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MENGELBERG

BEETHOVEN

Symphony No. 6 "Pastoral"
Symphony No. 7 

Transfers and XR remastering by Andrew Rose

REVIEW
"Another welcome installment in Pristine's live Mengelberg series. Once again, Andrew Rose's XR remastering procedure has opened out the sound very impressively, easily surpassing previous transfers on Philips and Music & Arts.

Mengelberg's "Pastoral" was an incredibly radical conception for its time: light, lean, stripped-down, sharply focused...

Mengelberg's approach to the Seventh was equally original. The first movement is played for precision and weight at a moderate, flexible tempo. His Allegretto is like no one else's in its heavily stylized clarity of legato/staccato articulation, and the contrasting major-mode section is a miracle of coloristic subtlety...."

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PASC 280 - Mengelberg  

Another welcome installment in Pristine's live Mengelberg series. Once again, Andrew Rose's XR remastering procedure has opened out the sound very impressively, easily surpassing previous transfers on Philips and Music & Arts.

Mengelberg's "Pastoral" was an incredibly radical conception for its time: light, lean, stripped-down, sharply focused. As always with Mengelberg (or nearly always), there's a cogent musical rationale for the seeming eccentricities. If his way with the opening at first strikes us as dangerously indulgent, his point is precisely to detach the first four bars as a "frame" for the movement proper, before pouncing on bar 5 with up-tempo zest (Pletnev recently attempted the same thing, not very convincingly, in his erratic cycle with the Russian National Orchestra; among Mengelberg's contemporaries, Mitropoulos was the only one to share his conception of the basic tempo, in his Minneapolis recording from the same year). Clarity and airiness are the watchwords-hear his radically detach� articulation of the second theme, and the incredible definition of the string figures in the closing section. The "Scene by the Brook" is taken as a real four-in-the-bar Andante, with a fluid flexibility of pace and vibrant fullness that he shared with Furtw�ngler, though accomplished within a faster basic pulse. More controversial is his eccentric rewriting of the rhythm in the main theme, resulting in a complex polyrhythmic effect-essentially superimposing a temporary 4/4 on the movement's basic 12/8-that I have never understood the rationale for (he maintains it, though not with complete consistency, throughout the movement). Mengelberg's "Storm" is one of the most amazingly vivid on record, deliberate and unhurried (Beethoven's metronome mark is only 80 here, in contrast to the needless frenzy often whipped up) but with a headlong sweep, controlled ferocity, and subtly nuanced but pungently tangy coloristic range-sul ponticello string chills, sudden glints of brass tone through the downpour. The climax (bars 106 ff.) is overwhelming. The "Shepherd's Hymn" has a (for its time) exhilarating up-tempo buoyancy and detached articulacy, with wonderful forward momentum in the coda, where so many conductors bog down. On the debit side, there are some fussy tempo changes (e.g., his disruptive slamming on of the brakes in bar 32); from the viewpoint of tempo modification, this is one case where Furtw�ngler's more seamless, gradual approach was more convincing.

Mengelberg's approach to the Seventh was equally original. The first movement is played for precision and weight at a moderate, flexible tempo. His Allegretto is like no one else's in its heavily stylized clarity of legato/staccato articulation, and the contrasting major-mode section is a miracle of coloristic subtlety. The Scherzo is unhurried and trenchant; the Trio slow and songful, with much agogic manipulation. The finale is once again notable for its constant modification of the tempo, but here more in terms of a subtle flux than the abrupt gear-changes heard in the "Shepherd's Hymn." There is an extraordinary sense of each of the movement's rhythmic elements leading its own autonomous life-e.g., the way he swings the swirling string lines against the massive, deliberate treatment of the wind-and-timpani punctuations. In comparison to alternative live versions (Mengelberg never made a studio recording of the Seventh), this one is notably slower overall, and more given to flexibility of rhetorical emphasis than those with the Concertgebouw in 1936 (Tahra) and Berlin Radio Orchestra in 1939 (on the British specialist Mengelberg label Archive Documents).     

PASC 280 - Mengelberg

They call him America's greatest native-born violinist and, indeed, Albert Spalding's tone was as richly expressive as any, even by 1951 when he recorded the three Brahms Violin Sonatas with pianist-composer Ern� Dohnanyi. These gripping renditions couldn't be further removed from the sanitised norm we so often hear nowadays. Rather, they reveal a pooled creative impulse, sounding totally improvised, and while neither is what you'd call super-slick, musicality burns from virtually every note. It's a clich� but I'll say it anyway: these are real performances. And Mark Obert-Thorn's expert transfers are well mastered by Pristine Audio. 

PACM 078 - Spalding

The 30-31 July 1947 performance of the Dvorak Violin Concerto by Polish virtuoso Ida Haendel (b. 1928?) has had prior incarnation through the Dutton label in 1999 as CDK 1204, where it appeared in concert with the Tchaikovsky Concerto from 1946 and the Saint-Saens' Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso from 1945, each of those latter collaborations with Basil Cameron. The Pristine restoration by Andrew Rose carries a pungent immediacy; and thus Haendel's strong suit, her blazing attacks, gain in their feral approach to a combination of gypsy and Slavic impulses in the music itself. Conductor Karl Rankl (1898-1968), an Austrian musician who like Haendel embraced British citizenship, generates a natural sympathy in the course of A Minor Concerto, although sonically we could wish the National Symphony woodwinds had more color presence. Haendel's work with the flute solo and French horns in the Adagio of the Concerto proves exemplary in its taste and vocal phraseology. The outer movements with their respective drive and rasping intensity will remind auditors in several aspects of the Milstein approach: virile, robust, grandly scaled.

The Finale perhaps of all three movements reveals the "feminine" character in Haendel's playing, although Rankl's orchestral part continues to vibrate with the rustic energies we know from Dvorak's Slavonic Dance forms. Again, better miking of the National Symphony tympani would have added a distinct power to already colorful approach. The middle section, rife with double notes and high voltage changes in bowing and registration, showcase Haendel's studied approach, which would gain even more vertical acuity after her fateful encounter in the 1950s with Sergiu Celibidache. The lithe athleticism of Haendel's upper register and flute tone, however, quite dazzle even here in 1947, and music lovers can only marvel at her combination of fluid technical virtuosity and absolute comfort in the emotional authority of her conception.

The recordings of Milanese cello virtuoso Enrico Mainardi (1897-1976) have been grudgingly slow to re-enter the main stream; and while this affecting effort in the Cello Concerto from 24 January 1955 with Fritz Lehmann (1904-1956) gives us hopes of further issues, many collectors envision that Mainardi's work with Paul van Kempen will no less warrant restoration. Restoration engineer Andrew Rose has resuscitated a German Heliodor LP with pseudo-stereo effects and done away with all phony sources of separation. Mainardi then reveals himself as a cellist whose style lies somewhere between the older romantic tradition of Casals and the relatively "clean," almost Spartan linear drive of Emanuel Feuermann. Lehmann, working with the Berlin Philharmonic, performed at the height of his powers, although he would die prematurely only a year later. In 1955, the Berlin Philharmonic still reeled emotionally from the loss of their major conductor Wilhelm Furtwaengler, but the discipline remained honed under Karajan, Fricsay, Jochum, Lehmann, and Knappertsbusch.

The scale of Lehmann's orchestral part does not strive for the metaphysical objectivity of Karajan nor the "patient" indulgence of Fricsay, but rather proceeds in a literalist fashion that might remind some auditors of the classic contribution George Szell provided for soloist Casals. The warm sound of the BPO provides a pampered tissue for the long-lined, impassioned declarations and runs from Mainardi. In their intimate moments together, Mainardi and Lehmann manage a chamber-music effect, quite arresting, that segues easily into the martial and more heroic gestures the first movement proffers, especially in its extended coda.  For those who complain of Mainardi's predilection for slow tempos, a potent tonic reveals itself in these pages. On the other hand, Mainardi's old school sensibility in the Adagio yields up thoughtful, exalted moments of meditative beauty bathed in the woodwind miracles of Dvorak's seamless writing. A self-effacing, meticulous approach may not achieve the epic proportions some of our modern virtuosi effect, but Mainardi delivers a Dvorak Concerto intelligent as it is ardent, and the last movement dances and sings with that especial nostalgia the composer imparts when his fairy-tale ethos meets musical ideas that celebrate both his national style and his universality.   

PASC 308 - Beecham