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FEUERMANN

in Philadelphia  

Writing "It's all over with Germany . . . all over with Europe," Emanuel Feuermann, who had been a professor at the Berlin Conservatory, joined hundreds of refugees who were able to depart from Nazi Germany, eventually ending up in Austria. He happened to be there at the time of the Anschluss, escaped to Palestine and then, in 1937, to the United States, where he soon found himself making recordings with Jascha Heifetz, Eugene Ormandy, Artur Rubinstein, and Leopold Stokowski. Two of those recordings can be heard on this Pristine Audio CD. These two recordings had previously appeared together on a Biddulph CD during the early 1990s. I thought those CD transfers were very good indeed. One barely noticed the soft hiss of the stylus on the 78s. It is possible that the Biddulph transfer is slightly brighter than this new one on Pristine Audio-here, the surface noise all but vanishes, whether because of different equalization or even better 78-rpm originals, I can't say. In any case, the Biddulph is, at least temporarily, in limbo and there is now only a 1938 Feuermann/Toscanini live performance of Don Quixote that I have never heard as a possible alternative.

As part of my preparation for this review, I auditioned 11 recordings of Don Quixote and six Schelomos. Of the Don Quixotes, the four fastest (this one, Piatigorsky/Reiner, Uhl/Strauss, Wallenstein/Beecham) were all from the 78 era. Is there some conventional wisdom to be inferred from this? Are performances getting slower and, if so, does this have anything to do with the space restrictions of 78-rpm discs? Is this why some repeats were skipped back then, or was it also the concert-hall custom? The other recordings I listened to were conducted by Munch, Karajan, Kempe (Dresden), Levine, Reiner (Chicago), Slatkin, and Ormandy (his fourth one). As it happens, I find much to admire in all the recordings, but-for what little it may be worth-my favorites turned out to be the three slowest ones: Fournier/Karajan, Janigro/Reiner, and Mayes/Ormandy. Interestingly, Feuermann/Ormandy and Uhl/Strauss, the two fastest performances, both timed out at 38:12, although the Feuermann/Ormandy, perhaps because of its higher energy level, seemed faster than the more subdued Uhl/Strauss recording. Not only is the former a tribute to the kind of 78 transfers we can hear nowadays (it's the golden age of 78s!), it also testifies to Victor's mastery of the Academy of Music as a recording venue. It isn't just Stokowski's recordings that sound good. Compare Ormandy's Victor 78s with the dead sound of his early Columbias. There is hardly a significant detail on later recordings of Don Quixote that one can't hear on this one. The fast tempos do not compromise detail and the performance has a kind of sweep and continuity that I can easily see seducing modern listeners.

There is plenty of energy and animation in the performance of Schelomo, too, even if it isn't quite as fast as the Zara Nelsova/Maurice Abravanel recording. Her recording with Ansermet is also pretty fast, and I wonder if her tempos were influenced by her first recording of the piece, which was with Bloch himself (which I haven't heard). As it happens, my favorite Schelomos are the fastest ones, and to Nelsova/Abravanel I would add the two Feuermanns (Leon Barzin and Stokowski). Unfortunately, the Barzin is plagued by some distortion in loud passages, and it's no better than the impassioned, surging Feuermann/Stokowski performance. Once again, the transfer is splendid. There is no need for the Biddulph, terrific as it is, to be reissued as long as we have this one. By the way, I liked all the other Schelomos, too. They were Neikrug/Stokowski, Rostropovich/Bernstein, and Starker/Mehta (but why wasn't it coupled on CD with its LP companion, Voice in the Wilderness? The ways of recording companies are truly mysterious).

Not the least of Feuermann's assets was his gorgeous tone, not necessarily big and fat, but still rich and well focused. He was only 39 when he inexplicably died after an operation to remove hemorrhoids. Among his pallbearers were Mischa Elman, Bronislaw Huberman, Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell, and Arturo Toscanini, who, according to the annotations, broke down and cried, "This is murder."  

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PASC 168

Beautifully sung Zauberflöte; arch-Romantic readings. Often, they work. The opera recording comes from a performance at the 1951 Salzburg Festival. Apparently, Austrian Radio had taped it but destroyed the tapes. These were "off-site" recordings from a broadcast, so the original audio doesn't reach state-of-1951-art levels. Pristine has done what it can, but it hasn't quite eliminated the occasional peak distortion. Unfamiliar with Furtwängler's Mozart, I eagerly looked forward to hearing how he approached two of the composer's best and most effervescent works.

I'll report mixed results. The actual playing of the Vienna Philharmonic is wonderful. Furtwängler brings out inner voices and shapes phrases with care. Some reviewers have found that the conductor emphasizes the spiritual aspects of Zauberflöte, by which they mean the music of Sarastro and the priests as well as of Tamino's trial. In my opinion, the performance fails at precisely those points, and it begins with the overture. Furtwängler sits on the "Masonic" chords so heavily that he can't get anything going in the quicker sections, which, after all, take up most of the time. He slows down both of Sarastro's arias to the point that Josef Greindl can't really sing them: he's too occupied with just making it to the end of the phrase. George Bernard Shaw wrote that these arias were "the only music yet written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God." Furtwängler makes Sarastro sound as if he needs a Feenamint. However, most of the other numbers move fleetly and gracefully. Then again, I'm always a sucker for Papageno and his magic glockenspiel.

For me, the singers really make the performance, usually well-supported by the conductor. They're so good, I was hard-pressed to think of a comparable group of present-day singers. Not only do they produce beautiful sounds, but they possess individual timbres and can act with their voices. Their performances come over the microphone so vividly, you think you can see them on stage. Irmgard Seefried's Pamina will break your heart, she sounds so vulnerable. Wilma Lipp's Queen of the Night has flexibility, power, and, in her revenge aria, such uncannily accurate intonation in her stratospheric runs that she reminded me of Annie Oakley, "Little Miss Sure-Shot." Anton Dermota does well in a part where it's all too easy to phone in a wooden performance. Let's face it -- Tamino's a bit of a stick, a generic prince-hero. Josef Greindl has a beautiful bass, but as I've said, gets stuck in Furtwängler's glacial tempos. As Monostatos, Peter Klein, a singer previously unknown to me, has a flexible tenor with a bit of heft as well as a noteworthy musical intelligence. Indeed, he strikes me as a perfect Mozart tenor. However, the Papageno usually makes a Zauberflöte for me.

The inflation Furtwängler is occasionally subject to infects the Symphony No. 39 with the Berlin Phil, as if ponderousness equaled profundity. This may be my favorite Mozart symphony, with a pyrotechnic excitement and sparkle. These two qualities Furtwängler's performance lacks. The scale is way too big, more suitable to a middle Beethoven symphony. This may be a reaction to the typical Nineteenth-Century opinion of Mozart as a petit maître of "tuneful little ditties" -- a view Shaw fulminated against. Furtwängler seems so defensive about the symphony's worth that he overcompensates, talks way too loudly. Indeed, he blusters. He sees Mozart through late-Romantic lenses -- a titanic hero rather than, in this work, a fabulous comic sensibility.

Pristine attempts to give you not only a clean sound, but a "live" one that conveys the ambience of the venue, mostly in "historic" recordings. Their success depends not only on their technical wizardry, but on the state of the original recording. Again, the Zauberflöte comes from an off-site taping made in the Fifties. The symphony performance comes from an early Forties recording which turned up in Russian archives. The circumstances don't contribute to an ideal result. However, Pristine has done what it can. The problems cited by the engineer, Andrew Rose, have mostly been overcome. Again, traces of fuzz at peak outputs remain in both recordings. I shudder to imagine how much more there was in the originals.