What a terrible injustice has been done to Koussevitzky. Here we have the conductor who built the modern Boston Symphony, commissioned and most often premiered some dozen of literally the greatest scores of the twentieth century and dozens of scarcely less wonderful works, and is spoken of by those who regularly heard him live with the kind of terms music lovers usually reserve for the elite within the elite. And yet, to the public, Koussevitzky's greatest achievement is Leonard Bernstein.
This state of affairs that is at least beginning to be remedied as live broadcasts begin to be released in tolerable sound. What is great about so many musicians who found the greatest success in America - Toscanini, Hofmann, Heifetz, Feuermann et al. - are mostly quantitative factors that the microphone can capture with little difficulty like rhythmic incision and dynamic range. But a mercurial musician like Koussevitzky depends on the urgency of the live moment to convey the enormity of his passion.
When you begin to appreciate what Koussevitzky could do in concert, a forgotten giant emerges who could play completely new music by Prokofiev or Copland or Shostakovich with understanding of the idiom equal to conductors fifty years later, who gave performances of modern classics like Sibelius, Debussy, and Strauss, that in some cases have still never been equalled (would that we had some Mahler from him...).
And then, of course, there's all that Tchaikovsky. This is a very different, and I believe more authentic, Tchaikovsky than the Mravinsky/Svetlanov Soviet Tchaikovsky hailing from a brutalized Russia, cut off from old Europe at the root. Koussevitzky's Tchaikovsky hails from the world of Tolstoy and Turgenev; you can still hear the French being spoken in the drawing rooms through all that rubato and espressivo.
Most music lovers would probably choose his 1944 Tchaikovsky 5 as his ultimate Tchaikovsky recording, perhaps I would have too until I heard this live Tchaikovsky 4 from 1949, the final year of Koussevitzky's tenure in Boston, which doesn't just blow that performance out of the water, but nearly any other Tchaikovsky performance. Koussevitzky and his orchestra must have been refining this interpretation nearly every year for a quarter-century. Every time I listen to it I'm newly astonished - the passion, the detail, the spontaneity, the rightness - even when Koussevitzky clearly goes against the score, the wrongness is clearly right. This is true authenticity.
Koussevitzky's La Mer is La Mer as you've never heard it before - so much closer to the volatility of the Sea Episodes from Peter Grimes (a work, of course, which he commissioned...). Koussevitzky was as masterful a colorist as any orchestral virtuoso, but unlike certain others (...) it's not just color for its own sake. For once, La Mer does not sound just beautiful surface, but an eerie work about an awesome body of water with lethal undertow.
One could draw similarly purple prosed metaphors for what he could do in Sibelius 6 (a never excelled performance to my knowledge) or Sibelius 2, or in Appalachian Spring and El Salon Mexico, or in either Romeo and Juliet from Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev, or the Scythian and Lt. Kije Suites, or Rachmaninov's Second and Isle of the Dead, or Also Sprach Zarathustra and Death and Transfiguration, these are all performances the equal of anything done later, and cases I'll link to below, may excel anything done later.
Toscanini lived on in radio broadcasts, and Stokowski simply lived forever, and both lived on in their recordings, but Koussevitzky was, at least in my opinion, the best of the three giants in early-century America: neither as wooden as Toscanini nor as wayward as Stokowski, and yet was so quickly forgotten. Perhaps that's the nature of performers, whose magic dies with them, but with the exception of Bernstein, Koussevitzky's particular magic truly died with him. Later American orchestras and their conductors took on the more quantifiable qualities of Toscanini as their model. This supposedly freest of countries had orchestras in every city who often sounded like military dictatorships. The great maestros who were truly free spirits usually seem to have a hard time in America (Klemperer, Mitropoulos, Kubelik, Barbirolli, Eschenbach...). But it's relieving to know that once upon a time, the most important and distinguished conductor in the country (and that's just what he was) was a musician in whom music truly breathed.
Three Unsurpassable Koussevitzky Recordings and but for the sound, never equalled.
Tchaikovsky 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUDh4-DWzL4&fbclid=IwAR3RRU4YswKARIpPcD-VRxdYAk73nrHrFpui6W1T_vpjEcJ9qhMQ5lT7R9E
La Mer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrzHhYH_mtM
Sibelius 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsVfbI7_T74
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