Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra: Sibelius and Beethoven's Fidelio
and some remarks on the present state of classical recordings
By: Michael Miller - Apr 18, 2007
Sibelius: Pohjola's Daughter (1906)
James Mallinson Producer
Jonathan Stokes for Classic Sound Ltd Balance engineer
LSO Live 0605
Pohjola's Daughter recorded live on 18 September and 9 October 2005
Symphony No 2 recorded live on 27 September 2006
In my review of the recent Boston performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, I gave special attention to the nature of concert performances of opera, which are becoming a major presence at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. It is instructive that James Levine, who has had so many years' experience in the opera pit, sees the value of a more controlled environment for Beethoven's only opera, with its complex orchestral textures and strenuous vocal parts. An opera recording is an even more rarified experience, which allows us to experience opera at home in an environment which can be almost entirely free of the distractions of an opera house or concert hall, if we are willing and able to achieve it amidst the daily bustle of our families and neighbors. By now we have over fifty years of modern recordings, hundreds of them, made under studio conditions with batteries of microphones, mixers, and the ability to edit flaws or to combine segments of different takes in order to achieve an ideal result. Recording producer John Culshaw's book, Ring Resounding, his account of his seven-year project of making the first complete recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle is still compelling reading, as is the recording itself, but today we tend to value more the technically inferior radio tapes of Knappertsbusch's and Krauss' Bayreuth performances of the same era, or Furtwängler's from Milan or Rome. Studio performances with their focus on detail and musical decisions based on the aesthetics of a performance which will be heard repeatedly most often lack the most essential quality of music as it is brought to life in performance, the excitement of a musical event, occurring in our immediate presence with our silent participation. It may be passive in some respects, but it is still participation. Over the past fifteen or twenty years more and more opera recordings are made from actual performances in the house, partly for economic reasons, but also because that is what the consumers of these products most value. Since this is my first CD review for Berkshire Fine Arts, I think I should say a little more about recordings in general.
Playing a recording is such a mundane activity, that we take it mostly for granted, without thinking about how the mechnical reproduction and storage of the music and the circumstances of how we enjoy it affect how we listen, how we receive the music. Recordings have made it much easier to compare one performance to another, and a whole branch of journalism has arisen around the consumer culture of classical recordings. When music exists as an array of partly identical, partly different consumer objects which can be compared and rated according to their desirability as a purchase, people begin to think in categories of bad, good, better, best, which are inherently alien to the nature of music-making. Conversely, quite a lot has been said about how recordings have affected musicians' playing, often for the worse.
Recordings have made opera audiences, who have always tended towards the fanatical, into obsessive historians. Even a bad recording of some mythic event in the opera house is eagerly sought after. Today many of these are in the public domain and are relatively easy to find. We can no longer enjoy illicit pleasure of seeking out a connection to Edward J. Smith, the maker of the "Golden Age of Opera" recordings, or digging through the bins at the back of Patelson's or at Discophile to find one of Callas' stage performances, or Furtwängler's Ring, or Flagstad singing Leonore at the Metropolitan Opera under Bruno Walter, or under Furtwängler in Vienna in 1950, most in quite listenable sound nowadays, and bound to improve, given the impressive advances in sound restoration technology, which just recently made a significant leap forward in an exciting breakthrough developed by Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio. In its own way, enlivened by a thrill of the hunt not unlike art collecting, this historicism inherently encourages a tendency to praise past times.
This circulation of broadcast recordings, however, obviously went on outside the main distribution system, where the major companies which recorded opera were limited by the circle of artists and orchestras they had under contract, raising a further obstacle to the preservation of a great night in the house. The economic pressures on the record industry and its consequent decline have been, in their way, liberating. Rather than face the daunting expense of recording in the studio, they are forced to pick up live performances as they are created. A 2005 EMI recording of Tristan and Isolde with, as Tristan, a 63-year-old Placido Domingo, who never sang the role on stage, was touted as "possibly" the last of the great studio recordings of opera. Many will be happy to see the last of them. I haven't heard this recording, so I can't comment on it.
Another unexpected blessing of the decline of the big record companies is the way in which musicians have taken over recording and distributing their own work. The London Symphony Orchestra through their label, LSO Live, has been one of the leaders in this promising new trend, beginning in 2000, and they have set a new standard for orchestral. All of the releases I have heard show the presence, clarity, and balance of the best audiophile recordings. Using straightforward pickups and the highest technical standards, most of the recordings are of live performances of the LSO with a variety of the distinguished conductors who have led them in recent years, among others André Previn, Mstislav Rostropovich, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Bernard Haitink, and above all, their former Principle Conductor, now President, Sir Colin Davis. While the music they have recorded can be considered pretty much basic repertory, there is a substantial reason for every recording. The symphonic repertory has been released in cycles: Shostakovich under Rostropovich, Tchaikovsky and other Russian music under Rozhdestvensky, Brahms and Beethoven symphonies under Haitink; Colin Davis has produced his second or even third recordings of the particular repertory to which he has been devoted for many years: Elgar (including Anthony Payne's reconstruction of the incomplete Third Symphony), Sibelius, Berlioz, as well as Smetana, Dvorak's Symphonies 6-9, Verdi's Falstaff, Britten's Peter Grimes, and now Beethoven's Fidelio. The earlier recordings are mostly available either in CD or the more expensive SACD format, while the more recent recordings are released as hybrid CD/SACDs. All titles are also available for download in high-quality compressed files from the LSO Live site, iTunes, or eMusic. Both the Sibelius and the Fidelio recordings discussed here include stereo and surround-sound mixes. I have only listened to them in stereo, and the single technical defect I found in the recordings, which I mention in my discussion of Fidelio, may be the result of some problem in phasing, resulting from this dual format.
LSO Live is not the only enterprise in which musicians are releasing their work on CD. The superb piano-cello duo David Finckel and Wu Han, who are both very much in the mainstream of American chamber music, not only through their own playing, but as Artistic Directors of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (David Finckel is also well-known as the cellist of the Emerson Quartet.) have been releasing their own recordings through their company ArtistLed, but that is a subject for another occasion. So are the Web sites which are offering classical music for download—an appealing idea, I think. I've never quite come to terms with CDs as physical objects, with their self-destructing jewel boxes and awkward size, both too small and too large at once. I look forward to the day when I can keep my entire record collection on a portable hard drive of enormous capacity, or a hypertrophied iPod.
*
I have no doubt that Sir Colin is one of the great conductors of our time, but his pre-eminence and passion emerge most vividly when he is representing a composer in whom he has a deep commitment. He has been one of the great champions of Berlioz, and of Sibelius, beginning in the late sixties, when the composer was becoming unfashionable. Typical of Sir Colin was a Ring Cycle he conducted at Covent Garden in the late 1970s—I can't understand why he hasn't returned to it. As a whole the cycle was very fine, but Siegfried really shone as an interpretation of genius. The brilliant sonorities of Wagner's orchestration, his maturing harmony, and the brilliant sonorities of its final scene inspired Sir Colin as nothing else. Likewise, his 1993 performance of Les Troyens at the Barbican will remain in my memory as one of my most powerful musical experiences, not just because of his carefully selected cast and meticulous preparation of the enormous score, but because he undertook it in the absolute conviction that it is one of the greatest achievements in musical drama, and his ambition to convince the audience of the truth of this belief was, as far as I could see, magnificently successful. Fortunately, the 2000 revival was issued by LSO Live as part of Sir Colin's Berlioz cycle.
The LSO Live's latest release is typical, the current installment in Sir Colin's Sibelius cycle, his third recorded traversal of the works with orchestra. This release pairs Pohjola's Daughter with the Second Symphony. The Second is by far the most popular and accessible of Sibelius's symphonies, and around seventy recordings are currently available, most of which are worth hearing. A Sibelius lover, whether passionate or finicky, could find several to live with, but I never heard any more affecting and persuasive than this. It begins with Sir Colin's years of study and advocacy of Sibelius and his total absorption in the musical, narrative, and atmospheric qualities of the symphonic poem and the absolute music of the symphony. The London Symphony's playing shows musicianship close to the very best we have today—sensitive dynamics, precise articulation, thorough preparation, together with the spontaneity of a live performance. Producer James Mallinson and balance engineer Jonathan Stokes of Classic Sound Ltd. have provided a recording with all the dynamic range one could ask for, and, most importantly a natural sonic space, in which every instrument and body of instruments has a secure and natural position. Whichever recordings you may already have, Koussevitzky's, Szell's, Beecham's, Bernstein's, Horenstein's, or Sanderling's, for example, you will want this one too.
Web: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~mjm11/index.html
Contact: michaeljames48@gmail.com