MUNCH conducts Vaughan Williams, Ravel and d'Indy (1958) - PASC368

Ralph Vaughan Williams was 83 years old when he completed his Eighth Symphony. It seems like an experiment in sonorities, featuring the woodwinds and brass in the second movement, the strings in the third, and a full battery of percussion instruments supporting the orchestra in the finale, which calls for five percussion players. The score lists parts for side drum, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, and three tuned gongs “as used in Puccini’s Turandot.” I’d love to be present at a performance so I could revel in the din of the percussion in the finale. If I have any disappointment with the subsequent recordings (all of which I have owned at one time or other), it’s that the percussion section doesn’t make enough of a racket. The percussionists in this August 1958 performance from Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home, I am happy to say, are among the louder ones. The score also gives a suggested timing of 26:30. On recordings, one conductor, Leonard Slatkin, brings the piece in close to that, at 26:27. John Barbirolli, to whom the symphony is dedicated, managed a 26:43 timing shortly after the 1956 premiere but several years later, had slowed down to 28:57 for a BBC broadcast. Haitink, Stokowski, and Thomson manage to stretch it out to more than a half-hour. I am not, however, judging by stopwatch—all of the recordings I’ve heard (16, including another Munch performance that is faster than this one) are certainly “good” ones and among my particular favorites are some of the slower ones, including this charged-up Munch performance. Timing wise, it’s in the middle of the pack, at 28: 19. Pristine’s notes claim it to be stereophonic but when I listened to it, it just sounded like enhanced mono. So I took out my headset and discovered that Pristine’s stereo claim is accurate…but the channels are reversed. I saw many Munch concerts and his preferred seating was violins on his left, cellos and violas on the right, the latter on the outside. No wonder I couldn’t get those violins into the left channel! Since I can live with the reversed channels, I consider this to be a Vaughan Williams Eighth that is the equal of any. Two oddities: This is the first symphony to which Vaughan Williams actually assigned a number; it is also only one of two RVW symphonies that have a loud ending.

Since Pristine must have wanted something else by Munch to fill out the CD, the producer came up with two French works for piano and orchestra that were recorded by RCA Victor a few months before the Vaughan Williams performance. The pianist, Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer was, I believe, Munch’s niece. She had previously recorded the Ravel Concerto with him leading the Paris Conservatory Orchestra for Decca London about a decade earlier and proceeded to record it with him again with the Orchestra of Paris for EMI. Munch had recorded the d’Indy with Robert Casadesus and the New York Philharmonic about a decade earlier as well. In his annotations, the producer gripes about the sound of the piano but I had no problem with it and the balance between soloist and orchestra is just fine. If these are not necessarily my favorite recordings of the pieces in question (Zimerman/Boulez and Larrocha/Slatkin in the Ravel—Casadesus/Ormandy, which is faster, Johannesen/Goosens, which is slower, and Thibaudet/Dutoit, which is similar, in the d’Indy), they are nothing less than first-class renderings of the music and sound marginally superior to my original RCA Victors. No one would go wrong with them. For what it’s worth, with three recordings of the G Major and three of the Concerto for the Left Hand (with Jacqueline Blancard, Alfred Cortot, and Jacques Février), Munch is the all-time leader in recordings of the Ravel concertos.

James Miller

This article originally appeared in Issue 36:5 (May/June 2013) of Fanfare Magazine.