Vaclav Talich/Czech Philharmonic - 'Present at the creation.' An orchestra almost literally created to play Dvorak. It's possible that Talich got even the slight deviations from the score from Dvorak himself, and if he didn't, it's still in a style Dvorak would have recognized. By our standards it's a very romantic reading, and if you'll permit a heresy I'll say that it's objectively a bit too much, but Talich almost always 'cuts with the grain' in a way that draws attention to the music's inherent detail rather than to the interpretation. Listeners would have to wait until Harnoncourt to hear a reading of the opening where you feel so many nature effects, and unlike Harnoncourt, Talich has the sense to speed up when things get more turbulent. All throughout makes just about everyone else seem thoughtless in this score he's clearly meditated on for his entire life. The only trouble is that I don't think Dvorak meant anything quite this romantic. Without the consistent rhythmic pulse of a dance, it feels too earnest for Dvorak. Nevertheless, when Talich resolves to dance in the Scherzo, nobody, not even Sejna or Mackerras, can possibly match this expression organic as a Pilsner. A
Sejna/Czech Philharmonic - Even more than Talich, this is the unmatched authenticity of the great Czech tradition. It goes almost exactly at Dvorak's specified metronome markings, with an unmatched feel for Dvorak's folk dance rhythms with absolutely perfect rubato that only exists in the obvious transitional bars of the structure. Other orchestras make Dvorak something gruff - the Czech Philharmonic makes Dvorak a 19th century Mozart - leavening even the biggest climaxes with levitating agility, velvet warmth and spiritual grace with textures vivid enough to eat. The only problem is that there is a level of extremes missing on both ends of the dynamic spectrum which dampens the excitement, and cannot just be explained away by the relatively mediocre mono sound, but rather, the drama is simply provided by the performance going at such lightning motion. This is thing of life, an evolving organism. Just listen to that clarinet wail in the last movement.... This is true music. A+
Rafael Kubelik/Vienna Philharmonic - My dirty Dvorak secret. Kubelik is my favorite conductor, and yet I don't like most of his Dvorak. Kubelik is just too tolerant of imprecision and skewed balances for this composer whose every bar dances, a fact made worse by his recording a cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic - the world's least toe-tapping orchestra. Nevertheless (and I'm a minority of one here...) this is easily his best Dvorak 7, with rubato to capture every lyricism and every excitement - even if it's not nearly as natural as in his Mahler and Janacek. Even if Kubelik doesn't always keep them together, the understanding of the Viennese for Dvorak is far, far more innate than in Berlin. The scherzo is incredibly dirty, but it speaks pristine Czech. The Viennese have a bass heavy sound lacking in Prague that adds an entirely welcome darkness. Kubelik stretches the second movement around like Furtwanglerian clay, but the biggest problem, as always in Kubelik's performances, was in the finale. He plays it as a grim piece of romantic tone painting with a lot of rhetorical rubato, when the whole point is that it's a peppy march that houses grim content. Dvorak 7's rhythms smile while its harmonies frown. An experimental Dvorak 7 with interesting ideas, but ultimately, it just wasn't Kubelik's piece. Kubelik was never an 'Upper Case R' Romantic, but a romantic he very much was, and Dvorak was secretly a classicist. Generally speaking, Kubelik's greatest strengths were in grander composers than Dvorak, and even when Dvorak speaks grandly, he speaks with understatement. C
Pierre Monteux/London Symphony - I'm not one for Brahmsian Dvorak, but Monteux is Monteux. The LSO of those years was a crude instrument, but Monteux endows them with a sunlit Brahmsian glow which is entirely beyond the Czech Philharmonic's inestimably great capabilities. Monteux was 84 here, and here as everywhere he has no lack of vitality, with rubato all over the place so subtle you'd never notice if you weren't listening for it. The phrases simply rise and fall as though they were assembled with nature's fractals. There is so much gentleness and introspection which a less mature spirit could never find. I do wish Monteux would take a little less time basking in the beauty of the slow movement, but when the playing is this beautiful and overtone rich, you can forgive him. And just in case you think Monteux has lost a step, he explodes in the finale like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, and yet there's the same rubato, with the same knowledge of exactly how to apply it when the spirit changes to maximize lyricism, character, and excitement. There are times when I would rate this as the greatest ever performance, but there are just so many candidates. It's just another day at the office for a conductor who radiated such pure music that every performance is endowed with an ineffable spirituality. A
Antal Dorati/London Symphony - Dorati, as so often, belies his reputation for aggression, and so does the LSO. Hardly any conductor goes to greater trouble to honor Dvorak's impossibly specific dynamic markings, and reminds us just how much of this work is soft and lyrical even as Dorati, as ever, provides us the full measure of drama. It is a darker vision, full both of visciousness and fragility. Whether at forte or piano, and at the many gradations upon the spectrum, the orchestral balances ('chording') are so exquisitely impeccable. Has any conductor ever thought this deeply about the analytic side of this symphony and made heard its many countermelodies, accompanying motifs, crossrhythms, odd textures? The sudden dramatic tempi changes in the first movement coda are an awkward misfire, but otherwise, what is on hand here is so exquisite. It never seems self-conscious because Dorati balances this fastidious lyricism with white hot rage in the dramatic passages. One of the most poetic Dvoraks ever set down, radiating a deeply unhappy spirit. A-
George Szell/Cleveland Orchestra - A lot of people rate this the greatest Dvorak 7. The 2nd movement IS the greatest set down, with rubato that is.... well it's a revelation. Nobody mixes the pastoral and turbulence like Szell. The rest is not on such a level. The last movement is empty virtuosity that does not even feel exciting amid all that gruffness. It's generally a very aggressive performance that, sadly, has dull sound which doesn't even let its excitement stand on its own merits. It's certainly not bad, the clarity of the Clevelanders is as always a marvel, but as great as alleged it isn't. B-
Leonard Bernstein/New York Philharmonic - Lenny just doesn't really get it. He loves the melody of course, but he doesn't get the irony between song and dance. One just has the sense Bernstein thinks this is a generic romantic work by an unspecified composer - full of big tunes and loud sounds, but subtlety was not exactly Lenny's thing. The more grandiloquent, the better he got, but winking intimacy like Dvorak? D
Karel Ancerl/Czech Philharmonic -
Suitner/Staatskapelle Berlin - The dirty secret of Dvorak is that Suitner made the best cycle, capturing Dvorak's mixture of song and dance better than any Slavic conductor. 7 is not the absolute highlight (5 and 8), the last movement is simply too slow and sober to capture its turbulence. But the mixture of linear clarity and warmth is so like the Czech Philharmonic, and Suitner makes absolutely clear that Dvorak is the great heir to the Mozart and Schubert he also conducts so well. B
Constantin Silvestri/Vienna Philharmonic
Carlo Maria Giulini/London Philharmonic - Once again, I don't like Brahmsian Dvorak, but of course, Giulini's gentle humanity makes it mostly work. Giulini is characteristically slow, and crucially does not let the bass or brass stint on the dramatic weight. Nevertheless, the prevailing spirit, as so often in CMG, is elegiac and glowing, with the most refulgent, overtone laden string sound you will ever hear in this work - including Monteux's LSO. It is particularly moving in the slow movement, too often forgotten but which is the crux of the whole work. It's impossible to overlook here, he stretches it to Brucknerian proportions, making the kinship with Bruckner 6 unmistakable. It's too self-consciously profound to be ideal, this is Giulini after all, but Giulini uses every instant of that extra time for extra weight and passion. Whether this is Dvorak or Brahms or Bruckner, it is so profoundly moving. The problem is, of course, in the later movements. Giulini never passes up an opportunity to sing and passes up every opportunity to dance. Getting Giulini to dance properly is about as likely as getting Pavarotti. No amount of beautiful orchestral glow in the trio can cover up the fact that this is a conductor who doesn't want to have fun. Giulini's romantic splendor is not a substitute for Dvorak's grim ironies. In Giulini, everything means exactly what it says it means. B
Kubelik/Berlin Philharmonic
Colin Davis/Concertgebouw The other sui generis performance that captures Dvorak's turbulence as no one else does. The dynamic contrasts are enormous, the sound of the Concertgebouw always alternating between warmth and fury. No performance is as great at showing Dvorak's ironic mix of dance and rage. The Concertgebouw, ever one of the clearest orchestras, displays a very Czech incision, with staccatos that are absolutely together. Few scherzi 'cook' like this - like a jazz band taken wing. The second movement, so clearly recalling Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, has only felt this warm under Giulini. So intense is Davis's involvement that occasionally sections of the Concertgebouw a very little bit of trouble keeping up, but otherwise, it never gets better than this. A+
Rafael Kubelik/Bavarian Radio
Levine/Chicago Symphony
Vaclav Neumann/Czech Philharmonic A-
Mariss Jansons/Oslo Philharmonic
Christoph von Dohnanyi/Cleveland Orchestra: Look, I'm president of the Dohnanyi fanclub. At this point I think he and Mariss Jansons are the greatest conductors I ever heard live, and it's a sad commentary that people find him heartless. Fastidious he may be, but it's because he's one of those rare musicians who organizes music on a quantum level, and unlike, say, George Szell, consistently uses his technical/intellectual abilities to overlay his musicmaking with sincere expression. Emotionally though, he is on a such a more sophisticated, specific level than most 'expressive' conductors. Dohnanyi is musicmaking for adults. This isn't just a conductor who thinks about where to play piano or crescendo, but which instruments, the exact sort of bowstroke of the strings and breath from the winds, and how every one of them will affect the music forty minutes later. That sort of depth is so much rarer than you think, and rarer still is a conductor who does it without vitiating the emotional content. Everything is thought through here - harmonies, dynamics, balances, color... with rubato perfectly calibrated to maximize the momentum. The only problem is that this is Dvorak - the world's most artless composer, who spontaneously erupts with melody and rhythm. So there are much better Dvorak 7s, no matter what Hurwitz says. It deconstructs Dvorak to its bolts, and then reassembles it piece by piece. Every line and chord weighted, every sound scrubbed squeaky clean but expressing generic character. The skill by which Dohnanyi does it is uncanny, but except for his red-blooded finale, it's still not Dvorak. Give us Davis a hundred times before this. Davis leads with instinct, not intellect. This approach is perfect for earlier romanticism, but Dvorak 7 is not the Schumann in which Dohnanyi has no peer, and playing him with an accent from 1840 only represses the work. Along with Davis, Dohnanyi gave us the greatest of all Dvorak 6's, but for its many virtues, this is not on so lofty a plain. C+
Wolfgang Sawallisch/Philadelphia Orchestra
Harnoncourt/Royal Concertgebouw This reading has things so far beyond any other. Look at the score and watch how many dynamics Harnoncourt hon B-
Ivan Fischer/Budapest Festival:
Mackerras/Philharmonia: Sir Charles will always have a chamber of my heart, but my estimation of him has gone ever so slightly down. The pandemic aged this listener. Snap and swing don't have quite the appeal they used to, and Sir Charles's deliberately lean palette can occasionally be as short of expression as it is long on excitement. Mackerras will always be a first class Dvorak conductor, Dvorak's truest musical grandson among maestros. Particularly in the Scherzo, there are things beyond just about everybody else (that flute ornament!). Mackerras understands what it means to 'be' Czech music beyond even what most Czechs do, and clearly, Mackerras has studied with Talich - either him or his recording, because there's nor a single effecy on his recording Talich didn't do first, but in (relatively) much better sound. One problem is that the Philharmonia strings sound surprisingly small and scrappy, but the bigger problem is that Mackerras is clearly going for a very 'Czech', 'folky' Dvorak 7, full of Mackerras's eternally vibrant rhythms and 'fun'. There is no mistaking the irony of such peppy rhythms housing such grim content, but at the same time, the Philharmonia doesn't particularly understand what he's doing - they're just playing another job and Mackerras does not refine them to reflect his conception the way Monteux or Dorati would. B
John Eliot Gardiner/Royal Stockholm Philharmonic
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