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His only recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic in new Obert-Thorn transfers
Producer's Note The two works on this release – Mengelberg’s only recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic – came about as a result of a pair of concerts celebrating the centenary of Tchaikovsky’s birth, which were held in the Philharmonie on Friday and Saturday, July 5th and 6th, 1940. (The concerts began with the composer’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, which was not subsequently recorded.) The following Monday, Telefunken engineers took down the symphony and, the next day, the concerto. While the latter, played with Edwin Fischer pupil Conrad Hansen, was new to Mengelberg’s discography, he had previously recorded the symphony with his own Concertgebouw Orchestra (the two middle movements alone in 1927, followed by a complete recording the next year). Carried over from the earlier recording are the cuts in the last movement of the symphony, both in the development section and in the lead-up to the final peroration. Mengelberg cited the claim of Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer’s brother, that in his final performances of the work, the composer had made these cuts, wanting to tighten the structure of the movement. The present performance differs from the earlier recording, however, in the BPO’s reticence with regard to applying string portamenti, which only really surface during the second movement of the symphony (and there, only sparingly). In addition, although the timings of the first, third and fourth movements are slightly longer in the BPO version, the second movement is over a minute longer in the 1928 Concertgebouw recording. This was probably a function of Telefunken’s desire to fit the symphony on 12 sides rather than the 13 Columbia allotted to the earlier version, which featured the second movement on four sides rather than the three given here. (Timing considerations probably also account for the elimination of most of the first movement cadenza in the concerto.) The sources used for the transfers were German Telefunken 78s except for Side 7 of the concerto, which came from a Czech Ultraphon set. Mark Obert-Thorn
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Willem Mengelberg Biographical notes from Wikipedia
Joseph Willem Mengelberg (28 March 1871 – 21 March 1951) was a Dutch conductor.
Mengelberg was the fourth in fifteen children of German-born parents in Utrecht, Netherlands. He studied in the Cologne conservatory, including piano and composition and was chosen as General Music Director at age 21 of the city of Lucerne Switzerland, where he conducted an orchestra and a choir, directed a music school, taught piano lessons and continued to compose. Mengelberg is renowned for his work as the principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1895 to 1945. In addition, Mengelberg founded the long-standing Mahler tradition of the Concertgebouw. In 1902 he met Gustav Mahler and became friends with him. Mengelberg was instrumental in introducing most of Mahler's work to The Netherlands, and Mahler regularly visited The Netherlands to introduce his work to Dutch audiences. In fact, he edited some of his symphonies while in the Netherlands, making them sound better for the acoustics of the Concertgebouw. This is perhaps one reason that this concert hall and its orchestra is renowned for its Mahler tradition. Nevertheless, Mengelberg's importance as a conductor was not only due to his Mahler interpretations. He was also, for example, an exceptionally gifted performer of Richard Strauss; and even today his recordings of Strauss's tone poem Ein Heldenleben, which had been dedicated to him and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, are widely regarded by critics as among the best — if not the very best — of this piece ever made. One criticism of Mengelberg's influence over Dutch musical life, most clearly articulated by the composer Willem Pijper, was that Mengelberg did not particularly champion Dutch composers during his Concertgebouw tenure, especially after 1920. Mengelberg was music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1922 to 1928. Beginning in January 1926, he shared the podium with Arturo Toscanini; Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs has documented that Mengelberg and Toscanini clashed over interpretations of music and even rehearsal techniques, creating division among the musicians that eventually resulted in Mengelberg leaving the orchestra. However, the maestro did make a series of recordings with the Philharmonic for both the Victor Talking Machine Company and Brunswick Records, including a 1928 electrical recording of Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben that was later reissued on LP and CD. One of his first electrical recordings, for Victor, was a two-disc set devoted to A Victory Ball by Ernest Schelling. The most controversial aspect of Mengelberg's biography centers around his actions and behavior during the years of the Nazi occupation of Holland between 1940 and 1945. Some newspaper articles of the time gave the appearance that he acquiesced to the presence of the Nazi's ideological restrictions on particular composers. Explanations have ranged from political naiveté in general, to a general "blind spot" of criticism of anything German, given his own ancestry. Because of Mengelberg's co-operation with the occupying regime in The Netherlands during World War II, he was banned from conducting in the country by the Dutch government after the war in 1945. He was stripped of his honours and his passport. The original judgment was that Mengelberg would be banned from conducting in the Netherlands for the remainder of his life. Appeals by his attorneys led to a reduction in the sentence to a banning of six years from conducting, retroactively applied to start from 1945. This notwithstanding, he continued to draw a pension from the orchestra until 1949 when cut off by the city council of Amsterdam. Mengelberg retreated in exile to Zuort, Sent, Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1951, just two months before the expiration of his exile order. Willem Mengelberg was the uncle of the musicologist and composer Rudolf Mengelberg and of the conductor, composer and critic Karel Mengelberg, who was himself the father of the improvising pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg.
Recorded Legacy In addition to his acclaimed recordings of Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben, Mengelberg left valuable discs of symphonies by Beethoven and Brahms, not to mention a wildly controversial but gripping reading of Bach's St Matthew Passion. His most characteristic performances are marked by a tremendous expressiveness and freedom of tempo, perhaps most remarkable in his recording of Mahler's Fourth Symphony but certainly present in the aforementioned St Matthew Passion and other performances as well. These qualities, shared (perhaps to a lesser extent) by only a handful of other conductors of the era of sound recording, such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Leonard Bernstein, make much of his work unusually controversial among classical music listeners; recordings that more mainstream listeners consider unlistenable will be hailed by others as among the greatest recordings ever made. Many of his recorded performances, including some live concerts in Amsterdam during World War II, have been reissued on LP and CD. While he was known for his recordings of the German repertoire, Capitol Records issued a powerful, nearly high fidelity recording of Cesar Franck's Symphony in D minor, recorded in the 1940s by Telefunken with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Due to the Dutch government's six-year ban on Mengelberg's conducting activities, he made no more recordings after 1945. Some of his performances in Amsterdam were recorded on the innovative German tape recorder, the Magnetophon, resulting in unusually high fidelity for the time. Sound films of Mengelberg conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra, during live concerts in Amsterdam, have survived. Among these are a 1931 performance of Karl Maria von Weber's Oberon overture and a 1939 performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion.
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Mengelberg
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