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Pristine Classical: Toscanini's 1944 Fidelio, plus free download of his 1935 Salzburg Fidelio
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Andrew Rose
May 25, 2012, 10:27:37 AM5/25/12
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Toscanini's Fidelio: "daring, fierce, mesmerizing"
And now in fabulous sound quality in these new XR transfers
PACO 077 BEETHOVEN Fidelio
Recorded 1944/45
Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Andrew Rose
BEETHOVEN Fidelio
NBC Symphony Orchestra
Arturo Toscanini conductor
Jan Peerce (tenor) - Florestano
Rose Bampton (soprano) - Leonora
Nicola Moscona (bass) - Don Fernando
Herbert Janssen (bass) - Don Pizarro
Sidor Belarsky (bass) - Rocco
Eleanor Steber (soprano) - Marcellina
Joseph Laderoute (tenor) - Giacchino
Web page: http://tinyurl.com/PACO077w
Short notes
The nature of much of Toscanini's work during the later decades of his
life, dedicated as it was from the late 1930s to the NBC Symphony
Orchestra and their many radio broadcasts, left little room for
Toscanini the opera conductor.
Yet his appearance conducting Fidelio at the 1935 Salzburg Festival was
a sensation, described by some as the greatest operatic concert of the
century. A part of it was captured, in a crackly, hissy, shortwave radio
broadcast, which we're giving away as a free download.
But not only that, we've taken his "concert" version of Fidelio,
prepared for two special radio broadcasts as part of his NBC Beethoven
Festival of late 1944 by omitting the dialogue, and remastered it to
bring out amazingly high standards of sound quality. "In its raw,
unvarnished way, it is daring, fierce, mesmerizing, to be heard when
you're feeling strong of spirit and mind." - Gramophone, 1992
Notes on this recording
The broadcasts from which this recording originated were transmitted a
week apart, and the normal mid-programme talk was omitted in order to
fit each act into a one-hour slot. Also omitted was almost all dialogue,
with the opera staged more as a concert piece than a staged work. An
error by soprano Rose Bampton in the Abscheulicher led to a re-recording
of this at an RCA Toscanini recording session in Carnegie Hall the
following June 14th, and it is this version which RCA subsequently used
in their releases of the recording - we have stayed with this version
for our issue.
The sound quality of the original recording was adequate, but huge
strides forward have been made with the application of 32-bit XR
remastering, which has particularly favoured the solo voices here.
Although the frequency range tops out at around 10kHz, there is plenty
of 'air' and brightness to be heard, albeit with a degree of background
hiss at times. I was also able, for the first time, to iron out some
quite pronounced pitch variations caused by the original recording
equipment drifting up and down in speed.
Andrew Rose
Review 1992
This isn't music-making for the timid, used to the sanitized, faultless
performances on your everyday CD. In its raw, unvarnished way, it is
daring, fierce, mesmerizing, to be heard when you're feeling strong of
spirit and mind. Toscanini views Fidelio and indeed Leonore No. 3 as
stark drama, devoid of sentimentality. The winds leap from the speakers,
the brass blare ferociously as the old wizard tells a story of the
struggle for freedom in a year when, even in the United States, events
far away in Europe must have felt very present. In achieving his end, he
demands and mostly receives superhuman efforts from his charges: speeds
are nervously fast, rhythms alert, as though the events were happening
in the conductor's presence. The wind section is prominent in a way we
have since heard from Norrington in Beethoven, indubitably influenced by
his predecessor. An occasional untidiness is a price worth paying for
such an edge-of-your-seat interpretation. Inevitably the epithet
'hard-driven' has been used about the performance: a visionary
conductor, inclined to the dictatorial, demands much from his performers
and listeners. No compromises can be made. We won't always want to hear
the score done like this; once in a way, it is cleansing and salutary.
According to Harvey Sachs's notes, Rose Bampton once said that Toscanini
declared "the words came first and that the music was composed
afterwards. So we had to understand the deepest significance of the
words in order to be expressive." Certainly all the singers enunciate
with the utmost clarity, to a fault in the case of the inadequate Rocco,
whose German is poor. Bampton herself, although no Lehmann (Toscanini's
Salzburg interpreter) in matters of voice or diction, is a determined
and dedicated Leonore, whose "Abscheulicher" comes from a later session
and is the best part of her performanceelsewhere she is sometimes off
form vocally. The young Steber is a lovely Marzelline. Although not
one's ideal Florestan, Peerce sings with his customary honesty and
technical security. Janssen may not have the incisive bass-baritone for
Pizarro, but he projects his part with biting venom. Nobody else makes
much of an impression and the chorus is no more than adequate-Robert
Shaw hadn't yet arrived on the scene-but the sum is greater than the parts.
Much as one may regret the break for Leonore No. 3, the performance is
so electrifying as to silence criticism, but exception has to be taken
to the complete absence of dialogue, an essential part of this score.
The digital tapes, made from NBC acetates rather than RCA originals,
have a little more breadth and reliability than previous transfers to
LP. In any case, reservations about sound should deter nobody from
sampling this unique experience.
A.B., Gramophone October 1992
Review 1956
Three names - Beethoven, Fidelio, and Toscanini - will be enough for
many people and will ask no more. Though they may find the following of
interest.
The new Fidelio goes onto four LP sides, as opposed to the six occupied
by the previous complete version (reviewed by A.R. in May 1954).
"Complete" in the sense that room is found for the Leonora No. 3,
without which we should probably feel cheated, though it really has no
business herewhile the spoken dialogue, except in the melodrames of the
dungeon scene, is cut-giving an effect to anyone who did not know the
work that this was an opera of continuous music and not an opera
corrtique, as it properly is. Moods are sometimes hereby made to change
too rapidly; but one concedes the omissions, in the interest of
time-space-money. The interpolated Leonora No. 3 starts the last side
and is "scrolled off", so that it may be left out if one wishes.
Otherwise the new set is not scrolled at all, as the Vienna performance
was, so that it is difficult to pick out individual "numbers", should
you wish to.
"New" is also a relative term meaning: publication over here. Actually
this Toscanini version, made up from two broadcasts of 12 years ago, is
older in time than Furtwangler's, which was made just after the
inaugural gala seasion at the new Vienna opera and with the cast and
orchestra which had performed it on the opening night. These discs get
more on to each side-the first side for instance concludes with the
little march, which in the Vienna set is already the second band of the
second side, and so on. Also, Toscanini's speeds are appreciably faster
in many instances.
Judging between the two is not at all easy; to this opera, unique, one
brings a special set of expectations and very varying responses. Music
which is alternately sublime and homely, heroic and simple almost to the
point of being humdrum, establishes a whole phalanx of contradictory
postulates. Is one to insist on heroism and make allowances for the fact
that heroes find it hard to wear clogs? Or insist first on the homely,
the simple and the natural sounding and make corresponding allowance for
"ordinary" characters dealing somewhat unheroically with the sublime?
Comparing these two versions is made further difficult by the actual
variability of one issue being taken from broadcast tapes.
In a very general way, I would say that those who already have the grand
Furtw�ngler set, with its somewhat overstrained Leonora (Martha M�dl)
but generally very authentically German sounding cast, should hesitate
before abandoning it in favour of the Toscanini with a cast not so
noticeably better, at least as far as Germanic authenticity goes. Rose
Bampton enunciates German clearly and plausibly, but she acts with her
voice less well than M�dl : there is less Innigkeit, less of the heroism
we remember from Lotte Lehmann's interpretation. On the other hand her
voice sounds better placed and less out of condition than M�dl's; the
top is free and has a real soprano ring (as in the allegro of
"Abscheulicher"). The veteran Janssen, too, sounds better than Edelmann
in the villain's formidable aria-though there the quality of the
recording is better in the Vienna set. In the matter of cast otherwise I
would somewhat prefer the Vienna soloists, though the N.B.C. chorus in
the ultimate pans of joy sound as if they had more deeper reserves of
exuberant joy.
Furtw�ngler's handling of the score was masterly and the recording was
all very much of a piece: Toscanini's is also masterly, but the recorded
quality varies from bright to just faintly distorted. And there are one
or two curious smudges in the ensemble, as if the maestro's titanic
spontaneity had taken the players off their guard (one such occurs in
the menacing orchestral passage which ushers in Florestan's "Welch
dunkel . . " in the dungeon scene). Then there are some shifts of level
hard to account for: for instance the Prisoners' Chorus seems to have
been inserted afterwards like a gusset in a coat (and it will be
recalled that it did not make its true theatrical effect in the Vienna
set either). After it is over, we jump back to the soloists, like a
sudden close-up in a film. Again towards the end of the dungeon scene
where in the theatre the mounting excitement comes out at you in a
rising tide, the performance here seems, on the contrary, to recede like
a camera slowly panning backwards to take in an ever widening (but more
distant) scene.
But, and it is an over-riding "but" for a great many people, Toscanini
at many points brings an exhilaration to the music which is, quite
simply, more purely thrilling than the stately and deeply considered
interpretation by Furtw�ngler. I suggest that you try, one against the
other, the trio beginning "Mein S�nnchen..." and play through each
version from there to the end of Scene 1. It is not that Toscanini is a
fraction brisker; it is that the ideal concept of the music and the
performance of it suddenly fuses into one and the same thing. One is no
longer conscious of music being made; it is the thing itself, and as the
short orchestral postlude lets the pressure down again, one resumes
one's ordinary breath rate exactly as one does in a theatre at the fall
of a cutain on some scene which has burned you up like oxygen and made
you forget everything about yourself and where you are. The scene, which
brings the American players and singers to full incandescence, is an
example of Toscanini's unique deamon (and unique is the keyword for this
opera). For it, and some other like wonders, you may be prepared to
jetison the steadier and finally less obtrusive qualities of Furtw�ngler
and the honourable Vienna gala cast.
I should make it clear that the American cast "copes" magnificently -
however much one may feel them out of touch with the German character of
the dramatic element and the declamatory German style. Both Peerce and
Miss Bampton are marvellously on top of "0 namenlose Freude" even at
this pace, and for once Toscanini never seems to be overdriving anyone.
It must indeed have been a thrilling couple of broadcasts and the issue
is one well worth making, possibly of buying, certainly of comparing
with the fine six-sided Furtwangler performance from Vienna. That either
version makes a quite wonderful impression is of course only to be
expected. us free
P.H.-W., The Gramophone October 1956
MP3 Sample No. 1 Duett - Jetzt, Sch�tzcvhen: http://tinyurl.com/PACO077
And now in fabulous sound quality in these new XR transfers
PACO 077 BEETHOVEN Fidelio
Recorded 1944/45
Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Andrew Rose
BEETHOVEN Fidelio
NBC Symphony Orchestra
Arturo Toscanini conductor
Jan Peerce (tenor) - Florestano
Rose Bampton (soprano) - Leonora
Nicola Moscona (bass) - Don Fernando
Herbert Janssen (bass) - Don Pizarro
Sidor Belarsky (bass) - Rocco
Eleanor Steber (soprano) - Marcellina
Joseph Laderoute (tenor) - Giacchino
Web page: http://tinyurl.com/PACO077w
Short notes
The nature of much of Toscanini's work during the later decades of his
life, dedicated as it was from the late 1930s to the NBC Symphony
Orchestra and their many radio broadcasts, left little room for
Toscanini the opera conductor.
Yet his appearance conducting Fidelio at the 1935 Salzburg Festival was
a sensation, described by some as the greatest operatic concert of the
century. A part of it was captured, in a crackly, hissy, shortwave radio
broadcast, which we're giving away as a free download.
But not only that, we've taken his "concert" version of Fidelio,
prepared for two special radio broadcasts as part of his NBC Beethoven
Festival of late 1944 by omitting the dialogue, and remastered it to
bring out amazingly high standards of sound quality. "In its raw,
unvarnished way, it is daring, fierce, mesmerizing, to be heard when
you're feeling strong of spirit and mind." - Gramophone, 1992
Notes on this recording
The broadcasts from which this recording originated were transmitted a
week apart, and the normal mid-programme talk was omitted in order to
fit each act into a one-hour slot. Also omitted was almost all dialogue,
with the opera staged more as a concert piece than a staged work. An
error by soprano Rose Bampton in the Abscheulicher led to a re-recording
of this at an RCA Toscanini recording session in Carnegie Hall the
following June 14th, and it is this version which RCA subsequently used
in their releases of the recording - we have stayed with this version
for our issue.
The sound quality of the original recording was adequate, but huge
strides forward have been made with the application of 32-bit XR
remastering, which has particularly favoured the solo voices here.
Although the frequency range tops out at around 10kHz, there is plenty
of 'air' and brightness to be heard, albeit with a degree of background
hiss at times. I was also able, for the first time, to iron out some
quite pronounced pitch variations caused by the original recording
equipment drifting up and down in speed.
Andrew Rose
Review 1992
This isn't music-making for the timid, used to the sanitized, faultless
performances on your everyday CD. In its raw, unvarnished way, it is
daring, fierce, mesmerizing, to be heard when you're feeling strong of
spirit and mind. Toscanini views Fidelio and indeed Leonore No. 3 as
stark drama, devoid of sentimentality. The winds leap from the speakers,
the brass blare ferociously as the old wizard tells a story of the
struggle for freedom in a year when, even in the United States, events
far away in Europe must have felt very present. In achieving his end, he
demands and mostly receives superhuman efforts from his charges: speeds
are nervously fast, rhythms alert, as though the events were happening
in the conductor's presence. The wind section is prominent in a way we
have since heard from Norrington in Beethoven, indubitably influenced by
his predecessor. An occasional untidiness is a price worth paying for
such an edge-of-your-seat interpretation. Inevitably the epithet
'hard-driven' has been used about the performance: a visionary
conductor, inclined to the dictatorial, demands much from his performers
and listeners. No compromises can be made. We won't always want to hear
the score done like this; once in a way, it is cleansing and salutary.
According to Harvey Sachs's notes, Rose Bampton once said that Toscanini
declared "the words came first and that the music was composed
afterwards. So we had to understand the deepest significance of the
words in order to be expressive." Certainly all the singers enunciate
with the utmost clarity, to a fault in the case of the inadequate Rocco,
whose German is poor. Bampton herself, although no Lehmann (Toscanini's
Salzburg interpreter) in matters of voice or diction, is a determined
and dedicated Leonore, whose "Abscheulicher" comes from a later session
and is the best part of her performanceelsewhere she is sometimes off
form vocally. The young Steber is a lovely Marzelline. Although not
one's ideal Florestan, Peerce sings with his customary honesty and
technical security. Janssen may not have the incisive bass-baritone for
Pizarro, but he projects his part with biting venom. Nobody else makes
much of an impression and the chorus is no more than adequate-Robert
Shaw hadn't yet arrived on the scene-but the sum is greater than the parts.
Much as one may regret the break for Leonore No. 3, the performance is
so electrifying as to silence criticism, but exception has to be taken
to the complete absence of dialogue, an essential part of this score.
The digital tapes, made from NBC acetates rather than RCA originals,
have a little more breadth and reliability than previous transfers to
LP. In any case, reservations about sound should deter nobody from
sampling this unique experience.
A.B., Gramophone October 1992
Review 1956
Three names - Beethoven, Fidelio, and Toscanini - will be enough for
many people and will ask no more. Though they may find the following of
interest.
The new Fidelio goes onto four LP sides, as opposed to the six occupied
by the previous complete version (reviewed by A.R. in May 1954).
"Complete" in the sense that room is found for the Leonora No. 3,
without which we should probably feel cheated, though it really has no
business herewhile the spoken dialogue, except in the melodrames of the
dungeon scene, is cut-giving an effect to anyone who did not know the
work that this was an opera of continuous music and not an opera
corrtique, as it properly is. Moods are sometimes hereby made to change
too rapidly; but one concedes the omissions, in the interest of
time-space-money. The interpolated Leonora No. 3 starts the last side
and is "scrolled off", so that it may be left out if one wishes.
Otherwise the new set is not scrolled at all, as the Vienna performance
was, so that it is difficult to pick out individual "numbers", should
you wish to.
"New" is also a relative term meaning: publication over here. Actually
this Toscanini version, made up from two broadcasts of 12 years ago, is
older in time than Furtwangler's, which was made just after the
inaugural gala seasion at the new Vienna opera and with the cast and
orchestra which had performed it on the opening night. These discs get
more on to each side-the first side for instance concludes with the
little march, which in the Vienna set is already the second band of the
second side, and so on. Also, Toscanini's speeds are appreciably faster
in many instances.
Judging between the two is not at all easy; to this opera, unique, one
brings a special set of expectations and very varying responses. Music
which is alternately sublime and homely, heroic and simple almost to the
point of being humdrum, establishes a whole phalanx of contradictory
postulates. Is one to insist on heroism and make allowances for the fact
that heroes find it hard to wear clogs? Or insist first on the homely,
the simple and the natural sounding and make corresponding allowance for
"ordinary" characters dealing somewhat unheroically with the sublime?
Comparing these two versions is made further difficult by the actual
variability of one issue being taken from broadcast tapes.
In a very general way, I would say that those who already have the grand
Furtw�ngler set, with its somewhat overstrained Leonora (Martha M�dl)
but generally very authentically German sounding cast, should hesitate
before abandoning it in favour of the Toscanini with a cast not so
noticeably better, at least as far as Germanic authenticity goes. Rose
Bampton enunciates German clearly and plausibly, but she acts with her
voice less well than M�dl : there is less Innigkeit, less of the heroism
we remember from Lotte Lehmann's interpretation. On the other hand her
voice sounds better placed and less out of condition than M�dl's; the
top is free and has a real soprano ring (as in the allegro of
"Abscheulicher"). The veteran Janssen, too, sounds better than Edelmann
in the villain's formidable aria-though there the quality of the
recording is better in the Vienna set. In the matter of cast otherwise I
would somewhat prefer the Vienna soloists, though the N.B.C. chorus in
the ultimate pans of joy sound as if they had more deeper reserves of
exuberant joy.
Furtw�ngler's handling of the score was masterly and the recording was
all very much of a piece: Toscanini's is also masterly, but the recorded
quality varies from bright to just faintly distorted. And there are one
or two curious smudges in the ensemble, as if the maestro's titanic
spontaneity had taken the players off their guard (one such occurs in
the menacing orchestral passage which ushers in Florestan's "Welch
dunkel . . " in the dungeon scene). Then there are some shifts of level
hard to account for: for instance the Prisoners' Chorus seems to have
been inserted afterwards like a gusset in a coat (and it will be
recalled that it did not make its true theatrical effect in the Vienna
set either). After it is over, we jump back to the soloists, like a
sudden close-up in a film. Again towards the end of the dungeon scene
where in the theatre the mounting excitement comes out at you in a
rising tide, the performance here seems, on the contrary, to recede like
a camera slowly panning backwards to take in an ever widening (but more
distant) scene.
But, and it is an over-riding "but" for a great many people, Toscanini
at many points brings an exhilaration to the music which is, quite
simply, more purely thrilling than the stately and deeply considered
interpretation by Furtw�ngler. I suggest that you try, one against the
other, the trio beginning "Mein S�nnchen..." and play through each
version from there to the end of Scene 1. It is not that Toscanini is a
fraction brisker; it is that the ideal concept of the music and the
performance of it suddenly fuses into one and the same thing. One is no
longer conscious of music being made; it is the thing itself, and as the
short orchestral postlude lets the pressure down again, one resumes
one's ordinary breath rate exactly as one does in a theatre at the fall
of a cutain on some scene which has burned you up like oxygen and made
you forget everything about yourself and where you are. The scene, which
brings the American players and singers to full incandescence, is an
example of Toscanini's unique deamon (and unique is the keyword for this
opera). For it, and some other like wonders, you may be prepared to
jetison the steadier and finally less obtrusive qualities of Furtw�ngler
and the honourable Vienna gala cast.
I should make it clear that the American cast "copes" magnificently -
however much one may feel them out of touch with the German character of
the dramatic element and the declamatory German style. Both Peerce and
Miss Bampton are marvellously on top of "0 namenlose Freude" even at
this pace, and for once Toscanini never seems to be overdriving anyone.
It must indeed have been a thrilling couple of broadcasts and the issue
is one well worth making, possibly of buying, certainly of comparing
with the fine six-sided Furtwangler performance from Vienna. That either
version makes a quite wonderful impression is of course only to be
expected. us free
P.H.-W., The Gramophone October 1956
MP3 Sample No. 1 Duett - Jetzt, Sch�tzcvhen: http://tinyurl.com/PACO077
Message has been deleted
t.j.l...@googlemail.com
May 25, 2012, 11:06:22 AM5/25/12
to
Isn't the suriviving Salzburg Fidelio from 1936 not 1935? Specifically Aug 16, 1936. There's even a picture of the transcription disc online here:
http://historicaopera.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/fidelio-salzburg-1936.html
so far as I know there's only one extract with Lehmann and Toscanini in Fidelio from Salzburg, even though the 1935 performance you mention was broadcast as well.
http://historicaopera.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/fidelio-salzburg-1936.html
so far as I know there's only one extract with Lehmann and Toscanini in Fidelio from Salzburg, even though the 1935 performance you mention was broadcast as well.
Andrew Rose
May 25, 2012, 11:46:40 AM5/25/12
to
Andrew Rose
May 25, 2012, 11:58:31 AM5/25/12
to
error that's been repeated on a number of occasions since it first
slipped it...
Message has been deleted
Andrew Fell
May 25, 2012, 4:21:37 PM5/25/12
to
On May 25, 5:58 pm, Andrew Rose <and...@pristineaudio.com> wrote:
> On 25/05/2012 17:46, Andrew Rose wrote:
>
> On 25/05/2012 17:46, Andrew Rose wrote:
>
expect it of you.
[Again wondering why Mark Obert-Thorn would associate himself with
this guy.]
Mike
May 25, 2012, 5:55:33 PM5/25/12
to
Fantastic-I need to download this. I think I've worn the digits off my
CDs the way I ground down a couple of LP sets in the old days. The
only significance of the date mistake (now corrected) is that it makes
it easier to identify those whose comments here are always ignorable.
CDs the way I ground down a couple of LP sets in the old days. The
only significance of the date mistake (now corrected) is that it makes
it easier to identify those whose comments here are always ignorable.
Message has been deleted
0 new messages