Word: toscanini
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...three singers alternate in principal roles. Of the three chosen for last week's Carmen one was Jewish: Eleanor Kahn, who has sung with the San Francisco Opera. Monsignor Bosetti, not only conductor but stage manager and vocal coach as well, drives his casts as hard as any Toscanini, and commands as much respect. When he gives a bawling-out, the customary response is a meek: "Thank you, father...
...common report on the two new recordings of the "Eroica" is unfortunately true. Toscanini's performance on Victor, exciting as it is, suffers dreadfully from the poor acoustics of the NBC studio, where it was recorded during the Beethoven cycle last year. The studio is probably more satisfactory for radio broadcasting than a concert-hall, as it is arranged so that every note comes over with perfect clarity. But for a permanent recording, one wants resonance as well as clarity, and the tone in this album is so flat and dead as to make the set very unpleasant...
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") in E Flat Major (New York Philharmonic-Symphony conducted by Bruno Walter; Columbia; 12 sides; $6.50; and NBC Symphony conducted by Arturo Toscanini; Victor; 13 sides; $7). Two versions of Beethoven's heroic symphony whose original dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte was canceled because the Bonaparte pretensions displeased the composer, present the customers with a tough choice. The Walter version is warm, well-recorded the best of recent Philharmonic discs. The Toscanini job is full of Beethoven's energy, but the recording-taken from a radio performance-sounds boxy...
Victor's feature release for March is the Toscanini-Horowitz recording of the Brahms B-flat Piano Concerto (Album M-740). Without going into a detailed criticism of the concerto--I for one consider it inferior to the best Mozart and Beethoven concertos--there is no doubt but that it is conceived on as lavish and massive a scale as any work of its kind ever has been since. The profusion of themes, the copiousness of orchestration, the "tiny" sherzo thrown in, the extreme energy bursting forth at every point, all make of it something quite unique in concerto literature...
Brahms: Concerto No. 2 in B Flat Major (Vladimir Horowitz, pianist, with the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini; Victor: 12 sides; $6.50). The Brahms concertos are as massively splendiferous as the Brahms symphonies. In this one, Toscanini, his pianist son-in-law and the recording engineers (it was made in Carnegie Hall instead of in NBC's woolly-sounding Studio 8-H) do a superb...