This week we celebrate on the 104th birthday on yesterday of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.

"Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. Considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time, he was the first American conductor to receive international acclaim. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history". Bernstein was the recipient of many honors, including seven Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, sixteen Grammy Awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Kennedy Center Honor.

As a composer he wrote in many genres, including symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and works for the piano. His best-known work is the Broadway musical West Side Story, which continues to be regularly performed worldwide, and has been adapted into two (1961 and 2021) feature films. His works include three symphonies, Chichester Psalms, Serenade after Plato's "Symposium", the original score for the film On the Waterfront, and theater works including On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide, and his MASS.

Bernstein was the first American-born conductor to lead a major American symphony orchestra. He was music director of the New York Philharmonic and conducted the world's major orchestras, generating a significant legacy of audio and video recordings. He was also a critical figure in the modern revival of the music of Gustav Mahler, in whose music he was most passionately interested. A skilled pianist, he often conducted piano concertos from the keyboard. He was the first conductor to share and explore music on television with a mass audience. Through dozens of national and international broadcasts, including the Emmy Award–winning Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, he made even the most rigorous elements of classical music an adventure in which everyone could join. Through his educational efforts, including several books and the creation of two major international music festivals, he influenced several generations of young musicians.

A lifelong humanitarian, Bernstein worked in support of civil rights; protested against the Vietnam War; advocated nuclear disarmament; raised money for HIV/AIDS research and awareness; and engaged in multiple international initiatives for human rights and world peace. Near the end of his life, he conducted an historic performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. The concert was televised live, worldwide, on Christmas Day, 1989." - Wikipedia

For the next week there is an automatic 10% discount on all our recordings of music played and conducted by Bernstein, of which there are 4 to choose from, listed here.

Make sure you see it applied before proceeding to final payment as we cannot apply any discounts retrospectively. Happy listening!

As is well known, Vaughan Williams created his Sinfonia antartica out of the film score he created for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic. Greatly moved by its subject matter, the composer actually wrote some 996 bars of music before receiving the actual film script. Only about half of that music made its way into the film, but RVW was by then already contemplating writing a symphony with the whole. Due to work on other projects, notably completion of his opera The Pilgrim’s Progress after 45 years’ gestation, the symphony was not finished until early 1952. RVW dedicated it to Kelville Ernst Irving (1878–1953), the veteran theater director and music director at Ealing Studios, who had commissioned the film score. The premiere was given by John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra and Choir, with soprano Margaret Ritchie, on 14 January 1953; performances in London, Chicago, and Sydney followed soon thereafter. The initial reviews, all extremely favorable, dovetailed in making much the same points: comparison to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony as a programmatic yet truly symphonic depiction of nature; a breaking of new stylistic ground by an octogenarian composer at the height of his creative powers, whose creativity continued to evolve; the work’s unconventional structure; the extremely colorful orchestration, with use of organ, vibraphone, and wind machine; and the virtuoso execution by the performers.

By contrast, the Symphony No. 8, composed in 1953–55 and premiered on 2 May 1956 by the same conductor and orchestra and dedicated to the former (“For Glorious John”), although received enthusiastically by its first audiences, provoked widely divided reactions from critics. Whereas RVW’s first seven symphonies were all considered to have explicit or implicit programs, for the first time he was seen to be offering a purely abstract work in that genre. Somewhat provocatively, he described the first movements as “seven variations in search of a theme” and said that the work utilized “a large supply of extra percussion, including all the 'phones and 'spiels known to the composer.” The negative notices duly seized upon these details to fault the work for deficit of form, dearth of inspiration, and reliance upon gimmickry.

Writing in The Manchester Guardian (May 3), Colin Mason charged that “the new symphony does not quite satisfy as a complete musical form.” While offering guarded praise for the first three movements, he excoriated the finale: “[T]he clattering din of the last movement, in which the whole percussion array is in action almost throughout, has no justification as a resolution of what has gone before, nor any in relation to the real musical content of the movement itself, which would have been more satisfying without this added noise, the only effect of which is to draw attention to the flimsiness and poverty of the material. This is the weakest movement in the symphony, at the bottom of the decline the work describes in its progress from first movement to last, a slight decline through the first three movements and a very steep one in the last.” Writing in The Observer (May 6), Peter Heyworth patronizingly characterized the piece as “a relatively slight affair. But just because it is so unpretending, it leaves in the main a pleasing impression,” and then damned not only the finale but the composer’s competence: “In the finale … he unlooses an orchestral tornado which sweeps up every hitting instrument within reach…. But this orgy is as unaccomplished as it is inappropriate. The trouble is that in matters of orchestral virtuosity Dr. Vaughan Williams remains an invincible amateur…. [I]t was just as well that Ravel was not present at the Free Trade Hall to hear what his old pupil was up to.” By contrast, Felix Aprahamian in The Times (May 6) declared: “From first to last, every bar of this admirably transparent score bears the hall-mark "R.V.W." This eighth symphony may well become the most loved and popular of the series.” Also in The Times (May 15), Frank Howes found that the summary statement of the finale’s chief themes “carries the argument to a satisfactory conclusion” and that a repeat hearing “removed some doubts” about the first movement as well.

In these two symphonies only, Boult’s recordings were not disc premieres, as the world premiere performers waxed them a few months earlier for HMV and Pye Nixa, respectively. The broadcast of the world premiere performance of the Eighth also has been released. Soprano Margaret Ritchie appears in both versions of the Sinfonia antartica, with Boult’s rendition adding readings by Sir John Gielgud of the prefatory quotations to each movement, a practice adopted by only five of seventeen recordings of that work released to date.

Andrew Rose is remastering for Pristine the first recorded cycle of Vaughan Williams’s symphonies, which was made in the early 1950s for Decca by Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic. This is Volume 2. For many collectors these landmark recordings remain the definitive choice, and Pristine’s XR process is giving them new life. The added ambience in no way diminishes the clarity of the originals; the overall effect is richer and warmer.

Boult made a later stereo cycle for EMI with the same London Philharmonic, which was also well received, but I have always found his first cycle a bit tauter and more firmly shaped. Boult lived for many years with this music, for which he was a fervent advocate, and he was extremely close to the composer. The task of a conductor in these works is to find a balance between what some have derided as the “Cow Pat” school of English Pastoralism and the music’s energy and drama. The origin of the denigration is the often quoted quip that Vaughan Williams’s music “is all just a little too much like a cow looking over a gate.” The attribution is usually given to Peter Warlock (the other possibility is Constant Lambert), but the jibe is an unfair generalization (and Warlock actually admired Vaughan Williams’s music).

Still, one cannot deny that there are passages in many of the symphonies that could fit such a description. Boult’s success is in maintaining a firm enough pulse to keep the music from sagging, and in his ability to integrate the gentle, lyrical episodes with the bigger, more extroverted statements, particularly in the “London” Symphony. There are many shifts in the score, changes of tempo or dynamics, but Boult never loses the shape of the music, thanks to the careful way he gauges each shift. I love Barbirolli’s way with this music too, but Boult’s extra crispness serves these two symphonies well.

A London Symphony, later No. 2—Vaughan Williams didn’t number his first three symphonies—is one of his most frequently performed and has established a place, if not at the center of the international repertoire, at least not on its outer fringes either. That is less true for A Pastoral Symphony, later No. 3. The reason may partly be economics, since a performance requires engaging a soprano soloist for the last movement, but I suspect the more important factor is that for almost all of its 35-minute duration, the music is soft and slow (like Parsifal without the jokes). It was exactly the kind of music that gave rise to the “Cow Pat” remark.

But the symphony is certainly not a description of the English countryside. Reflecting on his service as a medical orderly in World War I, Vaughan Williams later commented on the symphony, “It’s really war time music—a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Écoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset—it’s not really lambkins frisking as most people take for granted.” Boult finds the anguish and tragedy that inhabits the textures of this symphony, once more by extremely careful control of color and balances. Margaret Ritchie sings the wordless lament of the finale beautifully, and Boult makes sure that the score’s uneasy harmonies are not minimized.

In both works the London Philharmonic Orchestra plays with devotion and great care. There are brief, unimportant moments of imprecision, but the performance overall gets at the core of this music. I have long owned and treasured the Belart CD transfers of the original Decca LPs. Pristine has provided a significantly superior edition, and I look forward to the remainder of the cycle.

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

conducted by Sir Adrian Boult

I reviewed the first two volumes in this ongoing series (for which I am also writing the liner notes gratis), comprising Symphonies Nos. 1–3, in Fanfare 45:6 and 46:1. As before, Rose once again has magnificently realized the full sonic potentialities inherent in the original source materials over previous issues by Decca, Decca Eloquence, and Belart. One only need hear the pungent opening discords of the Fourth Symphony to gain an immediate appreciation of the difference. The originally somewhat tinny, treble-biased sound of prior versions now is fully rounded out, gaining far greater power, weight, and fullness. Likewise, the walking bass line that opens the second movement now has a firm, determined tread to it. Instrumental colors are greatly enhanced as well, as shown by the beautiful interplay of solo woodwinds in the Fifth Symphony’s Romanza movement. Indeed, despite these being ostensibly monaural recordings, the overall results have such richness and depth that to my ears they actually compare favorably to the somewhat shallow-sounding EMI stereo remakes of the following decade.

Given that any performances of Vaughan Williams symphonies conducted by Adrian Boult (who gave the world premiere of the Fourth in 1935) bear a stamp of deep authenticity, the question as before arises as to how these earlier Decca versions compare interpretively to their subsequent EMI counterparts. In my previous reviews, I found that the earlier recordings had a decisive edge in the first two symphonies, whereas the Third was a virtual toss-up. Here I would once again give the edge in both instances to the earlier Decca versions, though perhaps not as definitively as with the first two symphonies. In a previous review I noted a general pattern in comparing Boult’s two RVW symphony cycles: in the earlier recordings the fast movements were faster, and the slow movements slower, than in the later renditions. The Decca version of the Fourth Symphony represents the great exception to that rule, as the outer movements are markedly slower than later on: 9:00, 9:58, 5:42, 9:14 vs. 8:06, 9:53, 5:38, 8:40. Of great interest, however, is that these two symphonies are also the ones for which we have surviving performances conducted by RVW himself: the Fourth a studio recording from October 1937, the Fifth a live broadcast performance from September 3, 1952. Both of the composer’s performances have a remarkable fluidity, coherence, and degree of inspiration that belie the oft-repeated claims that his baton technique was inadequate. The Fourth remains the fastest version on disc—8:00, 8:30, 4:58, 7:50—with perhaps only the second movement possibly requiring an especially urgent tempo in order to be fit onto just two 78-rpm sides. What emerges from the composer’s own leadership is a performance of searing rage that no subsequent recording has ever equaled, and it remains a sine qua non for collectors. In the 1953 Decca version repristinated here, Boult finds a different solution with comparable impact by using more deliberate tempos in the outer movements to convey a sense of fierce implacability, which a hint of residual harshness in the monaural recorded sound actually reinforces. In the 1968 EMI version with the New Philharmonia, Boult apparently reconsidered his approach and sought to return to something far closer to RVW’s own recording; he largely succeeded in the finale, but fell short in the opening Allegro, which is somewhat lacking in punch. Likewise, the ominous tread of the walking bass in the Andante moderato second movement is surprisingly indistinct and a bit spongy as a result.

The differences between the two versions of the Symphony No. 5 (both with the London Philharmonic) are far more subtle. Boult’s conception of the work remains quite constant between 1953 and 1969, as the respective timings suggest: 10:56, 4:44, 10:50, 10:24 vs. 11:26, 5:11, 10:50, 9:52. These also do not differ greatly from those of the composer’s 1952 performance—11:58, 5:04, 10:13, 10:02—one that again is a highly desirable acquisition in its own right. The major difference lies in the Scherzo second movement: Here the earlier Decca performance far better captures the composer’s rustic, almost bawdy, sense of humor, whereas the EMI account is comparatively prim. In the other three movements the superiority of the Decca recording is tangible but much harder to pin down. There seems to be a very subtle degree of greater structural cohesion, and the woodwind playing is more clearly defined in its articulation. The Romanza exerts its magical spell unbroken in 1953, whereas in 1968 the agitation in the movement’s central section seems to lose somewhat the continuity of the gossamer threads binding the whole together.

As before, Pristine is issuing this release in a handsome digipak format. While these are both great works, for me the Fifth is one of the towering artistic and spiritual masterworks of the 20th century, and this recording one of its greatest realizations. Devotees of the composer will need no further exhortation from me to makes this a priority and essential purchase. Highest recommendation.