Rhapsodies from Louis Lane and the Clevelanders

From time to time, I've been delving into the recordings of the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by George Szell's associates and predecessors - Nikolai Sokoloff (here and here), Artur Rodziński, Erich Leinsdorf, Robert Shaw and Louis Lane, the conductor of today's LP.

Beside rising at the Cleveland Orchestra from conducing apprentice to resident conductor, Lane was the music director of the Akron Symphony and later held positions with the Dallas and Atlanta Symphonies. In 1963, when this album was made, he was associate conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra and the conductor of the Cleveland Pops Orchestra, which he leads here.

The young Louis Lane, in his summer Pops garb

I believe the Cleveland Pops was analogous to the Boston Pops in that it was the Cleveland Orchestra minus some of its principals. In those years before Blossom Music Center was built, the orchestra performed summer concerts in Cleveland's Public Hall, which is much larger than Severance.

Lane devotes the LP to orchestral rhapsodies - Chabrier's España, Alfvén's Midsommarvaka (the Swedish Rhapsody No. 1, which I believe is a bit abridged here), Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 and the least familiar of the bunch, Victor Herbert's Irish Rhapsody.

It was common at the time to declare the Cleveland ensemble the best in America or even the world, and just as common to complain that it was almost too perfect. After the orchestra's 1965 European tour, the eminent horn player Barry Tuckwell wrote in the Telegraph that "in spite of my great enthusiasm for the orchestra, particularly the teamwork, corporate musicianship and professionalism in the best sense, I waited in vain to feel excited; in an extraordinary way it was too perfect, too calculated."

Similarly, in his High Fidelity review of this LP, Paul Affelder observed, "These performances are meticulously note perfect, right down to the last turn and trill. There is only one thing missing: excitement. Not that Lane's readings are dull - far from it - but they could have been just that much better had they been invested with a little more sparkle and zest."

There is another way to look at this phenomenon, as expressed by Andrew Porter in the Financial Times: "The character of the orchestra is somehow that of Cleveland itself, the most cultivated of American cities," he wrote. "The Cleveland players show the most unobtrusive and artistic kind of virtuosity. There is no striving for fat, sleek, overfed tone, not any attempt to wow us with brazen clangour. On the other hand their controlled soft playing ... can be breathtaking in effect."

Breathtaking the playing is on this LP, and I detect no lack of sparkle. What is missing is the "brazen clango[u]r" that we usually hear in such pieces as Liszt's rhapsody.

The sound on this LP was even brighter than usually offered by the Columbia engineers working in Severance Hall. I have adjusted it so that the balance is better.