Word: scherzo
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Schubert, Symphony No. 9 in C; Debussy, Ibéria and La Mer; Berlioz, Queen Mab Scherzo; Respighi, Feste Romane; Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Strauss, Death and Transfiguration; Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique): The Philadelphia Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini conducting (5 LPs, RCA). When Toscanini made these recordings in 1941-42 with the orchestra Leopold Stokowski had built, it was astonishing, then as now, to note how readily the musicians yielded their lush sound and fat phrasing to the brilliant, transparent, sharply contoured style that Toscanini favored. The resulting interpretations are still splendid to hear-spacious...
...first two movements were the most successful; the Scherzo proved extremely demanding for the strings. The triumphant fourth-movement Allegro needed, quantitatively, more than the single doublebass present, and qualitatively, a fuller and richer brass sound, especially from the trombones. Nevertheless, the concert in its totality was impressive and gratifying. Under the right conditions, there's no reason HRO can't be a consistently fine orchestra, and the group sounds as if it is well on the right track right...
...exposing all its modal harmonies and laying out its violent cross-rhythms firmly and precisely. Best of all perhaps was the Beethoven Ninth. This was one of those uncommon moments in which the strictest adherence to the letter of the score had a liberating effect. Rarely has the scherzo been taken at such a whirlwind pace; rarely has its tricky beat sounded so clearly...
...Brahms, and despite its early opus number, its introspective intensity makes it an extraordinarily difficult work to interpret. But Chang, Kogan, and Ma (upon whom the trio now seems to be less visibly dependent for direction whirled through the work with abandon and brilliance. If anything, the second movement scherzo crept to the edge of brittleness; yet the sustained, almost religious adagio which followed was lyrically breathtaking...
...might something entirely new, some quarter-tone creation uncorrupted by respectability or qualifying compromises. They'd both have to meet the same standards, though. They could be lumped together, and if the juxtaposition sounded funny--Ives wrote a great piano trio with a second movement labeled TSIAJ, for "The Scherzo is a Joke"--the joke was on neither the popular tunes nor the stringent lyricism, but on the pedants who'd have liked to keep them separate. When Ives was joking, his music could be something like a Roy Lichtenstein painting of a comic book frame, mocking people's belief...