I may be a pianist, but listening to piano playing ranks very low on my list of Fun Things to Do. In my ever-burgeoning record collection, piano music represents only a modest fraction of the whole; in fact, I may have more opera recordings than piano music—and I’m not noticeably any kind of opera fan.
Orchestral music floats my boat and always has. As a teenager in suburban Denver I made periodic trips to the Target store on West Colfax near Kipling, my hard-earned cash from a job bagging groceries at the Applewood King Soopers vibrating impatiently in my wallet. My goal: the classical record section. The selection was threadbare, really little more than a vague gesture towards classical music, but it was the best I had in my immediate neighborhood. Invariably I came out of that store with orchestral records, typically Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, Bernstein conducting the NY Philharmonic, Reiner in Chicago, or occasionally I splurged on a pricey and chic job from Deutsche Grammophon featuring Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. As a rule I couldn’t afford more than one or two records at a time, but that meant I had those pieces down by heart by the time my underpowered little wallet had recycled sufficiently to allow another shopping trip.
Nowadays my wallet is fatter and more quickly replenished, and my record department spans the globe via the Internet. If it’s out there I can get it. Nonetheless my overall tastes have not changed; I am still first and foremost an orchestral geek. At the moment several tottering stacks of CDs sit on my desk, waiting to be ripped onto my computer in Apple Lossless Format; my practice is to rip first, listen later. I shuffle through the piles and discover lots of orchestral music—Barber, Berlioz, Chabrier, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, Borodin, Cherubini, Elgar, Haydn, Neilsen, Creston, Simpson, Martinu. Some big choral works such as Telemann’s Brockes-Passion and Holst’s “The Apostles”. A few operas ranging from fairly standard fare such as Verdi’s “Luisa Miller” to the downright obscure, such as Holst’s “Savritri” and Deems Taylor’s “Peter Ibbetson.” I do note a piano concerto album, made up of the Grieg and Chopin 2nd, but I bought it to round out my nearly-complete collection of Herbert Blomstedt/San Francisco Symphony albums, not for those concertos.
I’m likely to become attracted to a recording because it features repertory I find interesting, or out of interest in the orchestra and/or its conductor. I’m not the kind of listener who develops a fanatical attachment to a single orchestra or conductor and rejects all others. Nevertheless, I have my favorites, and I do have a few thoughts about some of those orchestras and (sometimes) their conductor.
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
If an orchestra’s personality can be likened to specific automobiles, then the Concertgebouw is a Rolls Royce limousine, purring its way majestically down the freeway. Some of that has to do with that opulent concert hall of theirs, so perfectly captured in the many recordings they’ve been making on their in-house label under music director Mariss Jansons. But one can listen back as well, through the Van Beinum years in superb monophonic sound, even into the Mengelberg days, and hear a cushioned, wonderfully rounded and resonant sound. To hear the RCO’s recent La Mer on a fine, room-filling stereo system is to be swept along a warm, flowing river. This is Big Band Playing at its Big Band-iest.
Budapest Festival Orchestra
A few years ago when Gramophone magazine ran an article ranking the top 20 of the world’s orchestras (in their humble opinion), I was a bit surprised to see the Budapest Festival Orchestra right up there with the traditional heavyweights. I didn’t know their work at all, but I figured it was high time I remedied that lack. It turns out that they boast an extensive discography, nowadays putting out a series of first-rate recordings on Channel Classics.
It was love at first listen, so to speak, as I encountered an absolutely spectacular Beethoven Seventh. So I explored more. Recently the BFO and its conductor, Iván Fischer, have released a Brahms First (together with the Haydn Variations) that stands with the Levine/Vienna as my all-time favorite.
What impresses me so deeply about the BFO is the group’s cohesion, its polished and burnished acoustic, and its distinctly Romantic bent; this is a group which does not shy away from discreet string portamento or honestly expressive idioms. Rather than providing a big swoosh of sound, this orchestra is fleet and clear, but not raspy or hard-edged in any way. Recently I picked up their 1997 recording of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (together with a number of dance suites), together with a more recent disc of Rossini orchestral works. Splendid, both of them. There’s a BFO Rachmaninoff Second Symphony out there; I haven’t gotten it yet, but I’m just dying to hear it.
Vienna Philharmonic
The Vienna’s unique sound stems partly from their idiosyncratic instruments—which belong to the orchestra, not the individual players. The long apprenticeship in the Staatsoper contributes as well; the Vienna is not staffed with fine young players right out of school, but is an orchestra of masters. The players have to wait to get into the orchestra, just as the audience has to wait to hear them: I understand that the waiting list for season tickets is now 13 years.
The Vienna is not a particularly lush orchestra; it’s more like a marvel of engineering, with every part perfectly designed and assembled with a fit and polish second to none. Think BMW rather than Cadillac. Over the years the orchestra has changed, nor has it been consistent. I’ve heard some scrappy stuff from Vienna, but at their best…well. James Levine conducted them for a Brahms cycle, happily recorded to a T by Deutsche Grammophon in the great hall of the Musikverein. Everything I treasure in the Vienna comes together in that splendid set (now an ArkivCD reprint, by the way, or an online download from DG)—clarity, transparency, passion, sonority, control.
Philadelphia Orchestra
I’m not one of those who maintain that the Philadelphia went to pot after Ormandy. In fact, today’s Philadelphia Orchestra, as witnessed by their recordings on the Ondine label, is a magnificent music-making machine, pure and simple. Oh, that old “Philadelphia Sound” isn’t there any more, but it was a bit of an artificial creation, really a kludge to get around the bone-dry acoustic of the old Academy of Music, now replaced by the much finer Verizon Hall. If there’s a more altogether satisfying Pathétique out there than the live Eschenbach/PO on Ondine, I have yet to encounter it.
San Francisco Symphony
I am a Contributing Writer and pre-concert lecturer for the SFS, and it’s my cherished home team. Obviously objectivity is out of the question. But I have explored the SFS discography at length and in depth, from those early days with Alfred Hertz (the SFS’s first few discs were acoustic, rather than electronic), into the long series of RCA Victor records under Pierre Monteux, through Enrique Jorda, Seiji Ozawa, Edo De Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and into today’s award-festooned catalog under Michael Tilson Thomas.
There is great stuff to be heard all the way through, from Hertz’s 1925 Parsifal excerpts to MMT’s astounding Mahler Eighth this past year and the stellar performances on the “Keeping Score” series. I must confess to having a particular soft spot for the Herbert Blomstedt discography; I love those many Decca recordings that came out, were on the market for about 10 minutes, then disappeared—now happily resurrected as ArkivCD reprints.
The SFS/Blomstedt repertory differs from the SFS at any other period in its recorded history, in that the grand old standard repertory makes up a significant chunk of the offerings. Even under Monteux, the SFS tended to record on the outskirts of the repertory—Ibert, Chausson, D’Indy, Franck. There were some exceptions such as a fabulous Brahms Second, and that iconic Scheherezade, but mostly the SFS recorded lesser-known stuff. The same held true for Ozawa and De Waart; a lot of good music was committed to disc by those conductors, but not Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, etc.
That all changed under Blomstedt. I suppose one could argue that the last thing the world needed was yet another Unfinished or Eroica, but we got them from Blomstedt/SFS and they’re terrific, as are the Mendelssohn symphonies, Carmina Burana, Bruckner symphonies, Sibelius symphonies, the many Richard Strauss works, and so forth.
Staatskapelle Dresden
To hear what makes the Dresden State Orchestra such a treasure, try the recording of Die Meistersinger made in 1970 with Herbert von Karajan conducting. Sure, it was a product of cultural détente during the Cold War years, as an English company (EMI) brought a West German conductor right into East Germany to record Wagner. But what may have started as a political stunt wound up blessing posterity with a precious musical gift. The Dresden, with its “old gold” brass sound and clear connections to the 19th century, emerged from the gray murk behind the Iron Curtain like a blazing phoenix. Surely there is no more splendiferous Meistersinger overture. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re a Wagner fan or not; this one will leave you dazzled.
But that’s the Dresdeners for you. I’ve never heard anything from them that impressed me as even remotely second-rate, in fact. I’ve been going through Colin Davis’s Schubert cycle of late, and as always I’m enchanted by the warm glow of their exquisite music making.