Italian Orchestral Music/Toscanini/NBC So [Original recording remastered]

What memories are brought back by hearing the RCA Red Seal issues on CD of the old Toscanini recordings. We now have Vol. X, < ; Italian Orchestral Music> 74321 72374-2). All the pieces that fill these two discs were recorded at Carnegie Hall 1949-53 with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, making for a better sonic ambiance than that afforded by the notorious studio at NBC that Toscanini seemed to prefer. The first CD gives us the three " The Fountains of Rome, " and " Roman Holidays. " The Donizetti and Verdi, two pieces by Catalani, and Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours." Detractors of the Maestro will of course find inflexibility of beat here and there; I find only thrilling music thrillingly played. Of course I could wish for better sound --but I maintain that with these recordings what we have sonically is part and parcel with the charm of the performances. This is a terrific companion to Vol. IX, " French Orchestral Music. "

Respighi owes almost his entire reputation to Toscanini, and after a long period of banishment, I notice that the rest of the Roman Triloogy and not just The Pines of Rome, is beginning to creep back on to concert programs. All three installments are brilliantly orchestrated, and even if auto horns and nightingale recordings smack of pops music, at least there's historic value here. For decades Toscanini's readings have set the standard, despite the sonic defects of RCA's old mono recordings. It sued to be said that the ones done in Carnegie Hall had more air and spaciousness than the suffocating, dry acoustics of Studio 8-H, the venue for NBC Sym. radio broadcasts. Neither comes close to the best from that era right after the war. Happily, this line of RCA reissues, unlike any previous incarnation, put a musician in charge of the remastering and gave him carte blanche to massage the sound any way he wanted to get a fuller, more musical result.

At times the results were a real breakthrough, as in the new version of Verdi's Falstaff; other times, given defective source material, what we get is a few steps forward but no revelation. That's about how I'd rate these Respighi recordings. The brass in Pines of Rome don't crunch or turn congested, yet the miking is a bit distant still. There's lot of bass, however, and clarity; in addition, the excruciating hard edge in the treble region, a plague in all previous Toscanini editions from RCA, has been greatly minimized. The violin harmonics that open the Fountains of Rome are now pleasing to the ear. The chief defect remaining is an inescapable thinness to the overall orchestral sound. Mire midrange, perhaps? Sonics abruptly improve for Feste Romane, which can stand a a demonstration of how good this remastering series really is - start here if you want to hear why Toscanini's Respighi burned down the house.

CD 2 is a grab bag of overtures and snippets. Sometimes the sound is dim and gritchy, as in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, which is a razor-sharp reading of the kind Toscanini devotees adore but which sounds driven to me. Then there's nearly perfect sound for an agreeable throwaway like the Dance of the Water Nymphs from Act 3 of Catalani's forgotten opera, Loreley and the Prelude to Act IV of La Wally. both are performed within an inch of their lives. The Semiramide Over. sounds about as sketchy as L'Italiana, with noticeable audience coughs, but the classic William Tell Over. that must have sold a million copies in the days when Hopalong Cassidy graced every television set has been amazingly well restored. Somewhere in the middle falls the Over. to La Forza del destino, which sounds thrilling now that the brass chords don't lacerate your eardrums. Toscanini's incomparable Dance of the Hours, going head to head with Stokowski's outrageously cutsie version in the movie Fantasia, makes you hear this charming dance music as more than a mincing cliche. finally, the overture to Donizetti's Don Pasquale is another sonic triumph, which makes almost the whole of CD 2 unmissable if you loved these pieces in older, inferior versions.

By and large, the music on this newly-remastered set is "trivial," Verdi's "Forza" overture and the "Dance of the Hours" (in my opinion, the best ballet music ever written by an Italian composer) being the best of a mediocre lot. But that is not the point. The point is that here we have Arturo Toscanini conducting pieces that HE enjoyed, which means that there is a lot of love and feeling that does not always come across in his more "serious" recordings.

As for the music: let's face it, Respighi was the Italian Gershwin. His music is splashy light classical mixed with the pop music of his time and place, same as Gershwin, and the result is about as artistic as "American in Paris." I had these "Pines and Fountains of Rome" on the original LP, which came in a deluxe package with huge photographs of the actual places. The Rossini overtures are OK I guess, though "William Tell" seems to me the best of a mediocre lot. The "Forza" overture is good, small g, and "Dance of the Hours" is an excellent ballet piece. The excerpts from Catalani's "Loreley" and "La Wally" are pleasant.

But to hear what Toscanini DOES with this music is to fully understand why he was so highly prized as a conductor. No matter how trivial the work, he imbues on it the same color and tensile strength he gave to Haydn or Beethoven. And, of course, the better the piece the better the effect. This is one of the best "Forza" overtures ever, and the very best "Dance of the Hours" ever committed to disc.

As for the sound: Good, much better than before, but not great. No amount of digital wizardry can revive the distant, unfocused sound of this "L'Italiana in Algeri" overture, and there are moments in some of the others where the famed crunching sound of the early LPs still remains. But by and large, these are beautiful transfers. As I said, I owned the original LP of the Respighi--not the "shaded dog" Victor, but the O-O-O-L-L-D-D-D ones that had silver lettering on a cranberry-colored label. A first edition pressing. And, good as the glockenspiels, trumpets and high strings sounded, there was still the uncomfortable feeling of compressed sound...of winds and brass being squished together to make a thin, nasty sound. No longer. The NBC Symphony sounds warm and lush here, perhaps less superficially brilliant but more like a real orchestra.

I cannot say enough about the overall high quality of the sound of these new transfers. When the music is great, as for instance the Verdi and Cherubini Requiems in the "Choral Works" album (see my review there), the new transfers are almost overwhelming.

But I wonder...is RCA planning to remaster the New York Philharmonic recordings as well? One can only hope.