Search - Guy Gardner, Johann Sebastian Bach, Bela Bartok :: Stokowski: The Maverick Conductor

A MAGICIAN AT WORK

Klingsor Tristan | Suffolk | 04/09/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Whatever his flaws, Stokowski could elicit the most magical sounds from almost any orchestra he stood in front of. The richness of the strings in his Philadelphia orchestra has arguably never been matched to this day. The distinctive colours and the sense of space he coaxed from winds, brass and strings alike probably derives at least in part from his time as organist at St. James, Piccadilly, in his youth.



Most of this excellent set showing off his unique conducting uses a largely ad hoc orchestra, put together for his personal use at a time in the late 50's when his career was somewhat in the doldrums, when he was seen as something of an out-dated charlatan. He was, of course, indeed a charlatan. But only in the image in which he chose to clothe himself - that fake, vaguely Slav accent; the myth that he was born in Poland; he even made himself out to be 5 years younger than he was. Actually, he was born in Marylebone, trained at the Royal College where he was a contemporary of Vaughan Williams and, as I said, started out as a London church organist. He went to America and rapidly became one of the great conductors of the last century. And no faking about that.



He was also a great advocate of modern music, so it is no accident that this set of CD's consists almost entirely of Twentieth Century music. His Bartok (Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste) is riveting, especially the mysteriously twisting and turning fugal opening movement with a superb crowning climax: and his Schoenberg (Verklarte Nacht) is richly romantic in its post-Wagnerian harmony. He was always a bold supporter of Shostakovich. Here we have his Symphony No.11, recorded within a year of its premiere, and with an opening movement that lacks nothing in atmosphere despite being significantly faster than we're used to nowadays; for the rest it is excitingly urgent with a still profound heart in the adagio. There's also a wonderfully colourful First Symphony, an - at the time - rare piece of Lady Macbeth and his own orchestration of one of the Op.87 preludes and fugues.



The Planets are a revelation. There is real menace in Mars's insistent 5/4 rhythms, great beauty in the perfectly balanced voicing of woodwind chords in Venus, superb fleetness of foot in Mercury and so it goes on, right through the piece. Of course he couldn't resist the odd bit of tinkering with the score - the crescendo on the tam-tam over the last bars of Mars and the sustaining of the string chord at the end of Saturn are just two examples - but they really don't interfere with the pleasures of conducting of such understanding (Holst, too, was a contemporary, remember).



That old warhorse, Carmina Burana, may well have you sitting up in your seat, too. The very first bars come as a shock with the `a' of `Fortuna' cut off extremely short by the choir. The crispness and clarity in the singing are characteristic of the whole performance: there are many caesuras used to great effect throughout and the tempi are often markedly different from what we've become used to. The rich upholstery of the strings under the soprano's In trutina is almost worth the price of the discs alone. But it seems to me all absolutely honest to the faux naivete of Orff's writing with the emphasis on clarity at all times.



For the rest, the Bach transcriptions are familiar from many other Stoki performances. His Debussy is richly impressionist, Stravinsky's Firebird, with an electric Kashchei's Dance, fares better than his Petrushka, his championship of Gliere's lightweight Ilya Murometz Symphony still puzzles me, his Pines of Rome seems like one master orchestrator's tribute to another and there is a wealth of other smaller pieces, all of which he illuminates as no other.



At such a knockdown price, I would urge anyone with a taste for thrilling sound-worlds to explore these 10 discs and marvel at a still underrated magician at work."