Manchmal geht alles schnell: Im Sommer 2013 hatte Claudio Abbado am Lucerne...

At a bit more than 81 minutes, this may well be the longest CD currently available. Perhaps what is most remarkable about it is that its sound is in no way compromised by its length. To be sure, both works were recorded in stereo by Szell with his Cleveland orchestra and are sonically a bit more attractive than these live accounts recorded in concert at a closer perspective. Moreover, this (presumably) ad hoc Swiss Festival ensemble heard in the Brahms score is not quite a match for Szell’s Cleveland ensemble in terms of spit-and-polish perfection. Perhaps, what is most striking about these readings is how often they come close to Szell’s studio efforts in terms of tempo, sometimes a bit either slower or faster than his studio versions, but never to the point where a radical change in pacing from one reading to the other is evident. For those who revere Szell, this disc may well prove redundant or attractive. Either way, both accounts are valuable as documents of the work of one of the leading maestros of his time.

Somehow I missed the second volume of this survey of the complete works of Grieg with these forces, but my comments on volume one can be repeated here. In short, this is a complete winner. As popular as Grieg is, a handful of his most popular music tends to get recorded over and over again, but he was an extremely prolific and long-lived composer, and a consistently excellent one. His extended oeuvre is well worth exploring. His orchestration skills were as sophisticated as any of his celebrated late 19th-century contemporaries, and his melodic gifts were seemingly inexhaustible.

These performances are excellent. Violinist turned conductor Aadland conducts with verve and a good ear for color and texture, and the Cologne ensemble is gutsy more so than it is polished, a quality which fits the music beautifully. The icing on the cake is Audite’s superb SACD recording, which bursts out of my stereo in excitingly realistic sound. Yes, I like this series. Treat yourself.

There is often some trepidation to experience at the arrival of a new Schumann CD. Few composers sound so different from performance to performance as Schumann does – just in general – and early music practices are at their most controversial when they confront the traditions of Romantic music in the 1840s. This release contains the Spring Symphony, the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, and the original version of the Symphony No. 4. I must say I was worried. Last fall, I reviewed Holliger’s CD of the Mendelssohn Third and Fourth symphonies with the Musikkollegium Winterthur and found no special insights in the performance. Such interpretive points as there were faded into the flat acoustic supplied by the engineers. The notes talked a good game but […]

This CD represents a doubly happy surprise, then. The music simply leaps from the loudspeakers, full of energy, joy, originality, and sound of remarkable warmth. So far as I can determine, the WDR SO is playing in substantial numbers, if not perhaps full strength. But no Norrington twang invades the string passages. Nor do I hear melodies chopped up into Baroque bits and pieces. Although the notes are more informative about Schumann’s psychology than the conductor’s performance practice, Holliger clearly favors a fruitier, more original sound from the brasses than usual – and the occasional harder impact from timpani.

What struck me foremost is how the introduction to the Spring Symphony leaps off the page. Holliger takes it fast and explosively. He begins with the fanfare voiced down a harmonic third, where it avoids blattiness. (Otherwise, this is the usual version of the work.) As the Symphony proceeds, it strikes me Holliger has found a way of integrating tempos in the music as though it were a piano piece. The actual thrust and velocity we hear are quite normal, but contrasting passages seem more vivid and, where appropriate, more mercurial. Textures become magical in places you might not expect. Plodding boredom is avoided. And traditional criticism of Schumann’s orchestration is dealt a serious blow yet again.

Performances of this work can rise or fall with the great fanfare climax in the middle of the first movement. There is nothing worse than just letting it go by stiffly. It can be a litmus test for time-beaters. Here, I’m happy to say Holliger gives us a beautifully judged ritard, and the extra champagne fizz from his brasses makes it a joyous and triumphant experience. I couldn’t resist playing it over several times. The slow movement is the other standout here, flowing along more swiftly than we might expect but losing no sentiment along the way – and avoiding boredom in places where we might have been reluctant to admit its existence in the past.

The rest of the Symphony unfolds in the same lively manner, as does the remainder of the CD. The Overture, Scherzo, and Finale is given a traditional but zesty account. The slightly smaller scale of the piece reinforces the notion of piano music, beautifully orchestrated and performed. But if there is another revelation, I’d say it is to be found in the original version of the Fourth Symphony, which rounds out the CD. Holliger has discovered that the key to this work is to let the textures dictate the tempo. Other conductors often give the impression of trying to make a big piece out of it – whereupon they fall prey to bizarre holes in the orchestration and the many places where Schumann doesn’t support this idea with appropriate weight. But take the music on its own terms, the way Holliger does here, play a good bit of it for deft movement, and suddenly this early version leaps forth with charm. Ultimately, for sheer power, I favor the reorchestrated, nearly Brahmsian version we have all come to know and love. But here, for the first time, I understand how Brahms could have preferred the original.[…]

This release is of particular interest to me, for as one who was born, raised, and lived most of my life in San Francisco, I probably saw and heard Isaac Stern perform live in concert and recital more times than any other single artist. That, of course, was because of Stern’s close ties to the city in which he grew up and studied violin under Louis Persinger, one-time teacher of Menuhin, and with Naoum Blinder, the San Francisco Symphony’s then concertmaster. In 1936, Stern made his debut with the orchestra under the baton of Pierre Monteux, and though he would soon leave San Francisco to pursue a career as one of the world’s most recognized and sought-after violin virtuosos, he returned often to the city that had nurtured him to appear with the orchestra and in recital with his long-time accompanist, Alexander Zakin.

In 1945, Stern signed a recording contract with Columbia, an association that lasted uninterrupted for 40 years, one of the longest such artist/record company alliances in history. And during those years, Stern joined forces with famous conductors, orchestras, and chamber musicians to record the entire mainstream violin concerto and chamber music repertoire, and beyond, often more than once. If you grew up in the 1950s and began collecting records in junior high and high school, as I did, the chances are you grew up with Isaac Stern spinning on your turntables. He was Columbia’s intended rival to RCA’s Heifetz, and I readily admit that I learned much of the violin literature from Stern’s recordings before I discovered those by other celebrated artists.

These versions of the Tchaikovsky and Bartók concertos – let it be stipulated that we are dealing with Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2, the more famous one, so it needn’t be repeated on each subsequent reference – are not only previously unreleased, they’re claimed to be quite rare, as Stern was seldom recorded live. A 1959 Brahms Concerto with Monteux and the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood was captured live and released by West Hill Radio Archives, which, I presume is still available since it was reviewed by Richard Kaplan as recently as 35:3. But that was the Brahms, not the Tchaikovsky or the Bartók and while Stern revisited the Tchaikovsky on a number of occasions with different conductors and orchestras, his track record with the Bartók, as far as I know, is limited to his one and only other version, a commercial studio recording he made two years after this one, in 1958, with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. That, of course, makes this Audite release all the more valuable.

Of the Tchaikovsky – not counting this live performance – there are four others I’m aware of: (1) a 1949 recording with Alexander Hilsberg and the Philadelphia Orchestra; (2) a 1958 recording with the same orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, released in both mono (ML 5379) and stereo (MS 6062) and originally coupled with the Mendelssohn Concerto, but reissued a number of times in various sets and singles, including one coupled with the Sibelius Concerto; (3) a 1973 recording with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic; and (4) the violinist’s last, a 1978 recording with Rostropovich and the National Symphony Orchestra.

Let me deal with the Bartók first, since there’s only one other Stern version to compare it to, the aforementioned studio recording with Bernstein. Before proceeding, however, I need to voice a disclaimer. I’ve had Stern’s Bartók with Bernstein on LP for longer than I can remember, but I haven’t dusted it off and listened to it in ages because, frankly, I never liked it. The reason goes back to my opening paragraph, where I reminisce about seeing and hearing Stern live on numerous occasions in San Francisco, though never in the Bartók.

It was around that same time, however, that another San Francisco-bred violinist, who also returned regularly to the city to […]

The space of the church in Muri is well suited for this repertoire, and has been effectively used to give an impression of how this music could have been heard in the time it was written. [...] It is notable that technical means, such as extra microphones, to "balance artificially the singers, or violins, or middle voices were consciously rejected in order to remain true to the feeling of the space and to the many different resulting 'desired effects', in particular of the text."

The consistency of the playing of the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln is one of the many pleasures of this recording and of this ongoing series, which is giving listeners a chance to hear Grieg as a far more varied and wide-ranging composer than he appears to be to people who know only the Piano Concerto and excerpts from Peer Gynt.

Holliger’s well-thought-out, well-put-together performances bode well for this Audite series, and if the mix here of popular and less-known works continues in future volumes, this group of releases – like the Grieg series – will be a notable one indeed.

Finally, two historic concertos from the Lucerne Festival. From September 8,...

So this is a mixed bag, but taking the good with the bad the set is still worth hearing as a document of its time and place. The sonics are decent radio quality for the period, dynamically compressed but clear enough.