Competition #1 

Composer Competition 

Winner: Mr. Chris Grounds of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, whose box of 8 CDs will be on its way next week.

Competition #2

Beuron Recording Search 

i've received a number of offers of this recording and will be sifting through the various e-mails and contacting everyone who responded shortly. The prize will be awarded in due course!

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Mitropoulos 

Mendelssohn  

Symphonies 1 & 3 

Gould Philharmonic Waltzes  

New York Philharmonic

1950/53   

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PASC 187 

This is exciting. We have an almost unknown conductor, little known recordings, including a major symphonic statement, first class Polydor pressings, and splendid restorations by Mark Obert-Thorn.

The conductor is Alexander Kitschin, about whom almost nothing is known. He was married to soprano Xenia Belmas, and - I'm reliant on the brief notes for my information - he emigrated to Germany with her from the Soviet Union in 1921. They moved to South Africa in 1938. He accompanied her on some vocal discs in Berlin, as well as these three orchestral outings. All were made in Berlin, and even here there's been some debate as to attribution. The Tchaikovsky Symphony is label-credited to 'The Opera-Orchestra, Berlin' but it's been ascribed elsewhere to the Berlin-Charlottenburg Opera Orchestra. Obert-Thorn thinks it's actually the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, who recorded the work two years later for Leo Blech, who ironically later trod the same journey as Kitschin, only in reverse, ending up in Russia.

Kitschin's conducting ethos, on the basis of the symphony in particular, might be generally likened to such outsize individualists as Mengelberg, Coates, Stokowski, and Golovanov. In another twist, I assume he was living in South Africa at around the same time as Albert Coates, whose conducting his so resembles, so maybe some trace remains of him there, as some recorded traces do of Coates in broadcast performances.

I don't think I've ever heard the Fifth open in such a way as here; a doleful, trudging, hugely introspective tempo, but one that is, amazingly, just about sustained through the opening paragraphs. Thenceforth we are treated to a remarkable display of personalised music making - powerful moments when the music stop-starts, slows down, speeds up. Rhythms are hugely flexible, and things are taken to phrasal and expressive limits. The slow movement is not especially slow in any way, but as throughout it's the variety of phrasing and of orchestral colour that lends this performance its strategic purpose. He encourages distinctive wind playing and phrasing, and brings the orchestra along with him to a remarkable degree. There are cuts in the finale but these were, I think, not unusual at the time and even later conductors, such as Schmidt-Isserstedt and Sargent, used them. If you've had the good fortune to hear Coates's 1922 traversal of the symphony you will certainly note a kind of kinship of interpretation. What is undeniable is the flair, excitement, and extremes generated by this unknown conductor.

As a bonus we have Glazunov's Stenka Razin, in a purposeful, powerful traversal, and the '1812', with the full-blooded contribution of the Ural Cossacks Choir.

These set the seal on a rather amazing disc.  

PASC 268 - Kitschin 

It's a funny thing; I've had Robert Casadesus on the brain lately. A couple of recent releases of Mozart concertos performed by current pianists elicited recollections of a number of LPs I once had of Casadesus and Szell performing Mozart's last half-dozen or so piano concertos, some with the Cleveland Orchestra, others with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Those LPs are long gone from my collection, and I never replaced them with their CD reincarnations, but I believe something more than simple nostalgia was at work in triggering my memory of those recordings. Casadesus and Szell, I think, had a special rapport with each other and with Mozart.

Pristine Audio, as readers will know from previous reviews, is a high-end audiophile enterprise dedicated to the remastering of older and in some cases historical recordings. The magic of the company's XR process has been applied here to these 1959 studio stereo recordings with unbelievable results.

In approaching these readings, one must begin by setting aside prevailing notions about modern-performance practices, for in the years that have passed since these recordings were made attitudes have changed drastically with regard to how music of the 18th and early 19th centuries ought to be performed. Unless one takes that into account, these readings are bound to sound regressive. The first thing you will notice, for example, is the fairly deliberate tempo at which the first movement of the C-Major Concerto proceeds. There's not much "brio" in this Beethoven "Allegro con ... ." You will also notice a sense of earnestness, even perhaps solemnity, in the interpretational posture that says, "I'm Beethoven, and I'm important."

But there are other things to note here as well. You will hear one of the world's great orchestras in its prime under the baton of arguably its greatest conductor after Mengelberg, Eduard van Beinum. There's a rhythmic exactness, almost of military precision, to the entrances and volleying exchanges between winds and brass, with all of the orchestral choirs dynamically balanced and perfectly in sync. It may be hard to believe, but I absolutely guarantee that you will hear in this 52-year-old recording the inner clockwork moving parts of this timepiece as you've never heard them, that's how meticulous the playing is and how revealing Pristine's restoration.

Now Casadesus makes his entrance, at first as unassuming and unpretentious as van Beinum's exposition was confident and proud. It's obvious that Casadesus sees Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 (actually his second in order of composition) as an extension of Mozart's final essays in the form. Casadesus's runs are strands of pearls and his passagework precisely weighted. The pianist plays his own cadenzas, which in the case of the First Concerto is a bit shorter and more modest than Beethoven's own, but draws upon some of the composer's familiar material and is eminently well-suited to the score. As for Casadesus's cadenza to the Fourth Concerto, I'll comment later.

Contrary to expectations, the second movement moves along at a pace rather more animated than the marked Largo. In fact, just for grins, I checked Casadesus against the recent Paul Lewis, and found that Casadesus is even faster than I thought-8:44 to Lewis's 11:41. That's an astonishing difference, but it further illustrates what I said above about the pianist seeing this early Beethoven concerto as having its roots in Mozart, for none of the slow movements in Mozart's last eight concertos has a tempo marking any slower than Larghetto. Casadesus's finale is filled with boisterous fun, proving he can hiccup and guffaw as well as anyone in this puckish movement.

If I'm a little less sanguine about van Beinum's and Casadesus's reading of the Fourth Concerto, it's because I hold it apart from Beethoven's other piano concertos not only as unique and the most extraordinary among them but as a work that, for me, has very special communicative powers. Therefore, I tend to seek in this score a feeling of radiance and rapture and a sense of the exalted. Till Fellner with Kent Nagano leading the Montreal Symphony Orchestra on an ECM recording captured those feelings, and deservedly made my 2010 Want List. The aforementioned Paul Lewis with Jiří Bělohlávek and the BBC Symphony Orchestra on Harmonia Mundi was a close runner-up.

If the first movement of the C-Major Concerto was on the slowish side, downplaying the "con brio," the first movement of the G-Major Concerto is on the fast side, tending to ignore the "moderato" of Beethoven's Allegro. The result sounds a bit perfunctory. Casadesus doesn't stumble once in any of the movement's tricky passagework, sounding nimble-fingered throughout, but the beautiful rippling effects, so different from the scales and arpeggios in the other concertos, and so much a part of the music's ecstasy, tend to be sacrificed at the altar of virtuosic display.

As for Casadesus's cadenza to the Fourth Concerto, fitting as it may be stylewise, it's no proxy for the first of Beethoven's own cadenzas. Nothing in my mind can substitute for those shocking 16th- and eighth-note chords in the left hand that cross the right hand in the concluding measures. The composer's cadenza is such a bold, original stroke, I'm tempted to say that it ought to be considered as much a fixed and irreplaceable part of the score as is the cadenza in the "Emperor" Concerto.

In the second movement, Casadesus and van Beinum don't quite see eye to eye, though technically Casadesus is probably closer to the mark. It's customary-as it already was 52 years ago when this recording was made-to heighten the drama of this movement by taking it rather slower than Beethoven's Andante con moto marking, sustaining the phrases and making the music sound foreboding. Van Beinum observes the tradition, beginning with portentously drawn-out gestures, the way I think we're mostly accustomed to hearing it. Forget the "con moto"; it's not even Andante. But as soon as Casadesus enters, you can feel him pressing forward. He wants to reestablish Beethoven's original tempo marking. And so we have a bit of a tug-of-war going on here between the podium and the piano, with the conductor slowing down for each entrance and the pianist speeding up. In the end, it all comes out in the wash because as the movement progresses the entrances grow closer together until they finally converge, at which point agreement is reached. The concluding Rondo vivace is nicely done, except for Casadesus's cadenza, which goes a bit bonkers toward the end.

While neither of these performances would be my first choice in these concertos, anyone harboring the slightest doubt about Casadesus's artistry really needs to hear this release. And that brings me finally to the recording, a triumph of modern digital technology. If only Bob Rose [sic] of Pristine Audio could figure out a way to use his XR remastering technique to rejuvenate the aged, he'd be celebrated and sainted for discovering the fountain of youth. Whatever reservations I may have about these performances, I cannot bring myself to believe I am listening to recordings made over a half-century ago. But they were indeed transferred from stereo test pressings made for Philips LP SABL 118. Recommended then as both a tribute to a great pianist and an amazing audio experience.  

PASC 243 Casadesus