MENGELBERG The Concertgebouw Telefunken Recordings, Vol. 6 (1942-43) - PASC776

This release concludes Pristine’s six-volume survey of Willem Mengelberg’s complete Telefunken recordings with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, begun in 2021 to mark the 150th anniversary of the conductor’s birth (28 March 1871). Telefunken was the label for which Mengelberg made the bulk of his commercial discs, and they are presented here in chronological order.

This final volume features some of his rarest recordings. The notes for a 1995 Pearl CD release claimed that only two copies of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik were known to exist, while Mengelberg’s recording of Schubert’s “Unfinished” has long been a sought-after holy grail among collectors. These and other rarities have been newly transferred directly from original Telefunken shellac 78s.

Our program begins on April 16, 1942, the day after the session that produced Mengelberg’s remake of the Beethoven Fifth which concluded our previous volume. It opens with three dances from Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust. Although Mengelberg reversed the order of the first two in a concert broadcast eleven months later, the matrix numbers show that Mengelberg recorded the works in the order reproduced here. The “Hungarian March” is given complete, unlike the abbreviated version he recorded for Columbia in 1926 (PASC 595). He then returned to native Dutch composers for the final time on disc with Johan Wagenaar’s overture Cyrano de Bergerac, a work strongly reminiscent of Strauss’s Don Juan. These recordings, as with most of the April 1942 sessions, have the finest sound Telefunken provided for his Concertgebouw discs.

The following day brought Schubert’s Marche Militaire, issued only in a sonically compromised dubbing, presumably to reduce the volume of loud passages to avoid wear, and Brahms’s Tragic Overture. Mengelberg’s broad, brooding reading of the latter contrasts sharply with the propulsive urgency heard in the four earlier recordings by Boult, Beecham, Toscanini, and Mengelberg’s former Cologne Conservatory classmate, Frederick Stock.

The next sessions from November 1942 began with three sides of Beethoven. The first two contain music from The Creatures of Prometheus, including the number whose theme Beethoven later used in the finale of the “Eroica” Symphony. Telefunken did not issue these sides on 78s; they first appeared in dubbed form on Capitol in the early 1950s and are transferred here from a Capitol LP pressing. The rare overture to The Ruins of Athens, originally issued as the filler for Eugen Jochum’s Parsifal “Good Friday Spell,” has been taken from the same LP.

Four days later came Mengelberg’s unusually swift Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Like the Beethoven selections and the two Schubert symphonies recorded seven months later, it suffers from peak distortion at louder moments inherent in the original recording, rather than from disc wear. Given Telefunken’s excellent results in April, this is puzzling. Because the distortion resembles that sometimes heard on early magnetic tape, I suspect these final sessions may have been recorded on tape and dubbed to wax masters. Due to the destruction of Telefunken’s archives in a 1950s Elbe River flood, we may never know.

Mengelberg’s final sessions, held over two days in June 1943, focused on Schubert’s last two symphonies. The “Great” C Major came first, appropriately enough since it was still generally known as the Seventh. Mengelberg again confounds expectations, taking a faster-than-usual introduction in the first movement but more measured tempi in the third. The uncut third movement was spread over three sides, with its da capo repeat requiring the listener to replay the opening side*. The luftpause I have left before the trio follows Mengelberg’s December 1940 live broadcast.

In the “Unfinished,” critic Rob Cowan has noted that the exposition repeat heard in Mengelberg’s November 1939 broadcast is omitted here, while the string portamenti are more restrained. Previous transfers relied on tape dubs of discs from a private collector and a Dutch archive. For this edition, I worked directly from a complete original 78 set, supplemented by two single discs from other sets, in the hope of achieving better results.

Mark Obert-Thorn

*From the matrix sequence, it appears that a separate final side of the Scherzo was recorded but not issued in order to save an extra disc.