TOSCANINI conducts American Music, Volume 1 (1942) - PASC495

Loeffler’s tone poem is peasant dark with an admixture of Russian threnody to which we can add Mussourgskian surge and a sense of evocative romanticism; maybe also a sly reference to Volga Boatmen. Its last movement, commemorating a death, is eerie in the extreme and beautifully extrapolated by Toscanini. Paul Creston’s Choric Dance No. 2 opens quite melodramatically and soon explores rhythmic implications with concentration and vivacity; more an exercise than a totally convincing piece but certainly bracing. This was the première of Morton Gould’s A Lincoln Legend, a piece that opens with contemplative string writing but soon introduces a raft of quotations (John Brown’s Body among a number) in a determinedly vulgar melange – at least I think it’s determinedly vulgar. After the tumultuous Americana we return to the more reflective intimacies that had ushered us in.

The 1942 concert and the first disc conclude here with Rhapsody in Blue in a performance given by Earl Wild. He was the youngest soloist to have played with the orchestra and always wondered why he and not a raft of others had been selected. Wild reminisced elsewhere that he later found out that Toscanini used to listen in to NBC’s chamber concerts on Sunday mornings and had heard Wild there – a more or less humble NBC staffer catapulted to fame. The Rhapsody comes complete with a celebrity clarinettist in the shape of Benny Goodman, soon to test classical waters with the Budapest Quartet but not yet a student of the legendary English player Reginald Kell. His nervousness shows with a fluffed note at a registral change but it’s salutary to hear Goodman’s wailing opening bars. Toscanini unfolds during the performance and Wild is fine though not as idiomatic as he was later to become (especially with Fiedler); the ending is magnificent though and properly conclusive.

Jonathan  Woolf  MusicWeb International, 2004