TOSCANINI Brahms: The 1948 Cycle, Volume 3 (1948) - Pristine PASC713

TOSCANINI ENDS CYCLE
Leads 6th Concert in Brahms Series With NBC Symphony

Arturo Toscanini last night gave the sixth and final concert in the Brahms cycle he has been conducting this season with the NBC Symphony. The program, which ran from 6:30 to 7:30, was given in Studio 8-H, which was filled to its 1,200 capacity.

"Gesang der Parzen" opened the broadcast. Thirty-seven men and twenty-six women from the Robert Shaw Chorale sang the six-part chorus with the orchestra. Then Mr. Toscanini led the Fourth Symphony. Next week he will conduct works by Mozart, Dvorak and Wagner.

The New York Times, Sunday November 28, 1948

This final volume in our Toscanini 1948 Brahms Cycle series brings you the fifth and sixth concerts in their entirety. In addition to excellent readings of the Third and Fourth Symphonies, together with the Variations on a Theme by Haydn, there was an unusual addition to the Toscanini repertoire in the performance on 27 November of the Gesang der Parzen, or "Song of the Fates". It's unique in the conductor's broadcast and recorded canon: a work composed in the summer of 1882 and first performed in Basel, Switzerland, it's a setting for 6-part chorus and orchestra of Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris. Writing about Toscanini's Brahms performances in "Arturo Toscanini, The NBC Years", Mortimer H. Frank was enthusiastic in his praise:

"The sole NBC performance of Gesang der Parzen is Toscanini’s only American presentation of the work and possibly the only one he conducted. Written for chorus and orchestra, it remains to this day a relatively unknown score, and Toscanini’s inclusion of it in his 1948 Brahms cycle stands as one of his most imaginative strokes of programming. At the time of the performance, no recording of the work had been made. Toscanini’s reading—in its rock-steady rhythm, colorful orchestral transparency, and sensitivity to the harmonic richness characteristic of Brahms—suggests that the work deserves more frequent performances. As reproduced in the RCA CD transfer, the sound is especially good for its vintage. Here is one of many examples typifying a little-acknowledged side of Toscanini’s repertory: its inclusion of forgotten works worthy of resurrection."

As with the previous volumes of this series, I was able to use near-mint source discs for this production, and the sound quality captured on these direct-cut discs is nothing less than superb for recordings made over 75 years ago. There was some light surface noise on the fifth programme discs, though nothing too intrusive, whilst the sixth programme was especially clean and clear.

Andrew Rose