STUPENDOUS STOKOWSKI AND STRAVINSKY FROM VOLKOV AND THE CBSO

CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★
The conductor Leopold Stokowski has always divided critical opinion. He transformed a provincial orchestra into the finest in the world, the "Fabulous Philadelphians" and promoted the performance of new music, giving American premieres to works by composers including Copland, Ives, Schoenberg, Varese and in 1922, Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'. Yet to a cadre of critics and musical puritans he was loathed as a showman and charlatan. He became a household name when in Walt Disney's 1940 'Fantasia' he shook hands with Mickey Mouse: for his denigrators he might as well have shaken hands with the devil. His orchestration of music from other genres and eras, particularly Bach, met with opprobrium. Such vulgarity, and to play them at popular concerts for the hoi polloi! Then there was his appearance, the mane of flowing hair and conducting without a baton preferring flowing theatrical hand movements and his dubious East European accent, odd for a Londoner with English and Irish parents, adopted at the suggestion of his first wife pianist Olga Samaroff, real name Lucy Hickenlooper.
Ilan Volkov, who will become CBSO's Principal Guest next season, commendably shares none of these prejudices and when invited to offer a half-hour programme of Stokowski's orchestrations he embraced the task with fervour, "it meant I could go back and listen to everything he arranged and performed. It is mind-blowing music and especially interesting to see how much early music he used, quite a few are pretty unknown." His five selections were judicious, the first four played without a break and forming an enjoyable ad hoc suite. It began with one of those "pretty unknown" pieces, Frescobaldi's 'Gagliarda Seconda' a gentle ruminatively dying-fall for strings which segued seamlessly into 'Dido’s Lament' the immortal aria from his opera 'Dido and Aeneas' in which the CBSO strings were lush, warm and passionate, the Carthaginian Queen's lament singing our on Hugh MacKay's cello. Stokowski's transformation of Debussy's piano work 'The Sunken Cathedral' was masterly, strings surging as the sea beats against the shore, tubular bells ringing out as the cathedral's own toll on, winds shimmering like sun flecks on the water. This was Stokowski as musical evangelist - anyone who didn't know Debussy's original would surely be fired to search it out. Stokowski was a fervent Mussorgsky transcriber, his earthy version of 'Pictures at an Exhibition' deserves a hearing as an alternative to Ravel's sparkling masterpiece, here we had the 'Coronation Scene' from operatic  'Boris Godunov: Symphonic Synthesis'. The CBSO's percussion and brass sections were unleashed, bells tolling and brazen trumpets announcing the new Tsar in impressive style urged on by Volkov. After a brief break the best came last, Stokowski's arrangement of Bach's 'Toccata and Fugue in D minor', the one he conducted in 'Fantasia'. Volkov elicited a stupendous performance from the CBSO. Stokowski began his career as organist of St James's Church, Piccadilly so he knew Bach's works intimately and his transcription shows that. Who needs 32-ft organ pipes when you have the CBSO's bass section thundering out? Want to know what a fugue is, then watch Stokowski bounce the music round the strings sections, pit them against each other and then unite them. The audience loved it - lets have some more please!
Stokowski enthusiastically embraced new technology to disseminate music: the first electrical recordings in the 1920s, cinema, the LP, stereo and in the 1970s - when he was in his 90s - quadraphonic recordings, enveloping the listener is music. I prepared for this concert by listening to his four-channel disc of Bach transcriptions and, for the concert's second half with Leonard Bernstein's 1972 quadraphonic 'Rite of Spring' with the London Symphony Orchestra recorded at Abbey Road with Bernstein in the centre of a circle with the LSO players surrounding him. It's an amazing experience - the listener is the middle of the 'Spring Rounds' as they whirl round you, the 'Ritual of the Rival Tribes' contesting either side of your armchair, timpani shaking the floor, brass battering you. Could an orchestra on a platform twenty yards away compete with that? The answer, unsurprisingly, is a vehement yes. Recorded music is disembodied; the CBSO's vigorous, violent and vehement rendering of Stravinsky's chthonic ritual of death and regeneration was supremely embodied. This is a performance by men and women extracting heavenly and devilish sounds from wood and metal, instruments which are often intransigent,  requiring amazing skill and dexterity. Seeing that is a necessary condition of the musical experience - and the hazardous nature of live music. The work begins with a bassoon melody, which is vital indeed crucial in setting the work's musical landscape: folk music but off kilter, sinuous, enticing, weird, desolate. The player has to nail this. The CBSO's principal Nikolaj Henriques did and his raucously cheered and applauded bow at the end showed that we knew and acknowledged it. Recordings can't match that. We saw the effort and timing required by Matthew Hardy to produce that timpani roll of thunder and the bass players' shoulders heaving as they sawed into their instruments to produce Stravinsky's barbarous rhythms. And what a climax: the Sacrificial Dance, the Chosen One lies dead, everyone holds their breath for a second, Volkov whirls his baton round and down. End. Now it's the audience's turn to make our contribution and we did. The concert showed the power of live music and it was heartening to see some many young people in the audience experiencing it. Volkov ensured that his concerts next season will be anticipated eagerly.
Norman Stinchcombe