Covid restrictions in China do not mean what they mean here.

 If the Chinese covid numbers really and truly are lower than in the US (and occasionally I have my doubts), it's because of China's zero covid policy. The zero covid policy means absolute quarantine. No one is permitted to leave their houses, sometimes including the emergency workers who are supposed to respond, from a date sprang on the population until a date the ban is arbitrarily lifted. Anyone who violates the zero covid policy will be captured on China's billion street cameras and could result in very long term prison terms. Any criticism or record of abusive repression is immediately erased by the government from the internet.

All of this of course is happening while Xi Xinping is consolidating power to become the lifetime dictator of China and is militarizing the country to an unprecedented extent. The Chinese people are at least as scared of war with us as we are of war with them, and yet, where are our anti-war voices? Where is our solidarity? Where are the protests against a power that can abuse and has abused more human rights than any government on earth?

The answer, of course, is nowhere, because that involves admitting that someone can abuse human rights who isn't backed by the US government.

Randy Newman's Faust

 My favorite American singer-songwriter made a musical version of Faust in the 90s that nobody knows about. One day I'll do a long piece on my weird love of Randy Newman - a love that I pretty much have all to myself. Everybody but me finds him insipid. I'm in that weird substrata of the Anglophone world that thinks he's something close to a genius.

Let's face it.... the level of musical and poetic invention in most pop music is not great, to say nothing of the singing... The difference between Randy Newman and the rest of them is

1. The quasi-operatic pretensions of rock are gone. The pretension is not particularly endearing when opera does it either, and Randy Newman strips away the varnish. He is about as far from a 'rock god' as a rockstar gets.Once you leave the production and high-tech behind, you're left with colloquial rhymes, unsophisticated harmonies, sung by people with bad voices. The difference is that Randy Newman's songs are quite a bit more sophisticated - harmonically, poetically, and thematically. Another reason people don't like him is that his influences go into the uncool parts of American music - Ragtime, Dixieland, Tin Pan Alley, Brill Building, and first generation R&B. Can't do much about the voice though... which is as bad as anyone's on the planet.
2. Because Randy Newman is an 'everyman', there is no pretense around how colloquial his music is. It sounds much less sophisiticated than, say, the Stones or Clapton, but it's in fact quite a bit more. This is an artist who's also a deep social critic, whose harmonies and arrangements (many of which he does himself) are incredibly sophisticated by rock music standards, and while other rock gods let us avoid the human condition, Newman steers us straight into life's tragicomic river.
3. From the beginning of his career, Newman was an adult while his contemporaries were still children, and they're still playing at children as they get to eighty. Newman realizes that life itself is tragicomic, and his music reflects the richness of emotional experience that can make us laugh as easily as it can make us cry. Like Mozart or Brahms, Newman is not trying to get our adrenaline pumping, he's trying to equalize our emotional temperature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VvSjvljbLs&list=PLWZBlPcT9yJirckM1JpsU6dm8he96dRPP&index=    

Otterloo's Fantastique

 Willem van Otterloo left two Symphonie Fantastiques that are as good as anyone has ever done them. One is with the Berlin Philharmonic, and of course that one is great, but this from eight years later is better. It's very nearly as well played, and those recent Nazis do not have the warmth or lyricism these Dutch present. It's absolutely beautiful.

Otterloo has a conception not unlike Cluytens (studio) or Beinum, but it's fierier. The Berlin version would remind anyone of how someone like George Szell might have done the Fantastique - everything is precise, accented, almost regimented. The inevitable regimentation is pretty much all that keeps the Berliner recording from being mentioned in the same breath as the M's - Markevitch (Lamoreux) Munch, Monteux, (and Davis if you like that sorta thing...).

The Hague Philharmonic is not the Berlin Philharmonic. Even in 1951, expecting other orchestras to play on the Berliner level is unrealistic. When a conductor asks for it, even the Philharmoniker during the Celibidache/Furtwangler years could produce unmatched clarity, precision, and lightness in addition to weight. What they could not do, and still cannot, is make you forget that they are an Orchestra with a Capital O. There is a kind of vanity in certain of the great orchestras, who patrol their native sound like vultures, and as such, the sound matters to them more than the music. Being the most gifted musician in the world is not the same as being the best - and the great musician of ordinary gifts often sees much further because they have to experience music the way the rest of us do - as servants to it rather than masters.

By any standard but Berlin, the amount of virtuosity on display here is astonishing. Listen to 'the E-Flat Clarinet from Hell' in the last movement, try not to gasp at the force with which they attack the March to the Scaffold. But you also get a sincerity of expression you almost never get from Berlin. Just listen to that cantabile all through the first two movements - it's Kreislerian, Kubelikian, Pattian... these are simple human beings making music that's about love, obsession, mental illness, horror, fun, and drugs....

There are different ways of playing this amazingly. You can make it into a Bacchanal like Munch or Cluytens when he did it live, you can dramatize the ideas like Bernstein, you can make it into a modernist commentary like Markevitch and Silvestri that point up every innovation, or you can make it into a virtuoso concerto for orchestra (pick any slick modern maestro...). And yet very few among the hundreds of Fantastqiues are of a musicality that's worthy of comparison to Monteux - maybe Cluytens, Jansons, Bruno Walter, Rozhdestvensky, Beinum, and this one. This is the work of real musical mastery - not the vain kind that shows off endless technical feats, but a humane music that expresses avec amour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkQgcNl0jc

Who's Gonna Lead the Revolution - Part 2

 For this part I'll cede the floor completely to Jacques Barzun:

"How a revolution erupts from a commonplace event---tidal wave from a ripple---is cause for endless astonishment. Neither Luther in 1517 nor the men who gathered at Versailles in 1789 intended at first what they produced at last. Even less did the Russian Liberals who made the revolution of 1917 foresee what followed. All were as ignorant as everybody else of how much was about to be destroyed. Nor could they guess what feverish feelings, what strange behavior ensue when revolution, great or short-lived, is in the air.

First, a piece of news about something said or done travels quickly, more so than usual, because it is uniquely apt; it fits a half-concious mood or caps a situation: a monk questions indulgences, and he does it not just out of the blue---they are being sold again on a large scale. The fact and the challenger's name generate rumor, exaggeration, misunderstanding, falsehood. People ask each other what is true and what it means. The atmosphere becomes electric, the sense of time changes, grows rapid; a vague future seems nearer.

On impulse, perhaps to snap the tention, somebody shouts in church, throws a stone through a window, which provokes a fight---it happened so at Wittenberg---and clearly it is no ordinary breach of the peace. Another unknown harrangues a crowd, urging it to stay calm---or not to stand there gaping but do something. As further news spreads, various types of people become aroused for or against the thing now upsetting everybody's daily life. But what is that thing? Concretely: ardent youths full of hope as they catch the drift of the idea, rowdies looking for fun, and characters with a grudge. Cranks and tolerated lunatics come out of houses, criminals out of hideouts, and all assert themselves.

Manners are flouted and customs broken. Foul language and direct insult become normal, in keeping with the rest of the excitement, buildings are defaced, images destroyed, shops looted. Printed sheets pass from hand to hand and are read with delight or outrage---Listen to this! Angry debates multiply about thigns long since settled: talk of free love, of priests marrying and monks breaking their vows, of property and wives in common, of sweeping out all evils, all corruption, all at once---all things new for a blissful life on earth.

A curious leveling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals, while others neglect their usual concerns---art, philosophy, scholarship---because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea. The well-to-do and the "right-thinking," full of fear, come together to defend their possessions and habits. But counsels are divided and many see their young "taking the wrong side." The powers that be wonder and keep watch, with fleeting thoughts of advantage to be had from the confusion. Leaders of opinion try to put together some of the ideas afloat into a position which they mean to fight for. They will reassure others, or preach boldness, and anyhow head the movement.

Voices grow shrill, parties form and adopt names or are tagged with them in derision and contempt. Again and again comes the shock of broken friendships, broken families. As time goes on, "betraying the cause" is an incessant charge, and there are indeed turncoats. Authorities are bewildered, heads of institutions try threats and concessions by turns, hoping the surge of subversion will collapse like previous ones. But none of this holds back that transfer of power and property which is the mark of revolution and which in the end establishes the Idea.

The seizure by Henry VIII of England's abbeys and priories, openly in the name of reform and morality, is notorious. But this secularizing of church property went on during the 16C in every other country except Italy and Spain. During this transfer, treaties were made every few years to confirm or reverse the grab, as the forturnes of war dictated. To the distant observer the course of events is a rushing flood; to those inside it is a whirlpool.

Such is, roughly, how revoutions "feel." The gains and the deeds of blood vary in detail from one time to the next, but the motives are the usual mix: hope, ambition, greed, fear, lust, envy, hatred of order and of art, fanatic fervor, heroic devotion, and love of destruction."

- Jacques Barzun, "From Dawn to Decadence"

Some Symphonie Fantastique Recommendations - Perhaps More to Come

Avoid: 

Norrington (not sorry)

Karajan (not sorry)

Mehta

Weingartner

Ozawa/Saito Kinen (sorry)

Argento (sorry)

Rakhlin (sorry)

Blomstedt/Leipzig (sorry)

Scherchen (sorry)

Horenstein (sorry)

Barbirolli (double sorry)

Beecham stereo (double sorry)

Davis/Londons (triple sorry)

Not Bad but not good enough: 

P. Jarvi

Beinum first recording

A. Jansons

Plasson

Dutoit (not sorry)

Gardiner (kinda sorry)

Fruhbeck de Burgos (sorry)

Dervaux (sorry)

Golschmann (sorry)

Skrowaczewski (sorry)

Gielen (sorry)

Zinman (sorry - I was at the concerts this came from, was very young....)

early Walter/Paris (very sorry)

Mitropoulos (extremely sorry)

Martinon (extremely sorry)

Maazel/Cleveland (sorry it's rated this high)

Apollonian:  

1. Mackerras/Royal Philharmonic '94: There's the stuff Mackerras does as well as anybody and then there's the stuff Mackerras does better. This is the former category. I don't know what to say except that it does absolutely everything right. Every detail that needs to register comes through the balance, every passage that requires awe duly gets its requisite awe, every phrase that requires passion gets passion. Not a single unique sound gets by Charlie Mack, and the dynamic range is as enormous as any Berliozian could possibly wish. Mackerras would be the greatest conductor of all time if it weren't for the utter efficiency with he dispatches problems that flummox lesser musicians. Everything he does is planned in a study months in advance. One comes away feeling that this delivers everything one could possibly ask from a Fantastique, and while it would be too much to demand something past our own ears' imaginings, so many performances deliver just that, and that is the only thing beyond Mackerras. 

2. (tie) Abbado/Chicago '89:  Even amid the Solti-era Chicago Symphony, there is no other recording which endows Berlioz with this grace and warmth. Abbado gives Berlioz a Bach-like spiritual glow. You could be forgiven for thinking this is a piece for the angels rather than the demons. 

3. Davis/Concertgebouw '74: Alright... time to make my peace with Davis's Fantastiques, at least these are not the London performances.... but it truly astounds me that so many people think of this recording as the ultimate Fantastique. It is so unbelievably relaxed and low key. Nevertheless, if I'm being honest with myself, it's a very good reading by a master Berliozian that understands most of what this music needs. Ultimately, I just think this wasn't his work. Ever the Englishman, I've always had the sense that Davis was most at home in choral repertoire, and Davis was practically put on earth to show us how to do Berlioz's vocal works (all of them...). To me, this recording is an end rather than a beginning. It 'tamed' the Fantastique and made people feel as though they finally understood it - showing people heretofore unheard things like the repeats and the optional cornet, and in doing so, made them feel ready to discover other Berlioz masterworks, perhaps greater ones. 

4. (tie) Zecchi/Czech Philharmonic '60: Even if he was better known as a pianist and teacher, Carlo Zecchi was a very real musician with ties as deep in Mitteleuropa as in Italy. Zecchi was a big influence over Abbado and particularly Mehta, and it shows in the steady pulse and gorgeously lush sound he conjures from the famously un-lush Czech Philharmonic. The warmth and irony of the third movement makes it sound like the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony. He rescores a number of moments - adding brass for clarity, adding horns and trombones to the Dies Irae. Perhaps the re-scorings worked better live, but they frankly don't work on recording. Nevertheless, is the work of a very real musician.  

4. (tie) Franck/Radio France 2018: Twenty years ago, Mikko Franck was supposed to be the superstar Klaus Makela is now. Unfortunately, back problems kept him out of the concert hall for a while, and by the time he came back everybody basically forgot about him. What amazes about Franck is that in his mid 40s he has the restraint of a septuagenarian's experience. After a rather too sedate opening movement, what emerges is a luminous, almost Brahmsian performance that's a little too unspectacular, full of lyricism, warm phrasing, and inner voices emerging out of the balances, with a slow but beguiling waltz; and then unfolds the most gorgeous, perceptive slow movement since Pierre Monteux. One could ask for more - he deliberately minimizes cymbal crashes in the scaffold march so as not to obscure the musical line, but it all pays off in a last movement of such awesome Berliozian force, all the more effective for being unexpected. The conception here is so thoughtful that it could be Leon Fleisher or Sandor Vegh on the podium. If his health keeps up, perhaps even if it doesn't, this man is going to be a master very soon. 

6. Boulez/Cleveland '95: It's not a modernist reading, just a classical one - limpid and lithe, much more Haydn than Mahler. Every expression is restrained, but the content comes through with stunning clarity and fidelity to the score. It's Fantastique completely defanged - ultimately quite enjoyable, but surely the Fantastique means more than this.

Dionysian: 

1. Munch live Paris '67 inaugural ODP concert: It is not Berlioz's SF. It's decadent, elephantine, with artificial effects imposed everywhere, but it is the most absorbing, passionate, loving performance there has ever been. It is perhaps the last celebration of the old French orchestral tradition, and amid the tatters of its then state comes an inspirational celebration of everything their musicians inspired. From first bar to last, it is an absolute bacchanale, turning the ears upside down like a natural event. 

2. Cluytens live Tokyo with OSCC '64 - Pretty much the same thing....

3. Bernstein/ONF video '76 - Bernstein is not out to create the bacchic frenzy of Munch and live Cluytens. The sheer excitement rivals the above two, but it is also more disciplined and directed. Lenny is out for something much more subjective and literary - to dramatize Berlioz's ideas in sound. On that score, no one conjures Berlioz's programmatic episodes with this level of vividness, even if you don't feel much beyond the effects themselves. One can argue, not without cause, that it's done for effect, but what effects! This is an agon between two flamboyant geniuses. It neither gets us quite the excitement unlimited of Munch, nor does it delve particularly into the entire world of Berlioz after the manner of Markevitch, but it achieves its effects on a level that will leave your jaw at your feet.

4. Dudamel/Bolivar/Radio France 2010 (really) When Dudamel is on he is ON, and however inconsistent and instinctual his talent, the potential for cosmic artistry is ever present. It has its flaws - you can practically hear two different orchestras here - the French sticking to their elegance while the Venezuelans put their whole bodies and souls into it. In strings, the huge vibrato of one consistently clashes with scant vibrato of the other, but it would only bother you if you're a pedant. I defy anyone to listen to this and not be riveted. There must be well over 200 musicians onstage, and while the sound has all the mass that implies, it has the most incredible tenderness too. The noise they make is absolutely arresting, all the moreso for Dudamel's manic, exhorting, romantic interpretation that alternates the most unbelievably dynamic whirlwinds with softness that aches with vulnerability. Listen to the tenderness of those strings in the waltz.  Dudamel even comes closer to sustaining an inadvisable 18 minute slow movement than anyone should. Yes, there are miscues and bad decisions, but this is no mere slick flash in the pan. 

5. Bernstein/New York '63 In these 'episodes in the life of an artist,' the emphasis here is on the 'episodes.' Bernstein is completely uncontained by form and completely releases the bridles of Berlioz's imagination with manic slow and fast tempi within less than sixty seconds of each other. Bernstein expresses in primary emotions, and whatever the most obvious emotion is at any given moment, Bernstein maximizes it. It's all very melodramatic, but the excitement is so undeniable. This Berlioz throbs. The problem, of course, is the third movement, which Bernstein's manic depressive approach cannot make into a coherent narrative, and if you try to maximize the stillness and boredom of the country, you end up creating five minute dead spots.  

6. Koussevitzky/Boston '43 It's very good, but it will not give a sense of why Koussevitzky's Boston is great as or greater than any orchestra will ever be. Even in the shrill compressed sound, you hear that the BSO plays it magnificently, but Koussevitzky's romanticisms are simply too much. He certainly takes us deep into the imbalanced heart of this work, but for a musician so at home among the French, this is so un-classical,  so melodramatic, so grandiloquent, that you can't really believe the story it tells. Nevertheless, as far as a 'dionysian' vision goes, nobody, not even Munch, takes us this far into the fantome of Berlioz's manic insanity. 

Hermean: Virtuosic feats

1. (tie) Markevitch/Berlin '53 - Virtuoso in the very best sense. It is, almost beyond doubt, the most sensitively played. Every moment bespeaks an ensemble that knows how to express the true nature of every bar. And yet, is it too suave and smooth? Surely Berlioz meant something more untamed than this. Markevitch would do better later. 

1. (tie) Otterloo/Berlin '51: Fiery virtuosity, but perfectly contained within the form. It deserves great notice and to be ranked higher. Not unlike the immortal [to my ears] Cluytens/Philharmonia in outline, but more streamlined. Less warmth, more fire. One is reminded of George Szell from first bar to last. Otterloo would do better later. 

3. Mravinsky/Leningrad '60: A performance like no other, more an experience than a performance. Ever Mravinsky's way, it's refined to the point of aristocracy, and yet overbearing and brutally terrifying. I don't know whether to put this in virtuoso or modern, because I don't know if there's any interpretive logic at all. It is simply, a terrifying, gripping Soviet performance, yet with one of the airiest and most absorbing third movements ever captured by tape. It is, as ever with Mravinsky, fire and ice. Warmth is found nowhere, and yet its passionate intensity insists on every bar. 

4. (tie) Munch/Boston '54: The other 'Greatest Fantastique Ever' does not have the abandon Munch would later deliver. It's a truly excellent virtuoso reading, but when you compare to Munch himself later, it's a slick professional job. It lots of fun, but it doesn't really mean anything. 

4. (tie) Paray/Detroit '59: A reading both great and overrated. It's overly driven, almost brutalized, but it is astounding how well the Michiganders keep up. The precision is worthy of Reiner and then some, and one cannot doubt the authentic phrasing or the timbre. Yet even so, there is something unpleasantly aggressive and driven. Surely Berlioz is more than a Formula One engine. 

6. Muti/Philadelphia '85: Where else will you put Muti/Philly? At no point is this Berlioz rather than Muti playing Berlioz. There isn't much deep thought here, but there also aren't the pratfalls of thought - like trying to make too much of the 'nature movement.' In place of thought, there is so much intensity, so much craft, and so much style. They turn corners as smoothly as a Ferarri. Munch and Cluytens (live) drive it much harder, but their fabric is nowhere near so tensile, and their deliberate messiness is how their exaggerations still manage to sound human. Even in the most extreme corners, Muti sustains faultless precision amid immaculate vocal lines and unanimity of style. Some people love musicians who play more like gods than men, I am not one of them. Like so much early Muti, this performance is a vapid miracle. 

Vulcanian: Modernist and Innovative

1. Markevitch/Lamoureux '61 - A completely sui generis performance, in a very different spirit from his Berlin recording. It's almost like an interview of the piece, an commentary on it, that highlights every modern dissonance and timbre and asymmetrical phrase. So vivid that it almost conjures a complete literary experience. Munch provides the height of heart, but this provides the height of expression. It feels so specific that you feel the obsessional longing, the aristocratic refinement and sensuality, the wind and sunlight and rain, the dread of the guillotine, and the horror of the flames. This is the world not just of Berlioz but of his whole era - Balzac and Dumas in music. Along with the one far below... it may in fact be the essential Fantastique.

2. Haitink/Concertgebouw, Christmas Matinee '79 - There has never been a performance to follow the score's dynamics this literally. It both wipes the slate clean from romantic excess and also releases an electric charge that only an orchestra as great as the Concertgebouw can when they are at the height of their powers. When you compare this to the Disneyfied performances going on in Berlin of Karajan, you marvel that musicianship this real was going on at the highest echelons of the 70s and that there were star younger conductors of that era not painting in Karajan's neon. It is not virtuosic, because there is nothing is done for effect here except to demonstrate the veracity of the score. It is not an Apollonian performance because the Symphonie Fantastique is not an Apollonian score. Nor is it the 'pure musicianship' of Monteux or Jansons, who demonstrate the loving spontaneity that is the only way to enliven the slow movement. It is, quite simply, a very modern examination of precisely what this score is, and thereby a towering performance.

3. Klemperer/Philharmonia '66: Whenever I'm given a choice I take Klemperer live. The sound on the copy I have is terribly synthetic, with that odd electronic reverb that sounds like a guitar distortion. And yet the bass-heavy intensity of the Klemperer sound comes completely through. The dogged concentration goes all the way through the performance, and as always, Klemperer makes the stakes existential - deadly serious on the surface, black humor just beneath. This is Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique for a generation who'd heard Mahler and Mussolini. Ever an underrated colorist, the new colors are everywhere to be found, even as Klemperer keeps the tempi absolutely steady.  When it comes to conjuring grotesquerie, Klemperer had nearly no equal in orchestral history. A performance, of course, like no other - more Camus than Dumas. 

4. Barenboim/WEDO Proms '09 When Barenboim decides to kick off his shoes and have fun, this is the result. Like Otterloo with the Hague Philharmonic, he's not facing the Berlin Philharmonic, and that's all to the good. He's free to make any requests he wants, and every moment has a new color, a new phrasing, a new way of looking at the music. The result is, of course,  too Wagnerian. This is Danny B. after all, and everything is seen through the Tristan lens. Every chance to inject yearning chromaticism is there, every chance to suggest vague disembodied possibilities, every chance to balance the french horn in front of every wind choir,... but the 'elan' and 'eclat' of the offsetting tonic, 'fun' moments is unmistakable. If only Barenboim always played like this he'd deserve every last bit of his awesome reputation.

5. Silvestri/OSCC '61 - Rather spoiled by an 18:15 third movement that makes flies drop to the floor, but the whole thing is a completely unique and insightful conception. The playing is not great, but Silvestri is sui generis. Good or bad, you get things from him you get from no one else, and there is no world in which we'd be better off without his insights. As for the insights themselves? Well... you just have to hear them. What he does is far too specific to get into in a single paragraph.

Orphic: Pure Music

1. (but...) Cluytens/Philharmonia '58 - It's the closest we get to an ideal conception, it reveals the inner meaning of so much. I don't have the secret of a conductor like Cluytens, but it seems as though he just conjures the proper sound, phrasing, balance and character from the ether. Even with a British orchestra, it's pure French folk music. 

2. Jansons/Berlin Istanbul 2001 - Caught live amid the echo of a Byzantine cathedral, yet every note matters. You don't just hear every detail, you hear every detail in the context of phrasing and balance, and yet there is such weight of tone that the Berlin Philharmonic sounds twice its size. In Jansons there's no division between classical and romantic, form and content, passion and precision, it's just music. 

3. (tie) Walter/New York live '54 - Perfect musicality. I wish, oh how I wish, Walter played more music from outside the Austro-German tradition. He knows exactly where to put the rise and fall of every phrase, he knows exactly where in the harmonic structure to put every rubato and just how much to advance the music's momentum. Walter's earlier, more famous, Fantastique from Paris is much less idiomatic than this. In Paris, he is heavy and gemutlich in a work whose spirit is the exact opposite of heavy gemutlichkeit, but here, whether it's because he'd consulted Monteux or Munch or Morel, or because he simply felt the score more freely, his playing is filled with the cosmic musicianship which never deserted him in music of the main Austro-German line. 

3. (tie) Otterloo/Hague '59 - By any standard but Berlin, the amount of virtuosity on display here is astonishing. Listen to 'the E-Flat Clarinet from Hell' in the last movement, try not to gasp at the force with which they attack the March to the Scaffold. But you also get a sincerity of expression you almost never get from Berlin. Just listen to that cantabile all through the first two movements - it's Kreislerian, Kubelikian, Pattian... these are simple human beings making music that's about love, obsession, mental illness, horror, fun, and drugs....

5. Monteux/San Francisco '50 - Monteux's 1930 performance (below) is unrepeatable. A French orchestra tradition still thrived, depleted only by one war rather than two. Next to the effortless French agility of Monteux's Orchestre Symphonique, the San Francisco Symphony cannot help but sound a little shrill and frenetic. It's basically the same interpretation, but the sound is much more vivid. Like Kubelik, Monteux is an ideal: passion without grandiloquence, risks but managed, not the dionysian playing of a rock star nor the Apollonian perfection of an untroubled soul nor the virtuosic precision of a military commander; rather the small-scale personalized expression of a musician playing for and with his friends. Perhaps the last two movements suffer a bit from this deliberate lack of spectacle, but only a master can make the third movement sound equal to the rest, and surely this is its most absorbing performance.

6. (tie) Kubelik/Bavarian Radio '81 - The list of my ideal performing interpreters are always changing, but the abiding love for Kubelik remains ever the same. Kubelik always seems unplanned, and yet the tempi flow with rubato just enough that it is absolutely never boring. He's broader than twenty-two years earlier, yet he knows music so from the inside that every deviation from the score feels entirely organic. It's not French sounding in either conductor or orchestra, but the inner light music's healing power is ever present.

6. (tie) Pretre/Boston '69 - A kinder, gentler, 'more musical' performance from the Munch template. What Munch drives, Pretre does naturally. Like the great man just below this entry, Pretre leaves it to the orchestra. He simply shows them what he wants and lets a great orchestra do what they do. The expression always comes from the player's heart rather than the tip of his baton (though Pretre's baton showed every single nuance). The orchestral sound is always 'spread out,' with attacks habitually never on the beat. The phrases expand and contract like human breath. There's no false precision or virtuosity, the music simply sings, dances, explodes, implodes, paints and talks.

8.  Beinum/Concertgebouw '51 - his remake. I initially put this in 'Apollo' but Beinum deserves to take his place among the pure musicians. I don't know if it's more than perfect, but it is perfect. I don't have the secret of Beinum perfect Apollonian pitch, but he finds the right 'tone' for every phrase, he can convince you that the SF is flawlessly constructed, and makes Berlioz truly worthy of Mozart. In spite of his oft-steady tempi, perhaps the appelation 'Apollonian' does not do this justice, as it does not so much Beinum, and it belongs in a different category far below... 

9. (tie) Bychkov/NYOGB 2010: An orchestra of 160-180 young musicians giving most eruptive, fiery orchestral sound ever conjured in this most eruptive orchestral work, all contained within measured, sensible interpretive framework. The dichotomy is unlike anything you will hear, and perhaps closer to Berlioz's own vision than any other recording. 

9. (tie) Kubelik/Concertgebouw '59 - I simply don't know how he does it, but the best way I can describe it is that Kubelik is like a meal from your grandmother. He clearly doesn't bother himself with the fancy technical matters, he simply knows exactly when to put in a dash of rubato, a pinch of crsescendo, and set the exact right temperature at every moment for a chemical change to happen that defies rational explanation. It tastes or feels exactly right. 

11. Rozhdestvensky/Leningrad London '72 - This is the inevitable grouping where the true masters go. However intrusive the brass and timpani blare, the thousands of nuances in the strings amid that phrasing is unlike anything you've ever heard. Every detail adds to the whole, and amid the strings and winds, the tens of thousands of nuances here are unlike anything you've ever heard - all of them seeming to add up to an indivisible whole. There's only so much 'Naddi can do to stop the terrifying interruptions of the Soviet brass and percussion, but he sounds as though he does everything he can to work their context into his conception. 

12. Ansermet/Suisse Romande '68 - It's from the year Ansermet died, and what a way to go out. Short of the Dionysians, this is the most exciting Fantastique you could imagine, but obviously with far greater taste and elegance than Munch would ever bridle himself to. The Suisse Romande is as imprecise as ever, but it's neither known for its excitement nor its weight of tone, and yet just listen here...  In extreme old age, Ansermet is not just a musician of perception and panache, but one whose excitement equals any in the world. The only problem in this performance is the nature movement, the one movement in which you'd expect an octogenarian to succeed beyond everyone else. For four out of five movements, this is as great a Fantastique as has ever been set down. 

12. Beecham/Orchestre National de France 1958 - Beecham would remake this mono recording one year later in stereo. It's a very famous recording, and yet whatever he had the year before, he lost.  In this mono version, the slow movement is dispatched in a mere 13 1/2 minutes, yet it's shaped with the freedom of Mahler. A year later he'd slowed it  to 17 minutes with nary a rubato. Nevertheless, for three movements, this one is as great a Fantastique as exists, leavened with warmth and fire in every bar. The problem with the final two is the orchestra, who simply can't play all the effects well enough to shock us, nor does Beecham have insights worthwhile enough to make subpar execution worthwhile. Beecham is never one to slather rubato all over a piece of music in the name of individuality. One friend referred to Beecham's goal as 'artless artfulness, careful carelessness,' and that demands more involvement than the sometimes metronomic stateliness of his sometimes overvalued final recordings. At his worst, Beecham was as wooden as an ivory statue, but at the best he arrived at quite often, Beecham is as true a maestro as the world has known. 

13. Chung/Radio France 2013 - Even more inconsistent than Beecham. It may be the single greatest opening movement ever caught on record, sensitive to everything, utterly spontaneous without ever drawing attention to its improvisation. It's just a miracle. The third movement, the masterpiece of conductor assassination, is on the same level - and yet at a very slow tempo, as is the beginning of the finale, full of original rubatos and sounds. The waltz has wonderful lyricism even if the playing sounds a little unrehearsed... it's really just the final two movements that do not deliver on what it promises. A march that is too fast and over in a flash without any real thought and indifferently played. And then there's the latter half of the finale, which is just so.... routine. Over and over again, the best way I can describe Chung is he's the greatest conductor in the world for twenty minutes at a time. 

The Olympian Summit;  

Monteux/OSDP '30 - In the centenary year of the Symphonie Fantastique comes the closest we'll ever get to hearing this music as the composer himself did. Monteux was Eduard Colonne's assistant, who was Berlioz's, and Monteux worked from the score of le maitre himself (l'autre maitre...). To this day, there can be no greater Fantastique than this. There are other early recordings, but this breathes a different air whose circumstances we can't understand, nor can we approximate what it sounded like live. It just feels right in the same way that it feels right when a bluesman is from the Mississippi Delta.

The absolute essentials: 

Gold:
Pierre Monteux/Orchestre Symphonique de Paris 1930

Charles Munch/l'Orchestre de Paris 1967, live

Igor Markevitch/Lamoureux Orchestra 1961

Andre Cluytens/Philharmonia Orchestra 1958

Mariss Jansons/Berlin Philharmonic 2001, video

Silver: 

Andre Cluytens/Orchestre de la Societe Conservatoire 1964, live

Willem van Otterloo/Hague Philharmonic 1958

Leonard Bernstein/Orchestre National de France 1976, video

Bernard Haitink/Concertgebouw 1979, video

Bruno Walter/New York Philharmonic 1954, live

Georges Pretre/Boston Symphony 1969

Bronze:

Igor Markevitch/Berlin Philharmonic 1953

Sir Charles Mackerras/Royal Philharmonic 1994

Willem van Otterloo/Berlin Philharmonic 1951

Gustavo Dudamel/Simon Boliver Youth Orchestra/l'Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France 2010, live video
Rafael Kubelik/Bavarian Radio Symphony 1981, live

Eduard van Beinum/Concertgebouw 1951

Semyon Bychkov/National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain 2010, live video

Pierre Monteux/San Francisco Symphony 1950

Who's Gonna Lead the Revolution?... Part 1

It starts with the parking. The job is sometimes crosstown and sometimes close by, but unless you're getting gas you don't think on the drive about how the gas isn't factored into your payment.

It always starts with the fact that you have to factor in time to park, which sometimes takes twenty minutes; occasionally more; and then you're hit with the parking fee. You should remember that parking fee, but it surprises you every time, and the indignity always bears a slight sting.

And then there are those moments when the parking is free, and you come back to your car with a ticket for being an inch over the line which costs you more than your day's wages.

Then there's the walk from the car past life's two tiers. The eaters in the restaurants, and the poor outside them. Some of the poor are panhandlers, some are just waiting for the bus home, all of them are missing teeth - and just from the lines in their faces and their uncombed hair your mind creates an entire life story for each of them.

And then you get to your temporary place of work, where you have to pack your own lunch or dinner - if they even allow food from outside, because they often make you pay for your own, and it's either that or risk low blood sugar in a high pressure situation. Some choose low blood sugar, with inevitable results.

Then you see your coworkers and four waves of emotion pass through you in immediate succession: excitement, affection, exasperation, and trepidation. They're not just coworkers, they're fellow soldiers in an army, and however hard we work, you're never sure their efforts are enough to save the mission. You worry one of them will screw it up for you, and worry still more that the screwup will be you, and you'll have to live with the guilt. By the end of the shift, you're all either too drunk or too sober to not be pissed off at each other.

So then you go to work: music, food, clothing, academia, theaters, galleries, sets, festivals, even classrooms, and all of them hustles. You can never stop hustling: networking for the next job, negotiating a better deal, trying to put together a vision nobody else cares about because they're all too busy trying to put together their own vision; because everything a creative person has can disappear tomorrow as though it never existed. You see possibilities all around the room: for achievements, for friendships, for romance, and especially for money. And well over 99 percent of those possibilities are a dead end.

Your coworkers are your fellow soldiers, the people you serve are the citizens whom you protect and fight for, and yet every partnership, no matter how close, is in perpetual threat of disintegration by tragedy - especially with your closest partners. You're in perpetual danger of bringing your home stress to work, and perpetual danger of bringing your work stress home. However tired, however worried you are about your health, you give 110% and try to be there on the good faith that the people you're with will do the same for you - knowing fully well that every person along for the ride with you has stories about people who weren't there - sometimes the people you still work with. Thriving is out of the question: it's an endurance test of one humiliation to the next amid the lifelong effort to avoid living death.

Tragedy implies a fall, so we had to start from somewhere high; and living death is not real death. Living death does the people we love the service of not inflicting the full extent of how this life damages us - so they might be spared the death we live. However much we suffer and stress, we are not the wretched of the earth, and people needn't feel sorry for us.

Because they need to fear us. We are so much more dangerous than the real deprived, and the rest of you should walk around us with terror. It won't be the poor who lead the next storming of the Capitol, it will be the working class, and it may well be the OTHER working class - the CREATIVE class.

The creative class is the 40 million Americans who exist within a system designed to maintain our perpetual failure. Every prosperous person in the country knows in their bones that their outsize prosperity is maintained by two lower middle classes - one is the blue collar guys who fix their houses, the other is the creative class who decorates them. One saves your life, one makes life worth living. The first may be more necessary than the second, but if you offend the creative class, we can end your prosperity much more quickly than they can.

In society after society, we are the ignition that lights your fire. We created your society every bit as much as its builders, and we can burn it to the ground. Look at all the revolutionaries you meet: what do they all have in common? They aren't necessarily poor, and they're not materially desperate:

They were passed over. They were neglected. They were humiliated. They were told that their gifts were of no value to people. In many cases, they were bullied; and no one is more likely to be a bully than those who were bullied themselves.

We are so close to simply storming the capitol in exactly the way blue collar rurals did. But we have the education, we have the perception, and god knows we have the will to power. In devaluing us, you put into peril of everything in which you find safety. .

I wrote the next two paragraphs a few months ago:

"There are always these little sub-markets and niches which corporations cannot possibly keep up with; and these little restaurants and stores and songwriters and theater companies and adjuncts and school teachers; innovate from the flimsiest of utilities out of necessity and do things found literally nowhere else in the world. But making a living requires the backing of a company, or a government, or a civic organization. Without one of the three, it is, in the long run, impossible. Every prosperous person in the entire country knows that, but their outsize prosperity depends on the hand-to-mouth existence of the various weirdos they went to school with who exist outside their nine dots. Most of these oddballs spend their existences in jobs for which they are unfit, do it mediocrely, and live lives of quiet desperation. Eventually, they develop the credit score that they can get a small business loan to achieve their ambition, for which they rarely get more one shot.

And, almost inevitably, their business fails, and back to decades of quiet desperation they go. And somehow, the country thinks this is a sustainable state of affairs that will not result in guaranteed civil unrest. Every town in America has their own hidden places and communities which the town misfits have to construct entirely on their own. Every person in the country falls over themselves in competition to find those unique things nobody else knows about to which they can introduce their friends. And there are new ones constantly springing up, because after two or three years, the older ones are constantly failing. In addition to all the colossal chain restaurants, there are always dozens of new restaurants in every large town in the US, most of which never last more than a couple years. The same goes in cities for clothing stores, concert venues, bars and breweries, and interior decoration. Meanwhile, there are a colossal number of artists and academics of all types trying to make careers, and rarely ever succeed; some of whom are far better than people with Hollywood contracts or tenured Ivy League professors. Every city has hundreds of unsigned bands who break up the moment they get good because they can no longer afford to rehearse. And there are literally thousands of independent films that are never seen anywhere but in film festivals."

All which creatives ever wanted to do for you, literally all of it, is to give your life meaning and morale. That's it. The ways we keep you alive may not be obvious, but we're the literal difference between you being fully human and being animals. Create a world where creative people can't make a living, and you create a world at war.

We are the reason you don't shoot yourselves. Everything you look forward to every day was made possible by a hundred people from the creative class. You think our value is nebulous, but what demonstrable value do you, the white collar douchebags, bring to the world? You think you deserve to keep all that money you make, and your justification for it is that you make money. You justify your selfishness with second hand cliches from totalitarian philosophers you've never even read or heard of, and then you call it 'liberty' and 'personal responsibility.' Whom among you but the doctors and scientists can point to the way you've provided communities with anything more than drudgery?

People view creatives as crazy, peculiar, generally unstable agents of chaos; they euphemistically call us 'free spirits' and 'dreamers' who 'march to a different drummer.' But there is no spirit more fettered than those who live inside the humane world. No one is more forced by realism into compromise than a person working in the humanities, no one is more forced by tragedy into limitations. People have no reason to dream in their waking hours if they're fulfilled.

Civilizations are never ended by blue collar guys who act before they think. They're ended by people who can do nothing but think and dream in a society where people think they can do without dreams, but our ideas make the entirety of your frontal lobe's neurons. When we think agreeable ideas, your society prospers. When we think disagreeable ones, your society eats itself alive.

Look around the world of 2022. Every day since 2015, new thousands awaken with a realization seeping into their pours that a new revolutionary idea, finally, explains everything to them: the beginning, the end, the whole of their lives and struggle from the mouth of their recalled time to the present moment - and even if the idea's not true, they feel the flame of hope burning particularly for them for the very first time in their existences. Their humiliations have a name, their suffering has a meaning, and they can direct their struggles toward the day when life exists as an experience better than to be endured. Every day, a new piece of subconscious wiring rebuilds itself to the specifications of their new beliefs, assumptions they didn't even know they had are questioned and knocked down with new assumptions to replace them. And even if the creatives won't be the ones to actually storm, the violence to come will be perpetrated by the people of action we inspired.

We are the creatives, and we will simply take what you deny us. The human spirit lies in its imagination, and long after all your notions about this world die, we will still be here. Will will end you, then we will bury you, and long after you are forgotten, we will be remembered.

Pelosi Hot Take

 The current fashion to say that 'everybody is replaceable' is so lethally irresponsible. Leadership depends on the efficacy of the person in the position. Most leaders are not capable of doing the job they're charged with. Many people can do the job well, but they usually not the ones who get it. When a person capable of the job is replaced, it's usually because the people replacing her think the job has different requirements from what it has, and the replacement fucks it up. So if we still have a democracy, it's mostly Pelosi's doing. Nobody else could have ever done her job as well. I would have voted her for President in a heartbeat, I would have followed her into battle. She had to do things much harder than great speakers like Rayburn and O'Neill because her majority was always razor thin, she had to keep coalitions together full of people who completely hated everything each other stood for against a monolithic and frankly authoritarian coalition. She still managed to get most things passed in the most impossible political climate anyone can remember.

THAT's leadership.

Horszowski's Chopin Preludes

In terms of 'bests', if there is one, then in Chopin it has to be Josef Hofmann. It's just... well listen to it.

But Hofmann was a giant, a brilliant tightly wound machine of music. If you struggle with Chopin as I do, he can't convince you to love it.

Mieczyslaw Horszowski though... this is Chopin that can convince you Chopin is as profound and sincere and warm as anything in Schubert. Only a genuine intellect and great soul can make music like this. It doesn't sound like a piano, the instrument sings and strums and glows.

I've never warmed to a lot of other Horszowski playing. Compared to other greats known best for 'the classics' among classics (Kempff, Lupu, Firkusny, L. Kraus, Schnabel, Brendel...), Horszowski can be a little unmemorable and plain. And yet here, he brings all his experience of Bach and Mozart and Schubert to Chopin and shows what music of the soul is here.

Amid plenty of famous recordings that make me shut the music off, the complete Preludes do have a lot of great recordings: Novaes, Moisewitsch, Cortot, Friere, even (goddamnit...) Argerich. But not even Cortot can make you (me) believe in this music like this. Only Novaes compares, but Novaes is completely different - all inner voices and puckish flying through the air. Every moment of Horszowski breathes a heavenly air, intoned like Bach at a celestial organ. Hofmann and Cortot can remind of everything in Chopin that's memorable, but the 80 year old Horszowski (with 20 more to go) shows you what in Chopin is eternal. Every ephemeral minute of the next 40 could be described by Emily Dickinson:

I went to Heaven, -

'Twas a small town,

Lit with a ruby,

Lathed with down.

Stiller than the fields

At the full dew,

Beautiful as pictures

No man drew.

People like the moth,

Of mechlin, frames,

Duties of gossamer,

And eider names.

Almost contented

I could be

'Mong such unique

Society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=819&fbclid=IwAR0TLyPeFu0FDX2WaxW1VY6W_3YIM0ZpJHTIj5N8oFiIfcy051OuA8_Rm1o&v=XS0Yzbo99ws&feature=youtu.be

Votto's Don Carlo in Chicago

 (wrote about this in two different social media spaces - one my own, one somebody else's)

I don't believe it. Here is the mythical 'more Verdi than opera.' More Verdi even than a Toscanini performance, and all the moreso pure Verdi because it's live opera rather than a concert performance and has a little bit of rubato flow that Toscanini would rarely if ever allow. This performance from a (then) very new opera company makes even Don Carlo sound perfect, Verdi's loose baggy monster.

Votto goes against every instinct of romantic music and follows the majority of Verdi's metronome markings to the letter. In Rigoletto and Falstaff, Verdi's tempi are generally slower than we hear, but In Don Carlo it's mostly faster than it's ever played, except for the fast turbulent passages, which are generally indicated to be played slower.

The end result is a completely different pacing that is far more classical - it feels like Haydn, and steers us directly into opera's pro-forma cliches. And yet by leading us there, it gains us all the inner feeling, those little twists of individuality that Verdi, like Chopin, gives us within the formula he sticks to like glue. For once, every note feels like it matters and has its own moral mission. So many conductors try to play up the excitement and passion, and the end result does not feel like music. The pacing feels completely out of joint and there are 20 minute dead spots that we (I) have no idea why we're listening to. The accompanying figures just feel purposeless, there's no cumulative impact, and everything simply sounds haphazard. If you have singers who are REALLY that great, as they were before WWII, they can make every moment count. But if you don't, it's a long slog. Would that we had singing actors today who equalled Boris Christoff and TIto Gobbi, but you can't tell me Richard Tucker (no relation) has the intelligence to carry an opera purely on his musical insights.

I'm clearly not an opera person....

--------------------------------------------

I just listened to this today. Again, I don't know if this is the 'best' Don Carlo, but this one is the most 'perfect' I've ever heard - and can convince you that Don Carlo is a perfect music drama like Otello. 'Perfection' is obviously not a virtue in Don Carlo, which has plot contrivances that make Trovatore seem like Tolstoy, but Votto can convince you that it's Toscanini or Cantelli in the pit.

Again, look at Verdi's MM's. Most of the tempi are faster than we generally hear, except for the fastest passages, which are inevitably slower. This completely changes the pacing and structure, and makes you realize how necessary each instrumental detail is. Verdi is a much more symphonically minded composer than he generally gets credit for being, and it's the fault of the many conductors who play him for maximum visceral thrills, like Muti, who has somehow hoodwinked the public into thinking he closely follows Verdi's scores - I generally like Muti's Verdi, but it's absolutely not Verdi's Verdi.

THIS is Verdi's Verdi, and has much better singers than Toscanini generally allows, lest their egos upstage Toscanini's adherence to the score. Votto's ever slight departures for rubato or accomodating singers wishes are entirely worth it, and gives an ever so slight bend to the necessities of live theater. The rewards spur this unforgettable cast to far more memorable singing.

I'm sure that in this of all scores, Verdi meant for more interpretive freedom. How can Verdi expect adherence to a score whose definitive version he couldn't even decide on? But this is an unforgettable performance with an absolutely unmatched grasp of what makes Verdi Verdi and not 'just opera.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr4EtAaklmM&fbclid=IwAR068gfkEQ13WkMHb1y0Xiu_BlAxu_Yj7GXETNb_YoD0D7qmSVckSi4eeLI

Poland Hot Take

.What happened in Poland was completely on purpose and as directed to Biden as the rest of this whole Ukraine craziness is - a way of saying 'I'm not intimidated by your new level of power.' This is what Cold War is, war by proxy and brinksmanship that dares the other side to escalate. If you don't show up to a war you're being challenged to, you don't eliminate the threat of it, you make the resulting war bloodier. This is obviously in large part Obama's fault for not standing up to Putin in half a dozen different arenas, and the longer Democrats take to stop excusing Obama for it and (un)reform their way of thinking about defense, the bloodier the resulting wars will be in their wake. Dictators are even less 'just misunderstood' than Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell (though not by a distance anywhere near what moderates allege...). Like Trump and McConnell, their entire aim in life is to increase their power over other people, and any of their people's legitimate grievances they bring to the negotiating table are brought to be abused.

But you should trust Democrats to take proper account of their role in this far before you trust Republicans. If Democrats were naively pursuing a dovish course - believing you can neutralize authoritarian threats by taking their concerns into account, Republicans under Bush believed that by using the sword and flag enough, you can defeat enemies and remake them in your image. And by pursuing this course in the Middle East, they went out of their way to strengthen their most obvious authoritarian threats - China and Russia. There are no words in the English language for that level of incompetence, stupidity, arrogance, and fanaticism. It's the ultimate evidence that the Republican party was willfully rebuilding itself in the image of the world's most destructive dictators because they secretly (unsecretly) admired their level of power.

Nobody wins in war, you just show up to fight it, inch by inch, like a pro forma ritual, in which you just resign yourself to gaining or losing an inch year by year, because that's how you prevent larger wars; and as Vladimir Putin now relearns, there are no words for the dangers of believing you can destroy whole societies and rebuild them from the bottom up. This whole mess means we are back to living every day with the low grade threat of World War III breaking out, and it's more George W. Bush's (Cheney and Rumsfeld's) fault than anybody in the world, who willfully strengthened the influence of Russia and China because W thought he could reform the precise countries that hated us most. It's a cluster bomb of diarrhea in the face of his father's legacy, who did more than anyone on earth except Gorbachev to save us from that perpetual threat. I'm not sure whether to call it a willfully stupid act of evil or a willfully evil act of stupidity, but some mix of willfully acting stupid and evil is the entirety of the modern Republican party, and their delusions have only increased in the years since. Their hubris would be funny if it weren't so willfully lethal, and has set the stage for everything that's happened thereafter.

Note: This is not advocating war with Russia, not that anybody would care what I think, but we do need a proportional response. I guarantee Biden and Blinken had a team working on what the appropriate response is for every contingent scenario since this first happened. Biden, Hilary Clinton, and Al Gore are, literally, the only Presidents I would trust in a scenario like this.

Bambino Santi in Don Carlo

Don Carlo had a 'moment' around the 1960s and 70s. Everybody seemed to think it was an excessively ambitious failure until Rudolf Bing featured it front and center during his Met tenure (one of his rare services to music...), then the whole world seemed to be doing it. It was exactly the same moment as the Mahler and Bruckner revival, and there is something 'Mahlerian' about Don Carlo, spreading out the largest, most existential issues on the broadest possible canvas.

Obviously the most legendary performance is the Visconti-directed Don Carlo at Covent Garden under Giulini - Christoff and Vickers as great as they'd ever be, with Gobbi and Barbieri along with them for every step. Clearly, there's Don Carlo 'before and after' that performance, and it probably did more than any other to solidify Don Carlo's place in the center of the operatic repertoire.

But at the same time as that, Karajan was already championing Don Carlo, a score which fit his particular mix of mass and delicacy better than nearly any other opera. Fricsay had already championed it and his death let go the possibility of a recording for the ages, but Solti would pick it up soon, and regardless of what people say, his Don Carlo is wonderful, or at least wonderful compared to what would come much later. Abbado and Levine and Schippers were just around the corner. Famous later performances like Haitink and Muti, for all their virtues, would have a simple problem: later voices do not have the idiomatic command of Verdi that opera houses were still able to get until roughly 1990.

But alongside the 'stars' were the second line of two dozen maestri di capella, mostly from Italy (though not all) who probably knew these works better than Karajan ever could. The 'last' of which was Papa Santi.

During this Salzburg performance in 1960, Nello Santi was not yet even 30 (and looked exactly like he did at 80...), but this performance shows that he was practically born with that innate knowledge of Verdi's idiom. The command here is not quite like anything you'll hear from any 'star maestro,' even Giulini. He follows the singers through every odd twist and turn (and Fernandi particularly takes him all sorts of bizarre places). While the Vienna Philharmonic always played plenty of Verdi, I doubt you'd ever heard them sound so much like La Scala as here. The phrases rise and fall so innately that it flows like the Tiber.

This is what a great operatic maestro does, and even as a kid, Nello Santi was clearly that. His biggest contribution is that he makes everybody else better than they are without him. The Vienna Philharmonic, who so often makes Verdi sound like Wagner, is simply as close to ideal as an orchestra ever gets in a work this large. Christoff's FIlipo is obviously well-known, but listen to what Ettore Bastianini does as Rodrigo - you may not hear a more perfect rendering. There is no performance of Carlo's quite like Eugenio Fernandi, whose phrasings and colorings are varied enough (some would probably say 'indulgent') to sound like a tenor from at least a generation earlier. Even Regina Resnik, a 'general practitioner' of operatic repertoire, sounds perfectly Verdian here. The only real problem is Jurniac as Elisabetta (question for the singers out there, is Elisabetta particularly difficult? A lot of great sopranos seem to have trouble with it.). But Jurniac is still pretty good, the only true problem is coordination in the Auto-da-fe scene, which is obviously incredibly tricky.

The famous live Giulini is still better than this, but that's an unrepeatable moment in the history of musical performance, an artistic miracle that continually leaves you gasping. This performance is far too naturally musical leave you gasping, and such performances are if anything, more valuable. It sounds like a living organism that breathes of its own accord, and there can be no higher aspiration than that. This is more than mere greatness, this is pure music, more Mozart than Mahler.

I've struggled mightily with Don Carlo in the past - it's so gloomy, so long, so humorless, the plot often makes no sense, andthere are so many editions. But I've come to view it as a kind of 'operatic novel', and its bloat is ultimately part of its appeal. Without the dry passages, do not get to those distant places which may represent the high watermark of Verdi's musical imagination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZR53COKyDQ