Pre-post to the upcoming post, "Sidebars: (2) Mendelssohn and (4) More Mendelssohn" -- in our series "One Sunday afternoon in August 1943 in Carnegie Hall . . . "

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: Without quite intending it, I wound up giving this "pre-post" an overhaul, especially as regards the sequence of Mendelssohn excerpts at the end, which I'd assembled before posting with a speed that startled me, but at the expense of proper consideration of its explanatory requirements. I think we're way better prepared now to proceed to the post that this pre-post is supposed to set up. I just have to produce it. -- Ken

Columbia Masterworks' ML 4001 (1948), "the first classical long-playing record, and the first 12" LP of any kind" (per Wikipedia), was a rerelease of the May 1945 recording -- issued on 78s the year it was made -- of the Mendelssohn Concerto by Nathan Milstein, Bruno Walter, and the New York Philharmonic, which we first heard two weeks ago as a substitute for Milstein's August 1943 NY Phil broadcast performance with Fritz Reiner.

i. Allegro molto passionato
ii. Andante [at 11:06]
iii. Allegretto non troppo -- Allegro molto vivace [at 18:58]


Nathan Milstein, violin; New York Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia, recorded in Carnegie Hall, May 16, 1945

by Ken

To catch up: We're enmeshed in a series of posts with the overall title "One Sunday afternoon in August 1943 in Carnegie Hall . . . ," which began on Nov. 28 with "Part 1: The concert." Part 2 was originally intended to present a series of "sidebars" to the concert post, which unfortunately turned out to be not amenable to single-post containment. As some readers will recall, the concert in question, by the New York Philharmonic under Fritz Reiner, on August 15, 1943, comprised three works: the Overture to Dmitiri Kabalevsky's first opera, Colas Breugnon; the Mendelssohn E minor Vioiin Concerto, with soloist Nathan Milstein; and the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony.

Last week we got as far as the Colas Breugnon sidebar, "(1) Fun with Dmitri Kabalevsky." (And even that post, I have to own, remains incomplete as of this writring. I haven't yet gotten to the promised follow-up insert music and performance thoughts prompted by the composer-conducted recordings we heard of Kabalevsky's Opp. 48-50: concertos for, respectively, violin, cello (No. 1, of two), and piano (No. 3, of four).

Which brings us to this week's installment, still under construction, with the working title "Sidebars: (2) Mendelssohn and (4) More Mendelssohn," leaving us still with one sidebar to come, "Sidebar (3)," which will take off from our hearing, in the Nov. 28 re-creation of the August 1943 concert, of the actual broadcast performance of the Shostakovich symphony, the work in which I was principally interested when I originally set us off on this post path. (At right we see again, from the New York Philharmonic Digital Archives, the Shostakovich Sixth score Leonard Bernstein marked up, which we can even digitally thumb through, for his 1963 Philharmonic performances and Columbia recording.)


IN OUR 1943 CONCERT RE-CREATION, THE ONLY
PERFORMANCE WE HEARD FROM THE CONCERT --

as it was sent out via radio waves on August 15 -- was that of the Shostakovich Sixth. For the tingling Kabalevsky overture we subbed in a recording that Reiner made in 1945 with "his" orchestra at the time, the Pittsburgh Symphony, a recording that was made the same day that Reiner and the orchestra recorded the Shostakovich Sixth, made in fact for use as the eighth-side 78 filler for the Shostakovich. (We have heard both Reiner performances of the symphony.)

For the Mendelssohn concerto, we took advantage of the fact that as soon as May 1945 Nathan Milstein was back onstage at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic playing the Mendelssohn concerto again, this time with Bruno Walter conducting, and Columbia made the recording that we heard as part of our concert re-creation and just heard again above. (When we get to the post proper we're also going to be hearing at least part of three later Milstein recordings of the Mendelssohn, stretching forward some three decades to 1972, carrying Milstein from age 39 to age 69. (For what it's worth, we still won't have heard, or heard from, anything like all the recordings of the Mendelssohn he made.)

So, "Sidebar (2) Mendelssohn" is designated to focus on emanations from the Violin Concerto. Well, what about "Sidebar (4) More Mendelssohn"?

Ah, right! We're still missing a piece of the puzzle, for which we have to go back to that original 78-rpm issue of the Milstein-Walter Mendelssohn E minor Concerto. You remember we were just talking about odd-side fillers for 78 sets? You know, the way Columbia recorded Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon Overture to occupy the blank eighth side of the 78 set whose first seven sides would contain the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony. Well, Columbia's Milstein-Walter Mendelssohn E minor Concerto would require five 78 sides, so in those same sessions Walter and the NY Phil recorded a Mendelssohn filler for that otherwise-blank sixth side filler: the Scherzo from the Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music.

We've yet to hear that dangling musical participle, but we will. More importantly, though, sets off a whole other strand of musical ponderings that call for sidebar of their own. I mean, anytime you bracket the Mendelssohn E minor Concerto -- and in a moment we're going to break out from the Milstein-Walter recording the concerto's ethereal central Andante -- and the MSND music, it's almost impossible for a person's mind not to range more widely over the composer's legacy, and our whole vast musical legacy. At least if that person happens to be this person.


MAYBE I CAN GIVE YOU A MUSICAL SKETCH OF THE
THOUGHT WAVES EMANATING FROM THE MSND MUSIC

Starting with the aforementioned slow movement of the Violin Concerto:

[1] MENDELSSOHN: Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64:
ii. Andante (including the "Allegretto non troppo" lead-in to the "Allegro molto vivace" of the finale)


Nathan Milstein, violin; New York Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia, recorded in Carnegie Hall, May 16, 1945

[2] MENDELSSOHN: A Midsummer Night's Dream:
Overture, Op. 21

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded in the Herkulessaal, Munich, Nov. 24-26, 1964

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Broadcast performance, May 23, 1969
"Notturno" ("Nocturne"), from the incidental music, Op. 61

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded in the Herkulessaal, Munich, Nov. 24-26, 1964

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Broadcast performance, May 23, 1969

No, we're not hearing the MSND Scherzo yet -- as I said, when the time comes, we will. For our present purposes, the Overture and "Notturno" are the most pertinent MSND selections, and the fact that they have not only different opus numbers but such different opus numbers will figure in our sidebar story. And I thought the story would be enriched by the two sets of performances.

Very different performances, you'll note, but made only five years apart with the same orchestra. And for once when we refer to "the same orchestra" it really is. In 1969, when Otto Klemperer made this guest appearance with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, the orchestra was still very much Rafael Kubelik's. He would remain its music director until his retirement in 1979.

The Kubelik excerpts are from his wonderful 1964 DG LP's worth of MSND incidental music. Longtime readers may recall that I have enormous affection as well as admiration for Kubelik's deep musicianship, and I think both the Overture and the "Notturno" are as beautiful as one would expect them to be from him. (There is in fact about a half-hour's worth Overture rehearsal excerpts that DG issued in a Kubelik commemorative box which I think it would be great fun for us to hear if I can figure out how to present them here.)

Otto Klemperer, meanwhile, another conductor for whom I have extra-special regard, seems to have had a special relationship with the BRSO, judging by the fair number of broadcast performances that have circulated -- and in the case of the Bruckner Fourth Symphony, even been issued commercially, an invaluable supplement to his earlier studio recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra, lovely as it is. It's kind of as if Klemperer thought of the BRSO as his "German" orchestra, from which he drew a weight and, um, tonal gravity different from what he seems to have sought from other orchestras. And he was so often a conductor you could listen to as he pushed beyond the safe terrain other conductors clung to, which seems to me emphatically the case with the MSND excerpts he conducted with the BRSO -- again, a striking contrast with the much earlier EMI recording with the Philharmonia, again lovely as that is.

But we've drifted into the territory of "Sidebar (4)." So let's wrap up this pre-post with one more Mendelssohnian springboard. (And again, its opus number is worth some attention.)

[3] MENDELSSOHN: Octet for Strings in E-flat, Op. 20:
i. Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco

Smetana Quartet (Jiří Novák and Lubomír Kostecký, violins; Milan Škampa, viola; Antonín Kohout, cello); Janáček Quartet (Jiří Trávníček and Adolf Sýkora, violins; Jiří Kratochvíl, viola; Karel Krafka, cello). Westminster, recorded in the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Konzerthaus, June 1959
Cleveland Quartet (Donald Weilerstein and Peter Salaff, violins; Atar Arad, viola; Paul Katz, cello); Meliora Quartet (Ian Swensen and Calvin Wiersma, violins; Maria Lambros, viola; Elizabeth Anderson, cello). Telarc, recorded in Houghton Chapel, Wellesley College (Wellesley, Mass.), Nov. 23-26, 1986
ii. Andante
iii. Scherzo: Allegro leggerissimo
iv. Presto

[separate tracks: ii. 8:12; iii. 4:46; iv. 6:05] Smetana Quartet (Jiří Novák and Lubomír Kostecký, violins; Milan Škampa, viola; Antonín Kohout, cello); Janáček Quartet (Jiří Trávníček and Adolf Sýkora, violins; Jiří Kratochvíl, viola; Karel Krafka, cello). Westminster, recorded in the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Konzerthaus, June 1959
[iii. at 7:25; iv. at 11:58] Melos Ensemble of London: Emanuel Hurwitz, Kenneth Sillito, Ivor McMahon, and Iona Brown, violins; Cecil Aronowitz and Kenneth Essex, violas; Terence Weil and Keith Harvey, cellos. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, January 1968

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