Post by hermanPost by Abbeddrose BierceOrchestral Music is a Cionductor's Medium. The orchestral players just
pawns
Abbedd
silly nonsense
Indeed it is. Obviously, a good conductor needs to have very specific
ideas about how he wants the music to go, the technical means to
realize his ideas and personality to convince the musicians to follow
him in his concept, but a really good conductor takes what the
musicians have to offer him into account and creates a coherent
interpretation by guiding the musicians' contributions rather than
imposing his will on everything they do. That is why the
interpretations of such "tyrant" conductors as Toscanini, Reiner or
Szell are often just driven and one-dimensional. There is enormous
potential in the dozens of highly trained and experienced musicians of
any professional orchestra. Conductors who just terrorize them into
playing everything exactly the way they want instead of guiding them
by creating a framework into which the musicians can insert their
contributions aren't even particularly good conductors. Or just very
one-sided ones.
That is why I have to disagree with you about your blanket dismissal
of Previn and his LSO recordings. Actually Previn shows himself to be
a very good "partner" rather than "dictator" conductor in these
recordings. I assume that the reported good relationship he had with
the LSO was because he had a lot of experience in the film music
industry which necessitates fast, precise, and reliable achievement of
results and that fit the mode of working of the London orchestras who
operated on a showstring budget and had very limited time and money
for rehearsals (and still do, of course). And the results he got were
generally rather respectable even if maybe not quite as extraordinary
as some of the hype suggested.
I realize that railing against anything you perceive to be
"mainstream" is your thing, and Previn in his LSO period was as
"mainstream" as one can get in the classical music world, he was hip
and fit well into the 60s and 70s London scene, had a Beatles hairdo,
married lots of glamorous ladies, appeared on popular TV shows talking
smartly about music in a fake British accent. And he made recordings
which sold very well and often received quite good reviews. So you
must shoot that down, I can see that.
But a lot of these recordings do show solid craftsmanship. They may
not be the most polished and some of the playing may actually be a
little roughly hewn, but they aren't as "messy" as you exaggerated at
all, and that direct, unpolished and unvain style of playing and
conducting actually has some rather attractive sides. His LSO
Rachmaninoff recordings, for instance, benefit from this approach and
make a lot of the musical detail stand out in relief where other,
smoother and more blended interpretations miss a lot of detail and
structure. And he is rather good at sustaining the longer "narrative"
as well in these recordings.
Generally, his later work seems to have been much blander, mostly
routine and rather faceless, but there is a lot of pretty good stuff
there from his LSO period.
The Nutcracker, for instance, is a little rough-edged and at times
maybe a little heavy-handed, but it isn't "messy" at all. Not all of
the string playing is of the highest quality and one can hear some
less than perfect ensemble in some places. But nothing any worse than
the typical level of orchestral playing at the time. One can find
little mistakes in basically any recording. Not my favorite version
either but definitely not a big "mess".