Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini
Charles Munch, Royal Philharmonic
Chesky or Menuet
April 25, 2011, RPO Press Release: David Robert Coleman has been replaced by James Judd. Coleman’s “Albeniz Fantasy” has been replaced by Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini. April 25, 2011, Democrat & Chronicle: A 16-year-old boy fatally shot a 17-year-old boy and critically wounded his own 17-year-old sister after finding them together having relations.” The only difference: Francesca died too.
Passionate love-making and hell are not refined, pretty, or clean. Neither is Munch’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s “despair-flames-passion-more flames” plot line. It opens with a cry of despair (emphasize “cry”), followed by screaming woodwinds, crashing percussion, hellish brass, writhing agony, surging winds -- vicious pandemonium edged with evil. In the passion section Munch practically makes love to the orchestra, caressing lines with tenderness and rapture as it heats to over-boiling. This is Munch, imbalanced at times, and terribly exciting, with lively engineering. After this, other recordings will seem Victorian.
WebTips: Munch’s 1963 recording is on both labels along with Bizet’s Symphony in C. The Chesky is the better pressing, more readily available, and cheaper (lots of used copies on Amazon). This was Munch’s contribution to a renowned Reader’s Digest 12-LP album with 12 of the greatest conductors of the day, all marvelously engineered by the same team who recorded Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos with Earl Wild.
Ravel: Shéhérazade
Linda Finnie; Yan Pascal Tortelier, Ulster Orchestra
Chandos
Barbara Hendricks; John Eliot Gardiner, Orchestra of the Lyon Opera
EMI
With Tortelier you get Impressionism par excellence! He creates a languid, liquid gait unlike any other conductor. Multiple simultaneous rhythms simply entwine around one another with the freedom of a recitative. Finnie’s warm mezzo voice fits ideally into the delicate textures. Together these artists understand the “rhetoric” of what Ravel does to these perfumed, almost intangibly exotic poems. This recording is sublimely beautiful.
The EMI performance is excellent too, with plenty of atmosphere. Hendrick’s light, girlishly innocent voice is ideal. Gardiner entwines her mellow lines around his subtle, transparent, liquid, almost petite orchestra, though he can’t match the atmosphere Tortelier creates.
WebTips: The best place to find the Tortelier is on amazon.com, but don’t “google” it. Instead go directly to amazon.com, search under “music,” and type in “ravel sheherazade finnie tortelier.” You’ll find it has been released on three different Chandos albums at various prices.
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Riccardo Muti, Philadelphia Orchestra
EMI
Fritz Reiner, Chicago Symphony
RCA
This recording blows all the others away! By attending to every marking in the score, Muti finds what others miss: the highly effective contrasts between agitated and “tranquillo” passages, and the brilliantly gradual way in which the composer builds excitement. Here is full-throated passion and panache; tempos are upbeat, rhythms are sharp, and the brass have bite. Recorded in 1983, the orchestra still has the Eugene Ormandy sound (he retired in 1980) in every department, as shown in the many wind, brass, and string solos gloriously played. But it’s the strings above all that still glow with Ormandy’s ghost. Good as the violin soloist is, it’s the cello soloist who is simply drop-dead awesome. In fact, the whole cello section is, especially in the utterly sumptuous "Romance of the Young Prince and Princess," where Muti moves the “rhetoric” of story-telling and the lilt of a lullaby. The only problem with this recording is the sound; it was recorded at too far a distance. As a result, on a big stereo system quiet passages have a rather weak presence, and details are muffled; the smaller the system, the better the sound; it sounds perfect on headphones.
Reiner’s recording is just the opposite. The magnificent engineering lets you hear every detail--quiet and loud, subtle and smashing--in perfect balance. It lets you appreciate how superbly the Chicago Symphony played under him. Listen carefully and you can even hear how Rimsky has the oboe color the violins’ first big melody. There are moments in the first two movements where Reiner (famous as an absolute authoritarian) holds back the excitement, but the third movement has fire, and the finale, recorded in one unedited take, is simply electrifying.
WebTips: Muti’s recording has been re-released on several CDs with different couplings, of which Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Respighi’s Pines of Rome are best. Reiner’s has also been re-released several times, most recently in RCA’s “Living Stereo” series with the quintessential recording of Stravinsky’s Song of a Nightingale.
