Czech in, Czech out
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Comparisons in music are unfair. An ephemeral art cannot be measured and pinned, like a butterfly, to the page without risking mortal damage. Nevertheless, human beings possess critical faculties and spend much of their lives assessing whether A is preferable to B. Not necessarily better, just more apt to present circumstances.
I offer these caveats because I have been listening to Dvorak orchestral works from very different sources…
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
In The Critic here.
Pictured: Dvorak in America.
You’re a lot nicer than I was towards the Stutzman recording. Those tempo manipulations are just wrong! And that’s just one aspect. The orchestra does play extremely well and the recording is quite vivid. Alas, the conducting isn’t on par. This new recording won’t threaten Kubelik, Bernstein, Kondrashin and another I’ve been thrilled with for a long time: Colin Davis and the LSO.
And what about Kertesz? Stunning set of Dvorak symphonies with an incandescent New World.
If we are to discuss favorite recordings of Dvorak’s 9th, let me make a pitch for the grossly underrated Frantisek Stupka, a conductor who stayed in Vaclav Talich’s shadow, but who actually conducted more concerts of the Czech Philharmonic than the maestro himself. Last coupling was with an even more stunning Dvorak 8th. Alas, wretched sound, but by far my favorite versions of each piece.
Other favorites are Silvestri, Celibidache, and Bruno Walter. A recent recording of Gianandrea Noseda with the NSO is very good too, without quite equaling the above-named conductors.
Unnecessary tempo manipulations seem to be an unfortunate feature of Stutzmann’s conducting. Her Tannhauser at Bayreuth was marred in the same way. She seems to be hugely overrated as a conductor.
As far as I know JoAnn Falletta is still music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and has been for 25 years.
Interesting for me in particular. Having been around both conductors this summer, one of the two ‘teams’ laments their conductor’s ability to conduct material unfamiliar to the orchestra, whereas the other has no such misgivings. I’ve worked with both; one has potential, the other beyond reproach.
The czech PO are a great orchestra, and they enjoy playing for Mr. Bychkov, they seem to match emotionaly.
Dvorak is a great symphonist. But sometimes his music suffers from ‘too easy themes’, i.e. too obvious, too naive. But at his best he equals Brahms as in the first two movements of his 7th and the first of the 9th. Especially the 2nd mvt of nr 7 is remarkable because the whole movement sounds as an improvisation, something you will never hear in Brahms. That movement is written in the spirit of Debussy, only in another musical language.
We know that Dvorak’s fame was greatly due to Brahms’ efforts to get Dvorak’s music published, they were friends, and they played their new pieces to each other. Dvorak’s 7th was inspired by two things: the death of his mother which shook him profoundly, and Brahms’ 3rd symphony which the composer played for him when Dvorak visited him in Vienna. He wrote in a letter about that visit, that the symphony was overwhelmingly great, and that it shocked him to find-out that Brahms had lost his religion. ‘Such a great man! And he believes in nothing!’. (My suspicion is that Brahms had just read Schopenhauer’s book.)