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.
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
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
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
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