One Sunday afternoon inAugust 1943 in Carnegie Hall . . .Part 1: The concert

The first page of the concert program from August 15, 1943

[New York Philharmonic Digital Archives]

by Ken

I claimed in the Sunday-into-Monday pre-post "Can we do a better job assembling the three movements of this symphony than, you know, the guy who composed them?" that we would be undertaking "a sort of re-creation" of the August 1943 broadcast concert whose concluding work we heard in its entirety in that pre-post, and I mean the actual performance -- sent out into the airwaves from the stage of Carnegie Hall that Sunday afternoon. Believe it or not, that's just what we're going to do: our concert re-creation, followed by an assortment of, let's say, sidebars.

We're going to hear that performance again, this time properly identified, when we get to that place in the concert, following intermission -- if the word "intermission" can reasonably be applied to an interval specified in the program (as we'll see) as "5 MINUTES." The program, by the way, is just one of a trove of treasures now accessible to all in the New York Philharmonic Digital Archives, where we can also digitally thumb through the score marked up by Leonard Bernstein [right] when he performed and recorded the work in October 1963, early in the second season of Philharmonic Hall, the orchestra's acoustically challenged new Lincoln Center home.


WHILE IT'S ONLY FOR THE CONCERT'S FEATURED WORK . . .

. . . that we're hearing the actual performance from August 15, 1943, I think that for the two works that preceded "intermission" we've got plausible substitutes:

• for the bustling overture that opened the program, a recording made later, in March 1945, by the same conductor, but with the orchestra whose music director he was at that time;
• and for the concerto that followed, a May 1945 NY Phil recording with the same soloist but a different (though equally historic) conductor.

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Fritz Reiner (1888-1963)

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. Columbia, recorded in the Syria Mosque, Pittsburgh, Mar. 26, 1945

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Nathan Milstein (1903-1992)

i. Allegro molto passionato [11:21]
ii. Andante [7:08]
iii. Allegretto non troppo -- Allegro molto vivace [6:12]


Nathan Milstein, violin; New York Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia, recorded in Carnegie Hall, May 16, 1945 (digital transfer by F. Reeder)

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AFTER THAT 5-MINUTE INTERMISSION (again, this
is the actual performance of August 15, 1943) --

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), in the early '40s

SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 54*:
[*Yes, somewhere along the line the opus no. changed from 53 to 54. -- Ed.]
i. Largo
ii. Allegro [at 21:32]
iii. Presto [at 28:10]


New York Philharmonic, Fritz Reiner, cond. Live performance from Carnegie Hall, Aug. 15, 1943


WELL, THAT'S THE CONCERT. NOW ALL THAT'S LEFT . . .

. . . is the "sidebars." Which will come in Part 2, which is nearly ready but not quite. Believe it or not, we're probably going to spend the most time on "The man behind the Colas Breugnon Overture," and the least on the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony, which you might have guessed from last week's post is our principal point of interest in this concert. Well, it is, but the work to be done there goes beyond the scope of mere sidebarring.

And our final sidebar is going to take off from a work that wasn't even included in the August 1943 concert! (Our point of departure is rather the eighth 78-rpm side of the original issue four-disc set containing the Milstein-Walter Mendelssohn E minor Concerto, the side that's not devoted to the concerto.)

Coming soon!

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