanini: A Mighty Beethoven’s Seventh

RCA is hardly being selective in its seemingly endless tribute to Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini.

Not for them any “Best of . . .” collection. Only “All of . . .” will do, including duplications, even triplications, of repertory, and a goodly number of performances that a name with less mythical resonances than Toscanini would never survive.

Among the latest and most valuable reissues are products not of his association with the NBC Symphony, the orchestra created for him in 1937, but the New York Philharmonic, over which he presided as music director from 1929 to 1937.

Many important musicians had their perceptions altered--even their future courses determined--by encounters with the potent combination of Toscanini and the New Yorkers during their 1930 European tour.

One master-to-be, the late conductor George Szell, a man hardly given to hyperbole, recalled “orchestral performance of a kind new to all of us. The clarity of texture, the precision of balance, the virtuosity of every section, every solo player with the orchestra . . . set new, undreamed-of standards.”

The recording that has come to symbolize that partnership and, indeed, the kind of performance to which Szell and others listened, awe-struck, is that of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, recorded in Carnegie Hall in 1936.

It has been reissued numerous times but never with the impactful clarity of RCA’s latest digital transfer (60316, mid-price).

Still, listeners are likely to need an audible frame of reference to appreciate fully what conductor and orchestra achieved.

Try some early 1930s orchestral recordings from nearly any other source (including Vienna and Berlin) and the point should be made. Those other recordings, no matter how powerful interpretively, disclose standards of execution no listener in our own time--or even by the end of Toscanini’s tenure with the NYPO--would tolerate.

Not everyone had to (or did) agree with Toscanini’s notions of musical truth--or his much-vaunted “fidelity to the score,” not nearly as clear-cut a concept as the idealistic words might suggest. But there can be no escaping the differences between the music-making heard in this Beethoven Seventh and what recordings indicate was going on elsewhere at the time.

Absent here are the rhythmic indulgences, the swooping dynamics, the extreme variability of tempo that are among the defining characteristics of the still-prevalent Romantic Style, to oversimplify, somewhat. And the sloppy ensemble.

Some naysayers were to claim that Toscanini had jettisoned “expressivity,” even personality. But there is hardly only one kind of expressivity. Toscanini’s stressed vitality over languor, directness over circumlocution, the big picture (i.e., “architecture”) over the inspiration of the moment, rhythmic thrust over curvaceous phrasing.

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This Beethoven Seventh moves quickly. But there is no feeling of being rushed--as was to become the case by the time of Toscanini’s later interpretations with the NBC Symphony. By then, the Toscanini style seemed often to have degenerated into a set of mechanical devices and interpretive simplifications.

There is also a superb command of dynamics here, which would have been impossible without the skills of the New York Philharmonic players. Surely their virtuosity inspired Toscanini to new heights, to instill a degree of daring in his interpretations that might otherwise not have been attempted.

The tension of Beethoven’s outer movements is thrillingly palpable here. But of even greater moment is the ebb and flow of the Allegretto, as moving a translation of printed notes into emotional experience as this listener has encountered, and an exemplar of dedicated performers’ ability to refresh music that may have taken on the aspect of tired ritual.

In this program, Beethoven’s Seventh is coupled with Haydn’s “Clock” symphony by the same forces, dating from 1929-1930, Toscanini’s first full NYPO season.

It too is impressively well executed, although what follows an airborne first movement isn’t far enough removed in tempo and articulation from the sort of heavyweight Classicism generally circulated at the time.

As an encore, RCA offers the scherzo from Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” played with dazzling lightness and lift by the New Yorkers whereas in later NBC Symphony retreads the impression is simply of speed--and hardly the accuracy encountered here.