Underrated Classical Musicians: Vaclav Talich

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZb2GEUmDPQ

I don't think listeners appreciate just how extraordinary it is to have Talich doing the Slavonic Dances on video. It's a full 70 minutes of Vaclav Talich visual footage. Talich has to be the closest Nikisch pupil and associate to live well into the recorded era, so this is the best evidence we have for what Nikisch's conducting technique might have been like in practice. It is simultaneously as minimalist as Reiner's and as enthusiastic as Bernstein's. And there's no question, the way the hands sometimes gallop one after the other bare a remarkable resemblance in technique to his most famous pupil: Charles Mackerras.

We have no idea how Talich conducted Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and a dozen other pillar composers of the German repertoire from a conductor who was once Konzertmeister of the Berliner Philharmoniker and Nikisch's assistant at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. But even with all that Deutscher biltung, he devoted himself to Czech music heart and soul. 28 separate Dvorak recordings, and even if we have no idea what he was like in Beethoven's 9th, we know exactly how he did Suk's Asrael and Novak's In the Tatras. I cannot imagine those records were bestsellers anywhere outside of Prague's lending libraries, but Talich clearly thought these works were important enough to document, and that is the mark of a musician who cares more about music than about his career.

My sense is that if we had Talich in the standard repertoire (we can thank Zdenek Nejedly for its absence... too long to get into here...), we would be mentioning him at very least alongside Walter and Klemperer as among the greatest of the great. There are a lot of Mackerras and Ancerl qualities of rhythmic vitality and wide dynamics, but there is a much more natural flow than either is gotten by Ancerl or Sir Charles (apparently 'Charlie Metronome' was a nickname given to him by London musicians). Talich's rubato is rarely ever excessive, but it's always there. If you didn't know the music already, you'd never notice it.

But if his live 1939 Ma Vlast is any indication, people might even mention him in the same breath as Furtwangler and Toscanini as the singular figure to whom everyone else must cede the curtain call. As it is, there is at least enough documentation to conclude that Talich is well up the pantheon's steps. Just look here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXFR_amAZIM