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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: None I listen to.... posted by andy evans on August 13, 2015 at 00:25:40:
. . . is that they've become part of this official Pantheon of Great Recordings, especially as far as listeners and critics in the US are concerned. And, BTW, I agree with you that SOME Szell recordings exhibit this "show and tell" mentality. (I've described it as "schoolmarmish" in other posts.) But in addition, some listeners kind of worship what Szell achieved with the Cleveland Orchestra in terms of orchestral articulation, intonation, etc. SO much that they seem to have stopped their listening right there (with the Szell recordings) and act as if nothing has happened in orchestral playing or interpretation since then. It's as if they want to sit and steep in their nostalgia of the past without caring to investigate anything else that's happened in the musical world since! This is particularly true of vinyl listeners (for obvious reasons!), but let's not go into that right now! ;-)
To give one example of this, there's the famous passage near the beginning of the last movement of Bruckner's Eighth, where the trumpet plays that ascending (Mannheim-rocket-like!) arpeggio. When the Szell recording of this work first came out, many reviewers and listeners were amazed by the absolute clarity and perfect accentuation of this figure on the recording. If you compared this little part with, say, the playing on the first Haitink/Concertgebouw recording (on Philips), the Concertgebouw trumpeter came in a poor second in this respect. But I must say that, overall, I much prefer the tone quality of the Concertgebouw Orchestra (and a few other European orchestras) to that of the Cleveland from the recordings of that time. (And i think even Szell himself commented on this, according to a recollection by Louis Lane.) And in any case, SINCE the Szell recording was issued so many years ago (1969?), MANY other trumpeters on other recordings have achieved comparable levels of clarity and accentuation. Heck, even the recent recording by Remy Ballot and the Upper Austrian Youth Symphony Orchestra exhibits a similar kind of expertise in the playing of this figure.
Of course, this is just a small example. But I think it's typical, and I do wish many listeners would dare to escape the comfortable nostalgia of their older recordings (not that I'm saying that these recordings are bad by any means!) and go out and smell the roses of more contemporary music making too. And finally, that Szell Bruckner Eighth is one of those problematic CBS multi-miked efforts from an engineering point of view that I was talking about (and berating!) in a previous post. In fact, that very same trumpet passage in the Szell Bruckner Eighth may owe at least part of its effect to a spot microphone - which could make it sound more "clear" and impressive, no matter how unnatural it may sound compared to more unprocessed sounding recordings. IOW, this misleading "clarity" is achieved at the expense of a holistic presentation of the orchestral texture as an entity, which was more typical of Szell's earlier (and to my mind far better engineered) recordings on the Epic label.
Finally, I did want to comment on an earlier post about the Szell/Cleveland La Mer and Daphnis recording: I also found that to be a tremendous recording, but I haven't heard it in years, and it seems difficult to get it on CD without a bunch of other stuff I'm not interested in. (Maybe I should have been checking the Japanese catalogs!)
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Follow Ups
- The trouble with some Szell recordings. . . - Chris from Lafayette 10:47:59 08/13/15 (0)
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