Two Views of Berlioz: Norrington and Stokowski

Hector Berlioz

My friend Jean Thorel ("centuri"), himself an accomplished conductor, advocated Roger Norrington's recording of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique as a follow-up to the recent post of Sir Roger's Beethoven Ninth Symphony. Great idea - here it is, with a contrasting companion.

Norrington's are historically informed performances. As the conductor himself wrote about the Symphonie fantastique, "The joys (and tribulations) of playing Berlioz 'historically' affect every aspect then: the score, the instruments, the style, even the layout of the stage." As such his recording was very unlike the ones that that had preceded it, which sometimes seem to take their cue from the work's lurid program, which involves an artist taking opium because of his unrequited love.

This sensational premise - and the scenes that involve a march to the scaffold and a witches' Sabbath - seem to invite or even require Romantic excess in performance. For this reason, I decided to couple Norrington's chaste version with one by the high priest of the Technicolor performance, Leopold Stokowski, leading a modern orchestra. It's quite a contrast.

But before we get to the performances, let's examine the notion that Berlioz himself was a wild-eyed Romantic - even considering the Symphonie fantastique program. First, consider that this symphony postdates Beethoven's Ninth by only six years - 1824 to 1830. Second, Berlioz himself was a famously skilled and fastidious composer and orchestrator. As Wilfrid Mellers has written, the symphony is "ostensibly autobiographical, yet fundamentally classical ... Far from being romantic rhapsodizing held together only by an outmoded literary commentary, the Symphonie fantastique is one of the most tautly disciplined works in early nineteenth-century music."

An 1846 caricature of Berlioz - no wonder he was considered a wild-eyed Romantic

So following the composer's instructions and using an orchestra he would have recognized should lead to revelatory results. And some reviewers found this to be the case following the release of Norrington's recording in 1989.

Stereo Review's Richard Freed wrote, "There's no need to debate whether Berlioz was actually the first great Romanticist or the last great Classicist. The point is that no one understood the orchestra and its instruments better than he did, and it was that profound understanding that enabled him to exploit orchestral color with such unprecedented imaginativeness. That, in brief, would seem to be the basis for Norrington's undertaking - an approach to Berlioz, as to Beethoven, on the composer's own terms - and it turns out to be productive beyond imagining, even more revelatory than his Beethoven performances...

"Before I got to the end I knew that this was the Fantastique that will be the 'basic' recording from now on, and the others will be the alternates."

But that was 35 years ago, and the sound of the modern symphony orchestra is still ascendant. The Norrington approach - while influential - remains the exception rather than the rule. Examine the many "best-of" articles on the Symphonie fantastique and you will find performances by any number of modern orchestras, with at most one "historically informed" reading, usually the one led by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Here are today's two recordings.

London Classical Players/Roger Norrington

Norrington and his orchestra recorded the Berlioz work in March 1988 at Abbey Road. As with the Beethoven disc recently heard here, the recorded sound was drab, which undercuts the delights of the composer's scoring as performed by instruments of his time. This is supposition, but perhaps the engineers recorded the orchestra similar to the way they would handle modern orchestras, which generally are much larger and louder than Norrington's forces. I have adjusted the balance accordingly.

Even so, the performance was much appreciated. Here's John Warrack in The Gramophone: "Prepared, and recorded, with the greatest attention to detail, it is a performance of imaginative sweep and excitement, and a record by which future performance of the work will have to be measured."

This transfer comes from a sealed copy of the original vinyl release. The LP had no notes whatsoever, so I have included a PDF of the CD booklet, which includes essays by Norrington and Berlioz expert Hugh Macdonald.

Sir Roger Norrington

LINK to Norrington performance

New Philharmonia Orchestra/Leopold Stokowski

The Symphonie fantastique and its queasy program - which Berlioz later downplayed - would seem to have been made for Leopold Stokowski, one of the most extroverted of 20th century maestros. But somehow he did not record the work until 1968, when he was 83. Decca London provided a multi-miked Phase 4 Stereo production for the occasion.

The results are predictable. Where the harps in the "Un bal" movement sound discreet if delightful for Norrington, for Stoki the single harp is as loud than the rest of the orchestra. Conversely, the orchestral sound at times is quite recessed in a reverberant space (Kingsway Hall), but then a solo flute will suddenly jump to the foreground.

As for the conductor, he is on his best behavior for much of the symphony - unlike a live performance from about the same time that was later released. Harris Goldsmith wrote in High Fidelity: "For the first three movements, Stokowski is really quite restrained. The string tone is, of course, gorgeous and while the playing is always imaginative and full of refined sheen, the tempos and phrasings are not terribly removed from the mainstream of traditional interpretation... In the 'Marche au supplice,' though, Stokowski does adopt a too precipitate approach - one would almost think that the hero in question was attempting to flee justice rather than offering himself as a willing victim to the scaffold... When we arrive at the 'Witches' Sabbath,' however, the conductor really starts substituting LSD for Berlioz' opium." To sum up, Stoki sounds uninvolved until he gets to the juicy parts.

Despite his observations, Goldsmith was positive: "Not my favorite Fantastique perhaps (I prefer the Davis version on Philips), but an attractive and stimulating one, nonetheless."

I'll leave it to you to decide which one is better - Stokowski or Norrington.

Leopold Stokowski

LINK to Stokowski performance

Norrington's 'Uniquely Important' Beethoven 9

Nearly 40 years ago, when Roger Norrington's recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony first appeared on the market, it was considered "uniquely important" by critic Richard Osborne of The Gramophone.

Sir Roger has now died at age 91, so today let's reassess this performance and the reasons why it was so well received.

The first thing to mention is that it is what today we would call a "historically informed performance." The instruments are similar to those used back in 1824, when the symphony was first heard. The performance practices are of the time. And the tempos follow the composer's guidance - unusual in 1987.

Roger Norrington

The 1980s witnessed a flowering of such performances. Norrington's was, I believe, the first Beethoven symphony cycle of its type, but others were in process and many more were to come. On the Norrington recording, Osborne writes that it displays "glimmering, vibrato-free strings, plaintive woodwinds, keen toned and at times strangely keening horns and trumpets, and those wonderful small, hard, sonically explosive drums."

Norrington views the Ninth "looking, Januslike, both backwards and forwards from its historical vantage-point in 1824 ... [T]here is no doubt that by using period instruments and a smallish choir, all admirably caught on LP by EMI in this lively Abbey Road Studio No. 1 recording, Norrington has given us an account of the Ninth that is both uniquely persuasive and uniquely important."

[An aside - unless the LP sound has somehow deteriorated over the past 40 years, the recording quality was not all that good to begin with - dim and boomy, which I have addressed.]

As for the tempos that I mentioned above, both Osborne and Richard Freed in Stereo Review were generally if not universally convinced. Freed: "[T]he start of the vast final movement is refreshingly free of the expected monumentalism: When the great 'Joy' theme makes its first appearance, it does not lumber, it flows. The bass recitative, still in tempo, may strike some listeners as being too nervously agitated when what is wanted is a reassuring gesture of peace, but that is probably the only conceivable objection one might have to the entire performance..."

Of course there are other ways to interpret Beethoven than historically informed performances. As Osborne wrote, "[I]t is not Norrington's aim to give us a transcendental Ninth in the Furtwängler style. This is a Ninth which owes nothing to Wagner but quite a lot to Bach and Haydn."

Norrington - genial and relaxed

That is not to say that Norrington was inflexible or stern: he was famously genial and generally relaxed on the podium. He wanted the audience to enjoy themselves and encouraged applause between movements of a symphony. 

In Norrington's New York Times obituary (gift link) he is quoted as remarking that he didn't conduct the great orchestras of America and Europe until relatively late in his life, meaning that "I actually knew what I wanted. And this meant I could relax and treat music-making as something that is full of love and laughter. It’s not about consecrating a sacred object. It’s about exploring and being curious and having fun.”

Allan Kozinn in the New York Times: "He rebelled against the notion that one could recreate historical performance styles by merely playing what was written on the page. And he inveighed against those who treated performances as museum pieces.

"'A performance is for now, and one instinctively tailors it for today,' he said in a 1989 interview, adding, 'To say that you don’t put your personality into it is rubbish.'"

Coincidentally, I am working on a post that will feature several Beethoven compositions led by the famed conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, he of the "transcendental style" mentioned above. These performances are indeed a contrast to Norrington's. Neither is wrong or right; just different. One aspect of enjoying such music is in relishing the difference in performance styles.

Norrington has appeared on this blog twice in recent years, with fine recordings of Schütz's Christmas Story and of baroque Christmas music.

One final note: while I transferred the Beethoven Ninth performance from my LP copy and have included the related scans, I have added the booklet from the corresponding CD issue because it includes an additional essay missing from the LP and much more information about the performers, etc. Also in the package are the two reviews cited above, along with a contemporary article on Norrington.

LINK to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

Schütz's Beautiful 'Christmas Story'

The Christmas Story by Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) is a glorious work from the early Baroque period, here, appropriately enough, performed by the Heinrich Schütz Choir and a starry group of singers and instrumentalists directed by Roger Norrington (now Sir Roger) in this 1970 recording.

Roger Norrington

The performance is graced by the presence of one of my favorite singers, tenor Ian Partridge, who assumes the important role of the Evangelist. His recitatives are interspersed with Intermedia, which are taken by characters from the familiar story - the angel and angelic host, the shepherds, the three kings, the high priests and scribes, and Herod.

Ian Partridge

Partridge came in for particular praise from the critics. Jeremy Noble wrote in The Gramophone that "his combination of simplicity, excellent German diction and sensitivity to every nuance of the biblical words is beyond praise."

Felicity Palmer

The Angel is Felicity Palmer, now Dame Felicity, who also is splendid. There are familiar names among the other roles as well. The shepherds are James Bowman, Derek McCullough and Philip Langridge; the wise men Langridge, Martyn Hill and Christopher Keyte, and Herod Eric Stannard. The instrumentalists include Robert Spencer on chittarone, and David Munrow and Philip Pickett on recorders, along with the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble.

The performance was - as were many records of the day - a combination of traditional and historically informed practices. Noble complained about revisions to the orchestration: "it seems odd to take one of the works for which Schütz has given us a specific instrumentation and then reorchestrate it (to a much greater extent than is implied in the informative sleeve-note, by the way)."

Heinrich Schütz

A quick note about the composer, edited from Wikipedia: "Heinrich Schütz was a German early Baroque composer and organist, generally regarded as the most important German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach and one of the most important composers of the 17th century. He is credited with bringing the Italian style to Germany and continuing its evolution from the Renaissance into the early Baroque. Most of his surviving music was written for the Lutheran church, primarily for the Electoral Chapel in Dresden."

The sound from this disc is excellent.

LINK

Gramophone, October 1971

Glad Tidings from 17th Century Europe

In 1968 Roger Norrington was embarking on a recording career that lasted more than 50 years. His first LP was this collection of Christmas music from the baroque era.

For the Argo record, Sir Roger (as he is now) brought along the Heinrich Schütz Choir he had founded in 1962, the London String Players (which were actually the illustrious Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, then a string ensemble), the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, and the Camden Wind Ensemble, presumably led by oboist Anthony Camden.

Roger Norrington at a 1968 recording session

Norrington later became famed for historically informed performance practices, but this does not reflect that interest. It is instead used the halfway measures that were common back then: reduced forces and a de-emphasis on the Romantic style that was the norm in concert programs. 

Derek McCullough's sleeve explains the aims of the program: "The selection of music on the present disc limits itself in time to a period of about 100 years and sets out to show how great, minor and anonymous composers from all over Western Europe sought to translate the mystery and joy of the Incarnation into music. The result is a startling diversity of styles, ranging from the gentle sentimentality of an anonymous Spanish song to the sophisticated unpredictability of a madrigale spirituale by Heinrich Schütz."

The works were composed from c1585 (Giovanni Gabrieli's "O magnum mysterium") to 1687 (Henry Purcell's Christmas Anthem "Behold I bring you glad tidings," the most substantial work on the program).

The result: The Gramophone's Denis Arnold found the disc was, "Altogether a very creditable and enjoyable affair, and a most suitable Christmas present for a favourite graduate uncle." I do hope you and your graduate uncles all like it.

LINK