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Toscanini Collection Vol 68 - Tchaikovsky, Strauss

Toscanini Release Date: 01/30/2015
Label: Rca Catalog #: 60312 Spars Code: DDD
Composer:  Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky ,  Richard Strauss Conductor:  Arturo Toscanini Orchestra/Ensemble:  Philadelphia Orchestra Number of Discs: 1
Recorded in: Mono Length: 1 Hours 6 Mins.

In mid-1941 Toscanini temporarily fell out with the NBC Symphony Orchestra management, and during the following season directed the Philadelphia Orchestra in a number of concerts. Some of the items he conducted were also recorded by RCA over several sessions, but various technical disasters left the metal masters with heavy surface noise and a barrage of clicks and pops. Nothing could be done to salvage the situation at the time, but later technology opened up possibilities and in 1963 the Schubert Ninth Symphony was published. In 1977 the whole Philadelphia series finally saw the light of day on five LPs (nla), but some allowance had then to be made for the recording quality. Further technological miracles have taken place and as a result Read more all the performances have emerged on CD with remarkably improved sound. In fact, the recordings now seem very good indeed for their date, and RCA are therefore in a sense justified in leaving the troubled history of the enterprise out of their accompanying notes.

...Toscanini re-recorded all the Philadelphia items with the NBC orchestra, but later versions do not all show gain... [A] great performance whose qualities really emerge for the first time in the improved sound is that of the Pathetique. Here is a most moving, eloquent and exciting account of the symphony, one which is a great deal more characterful than Toscanini's somewhat detached 1947 NBC recording. This now takes its place besides the extraordinary 1937 Furtwängler version as one of the most powerful accounts of the work ever recorded... Strauss's Tod und Verklärung is given a very dramatic, vivid reading...

The Philadelphia Orchestra of 1941 was very much a Stokowski-trained instrument, and possessed more tonal colour and warmth than the New York, NBC and BBC orchestras with which Toscanini made most of his recordings. These performances tend to show a different aspect of the great conductor, one where he sometimes responds in a slightly more yielding fashion to the character of the orchestra and to the acoustic of Philadelphia's Academy of Music, which was softer than Toscanini's usual New York venues.

-- Gramophone [6/1991]
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