Schubert: Winterreise; Die schöne
Müllerin. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Alfred Brendel
and András Schiff, piano.
Arthaus Musik. $29.99 (2 DVDs).
Tchaikovsky: Variations on a
Rococo Theme; Pezzo capriccioso; Romeo and Juliet—Fantasy Overture; Britten:
Gloriana (extracts). Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Peter Pears, tenor;
Aldeburgh Festival Singers and English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin
Britten. ICA Classics DVD. $24.99.
Brahms: Symphony No. 1; Mendelssohn:
Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Chicago Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Sir Georg Solti. ICA Classics DVD. $24.99.
Toscanini Unreleased.
Concerto DVD. $19.99.
Two of the most
interesting classical-music videos to come along in quite a while have shown up
just in time for the Christmas season – gift-givers be aware! The two-video set
of late-in-life performances of Schubert’s Winterreise
and Die schöne Müllerin
by one of their preeminent interpreters, the late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is
a genuinely interesting musical and visual document. It contains both the cycles plus a generous
73 minutes of bonus material, most of it in the form of a nearly hour-long
documentary showing how Fischer-Dieskau thought through and rehearsed Winterreise with Alfred Brendel as
accompanist. Neither Brendel nor András Schiff, Fischer-Dieskau’s partner
in Die schöne Müllerin,
has ever been particularly known in the accompanist’s role, both being very
high-level virtuosos unlikely to subsume their personalities within the
more-modest role of a singer’s backup. But both take well to the experience in
these performances, collaborating with Fischer-Dieskau to bring out the flow
and emotion of Schubert’s music while being careful not to overwhelm him or
turn the spotlight more onto themselves.
If neither Brendel nor Schiff has the easy familiarity and high comfort
level with Fischer-Dieskau possessed by Gerald Moore and Jörg Demus, that is likely because
neither Brendel nor Schiff has a particular calling to take on the role he
assumes here. It may also be because
Fischer-Dieskau’s voice was showing its age in these performances, especially
in Die schöne Müllerin,
recorded live in 1991, when the singer was 66. The understanding of the music
is superb, the delving into its emotional heart excellent throughout, but this
cycle is, after all, that of a young man desperately in love and desperately
overreacting to its loss, and Fischer-Dieskau has a touch too much worldly
wisdom and experience to sound wholly convincing – although his musicianship is
at the highest level throughout. This
version of Winterreise, an even
bleaker cycle, was recorded in 1979, and in this case the autumnal tone of
Fischer-Dieskau’s voice fits the wintry story very well indeed, producing a set
of variations on a theme of despair that extracts considerable emotional
intensity without ever wallowing in depression.
Fischer-Dieskau was an outstanding interpreter of these cycles, one of
the best of all (and some would say the
best). These particular interpretations
may not be quite the finest he ever recorded, but they are superb in many ways
and on many levels, and the collaborations with Brendel and Schiff – plus the
rehearsal video and a Fischer-Dieskau interview recorded in 1985 – make this
two-DVD set a wonderful one in wintertime or anytime.
The same is true of
the ICA Classics release featuring Mstislav Rostropovich, Peter Pears and
Benjamin Britten, but for different reasons.
Rostropovich was at the height of his interpretative powers in 1968,
when the Tchaikovsky pieces on this video were recorded, and Britten had become
a highly accomplished conductor if not exactly a formidable one, as his version
of Romeo and Juliet makes clear. Rostropovich’s way with the Variations on a Rococo Theme, to which
he gives rich tone and a high level of expressiveness, is altogether winning,
and if his style is almost too big for the rather slight Pezzo capriccioso, it is nevertheless highly impressive to hear and
watch his full command of the cello’s nuances.
Britten’s emotional but not overdone handling of Romeo and Juliet is a fitting capstone to the Tchaikovsky part of
the program. And the Pears-Britten
excerpts (here called “extracts”) from Gloriana,
recorded in 1970, make a wonderful bonus, showing the skill of Britten’s vocal
writing for both soloist and chorus – and the intimate interrelationship
between Pears’ talents and Britten’s own.
Here as in the Fisher-Dieskau Schubert performances, there is
considerable pleasure in watching the way the soloists approach the music,
immerse themselves in it and take from it the full measure of expressiveness
that it contains. These DVD releases are
ones in which the visuals really do add an additional dimension to the auditory
one.
This is less true of
two new conductor-focused DVDs, however. Both the Solti release on ICA Classics
and the Toscanini one on Concerto earn a respectable (+++) rating, but neither
is likely to make listener/viewers sit up and take notice. The Solti DVD is a
recording from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performance outside North
America, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1971. The tour – in which Solti shared
conducting duties with Carlo Maria Giulini – was a turning point for the
orchestra, its first time outside the United States in its 80-year history and
the beginning of a revival of its flagging fortunes that had persisted since
the death of Fritz Reiner in 1963. It
was not yet the highly polished, top-tier orchestra it would eventually become,
though, and while the Brahms and Mendelssohn performances heard on this DVD are
perfectly serviceable, with the Brahms having moments of genuine grandeur, neither
reading is one that a 21st- century music lover will consider a
must-have. There is a dearth of bonus material here, too – just a five-minute
segment from the BBC in which Solti discusses the orchestra.
Solti’s toughness in
rehearsals (along with his bald head) led him initially to be labeled “the
screaming skull” by some wags, but he was never considered as dictatorial as
was Arturo Toscanini, a conductor whose name is virtually synonymous with
“martinet” among many who knew or played under him. The same musicians often admitted, though –
albeit sometimes grudgingly – that the result of his browbeating was some
absolutely outstanding music-making. Toscanini Unreleased, unfortunately,
shows only a modicum of that. It is a
modest documentary for Swiss radio and television, including some photos from
Toscanini family archives and film shot in a number of European and U.S.
locations that held special meaning for Toscanini. A driven, complex and in some ways deeply
flawed man, Toscanini was neither a complete podium monster nor a total podium
master – although closer to the latter than the former. Toscanini Unreleased, though, sheds little new light on the
conductor’s music-making or personality, being devoted mostly to rehashing
details of his biography that have already been quite thoroughly hashed
over. Many of today’s listeners know
little of Toscanini at all, which is unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as the
fact that his recorded legacy comes primarily from below-standard recordings
made in the 1940s and early 1950s – many in the notorious Studio 8H, whose
acoustics were famously awful, and many others at live performances where the
audiences were far less unobtrusive and refined than are audiences at most live
recordings today. Toscanini was a giant
of the earlier part of the 20th century, but in the early part of
the 21st, he needs less to be “unreleased” than to be released from
the cobwebs of history in which he now seems permanently enmeshed.
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