TOSCANINI NZBS Memorial Programme

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 15

TOSCANINI NZBS Memorial Programme

A SPECIAL Toscanini Memorial Programme, compiled by John Gray, and to be broadcast from all YCs at 7,0 p.m. on Sunday, February 24, will concentrate on Toscanini’s career as a recording artist and will contain representative recordings from each of his main periods. It is also hoped to include recordings from a new Verdi album just released in America, which should reach this country by airmail in time for the broadcast. This album, which has -been compiled from. Toscanini broadcasts, includes rarities such as the "Hymn of the Nations" composed for the Great Exhibition of 1851, Toscanini’s recording career started around 1921 in the days of acoustical discs, (He did not take easily to the idea of recording, and was a stern critic of all his discs.) The Memorial Programme begins with electrical recordings made in 1929 when Toscanini was conducting the Philharmonic Symphony of New York. It includes, too, a disc made with the BBC Symphony typical of the high quality work he secured from British orchestras during the years 1937-9. His last and longest recording period was with the specially created NBC Symphony, reaching its peak in the years 1951-3. Altogether, the recordings to be played will represent every stage of his career excluding the acoustical recordings. John Gray, who saw Toscanini conduct in the re-opened La Scala Opera House in Milan in 1946 will also contribute some personal

impressions, Toscanini’s repertoire, now that it can be seen in perspective, was a fairly narrow one, He concentrated on his contemporaries and devoted most of his life to the interpretation of the great 19th century classics. He was. not particularly interested in modern composers nor in American composers, His teadings of the Beethoven Symphonies are amongst his greatest achievements, but he was also a fine conduc-

tor of Wagner, Debussy, Brahms, Schubert, Weber, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Verdi. He was an immensely practical man and rehearsed his orchestras intensively. In 1927, the centenary year of Beethoven’s death, all Italy was waiting for his performance of the Mass in D by the orchestra and choir of La Scala. After 30 rehearsals Toscanini eventually put away his baton and said quietly, "Ladies and gentlemen-next year." The special quality of a Toscanini recording comes partly frem its overriding clarity. One of Toscanini’s aims was to regain in the modern orchestra the purity and precision of execution which prevailed in the small court orchestras of the 18th century. Winthrop Sargeant, who played second violin in the New York Philharmonic Symphony under him, has written of the special quality of Toscanini’s mind. "Arturo Toscanini has a classical Mediterranean mind," he writes, "His interpretations are as lucid, sharply defined and brightly lit as if the warm sun of his native Parma were seeking out and illuminating every musical nook and cranny. He worships logic, clarity and polish, abhors everything enigmatic, diffuse, rough-hewn or boisterous. This classical attitude of mind probably has something to do with the wonderful clarity that he gets into his interpretations. . . His passion for clarity will lead him to prefer music that is clear but intrinsically cheap, to music that is profound but awkward and lumbering,"

Toscanini’s style of | conducting and interpretation seemed to have found a successor in the young Italian conductor Guido Cantelli, whom ‘Toscanini had selected and trained. Cantelli conducted the NBC Symphony and recorded with them, but his tragic death at the age of 36 in an air crash outside Paris as he was on his way to meet Toscanini and fulfil an American conducting tour cut short a brilliant career, and has probably ended the tradition,