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Jun. 30th, 2010 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbI think I've made a discovery. Not much of one, of course, but I had never previously listened to the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch, and this afternoon I listened to his accounts of Beethoven's Third and Bruckner's Fourth in succession, and was struck dumb. Such grandeur and dignity, and incredibly beautiful sound. It helps that the orchestra is the Wiener Phil at the height of its excellence, but Knappertsbusch has such a distinctive touch that it is impossible not to ascribe the excellence of these performances to him first and foremost.
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Date: 2010-07-01 12:16 am (UTC)...do you know/like both Kleibers? Keilberth? Kempe?
(Not doing the K rigmarole on purpose, I swear!)
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Date: 2010-07-01 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-01 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-01 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-01 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-02 02:31 am (UTC)And FIE on so-called "classical" radio stations. They dole out stuff one movement at a time, usually in the last version that came out of the bin. We used to have a perfectly good one, Radio Classique, which was WRECKED by the marketing philistines. (I bet you can get good Italian stations on the Internet, though? And certainly there are several excellent German stations where you have none of this Classic FM nonsense; Bayerischer Rundfunk is one.)
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Date: 2010-07-02 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-02 06:09 am (UTC)Klemperer? No, absolutely not. Klemperer I love. Although my ultimate stick-waving hero remains Arturo Toscanini. He incarnates everything that is good about the land of my fathers (Emilia-Romagna): a fighter, afraid of nothing and nobody, a man's man from top to bottom, a man to whom principles are real and living things, and even in his vices (such as womanizing and yelling) never mean or vindictive. A woman who turned him down did not need to worry about him carrying a grudge; an orchestral who was hurt by some irate remark would receive an apology. (He was short-sighted, so he could hardly ever see the player's faces, and his fury was always at things, never at people.) And his music almost always lives. (Almost; I remember a fantastically bad Schubert's Unfinished.) When he came back to Italy in 1946, it was as though the soul of the nation had returned home after a long nightmare; it was universally taken as a kind of resurrection.
An anecdote: After he left Italy, he did everything in his power to show his enmity to Fascism and Nazism and to fight them whenever and wherever he could. And so it was that, in 1937, he let the recently established Palestine Philharmonic (now the Israel Philharmonic) know that he would like to conduct them. That was of course a poke in the eye of Nazism; in spite of enormous offers, Toscanini had refused to conduct at Bayreuth since 1933, and would soon vacate Vienna as well. However, the little orchestra in Tel Aviv was hardly on the same level, and it was cautiously suggested that the great man's fees might be a problem. The answer came: who ever said anything about fees? Maestro Toscanini will conduct for free. What is more, when he actually came, he left the players a bit worried, over the first two days of rehearsals, by keeping his legendary temper under complete control. When, on the third and final day, there was an outburst, some players were actually relieved: now he was treating them like any other band. Later, to show its gratitude, the impecunious Philharmonic voted Toscanini a lifetime supply of Jaffa oranges.