Dvorak Cello Concerto
Some recordings imprint us with impressions of a piece that any other interpretation just doesn’t sound right, particularly if we have listened to that recording a bunch prior to hearing others. In this work I had a recording by Maurice Gendron, a French Cellist known more as a teacher than a recording artist, and Haitink with the LPO, that I played the proverbial grooves off 40 years ago.
The piece itself is one of Dvorak’s greatest. He was a superb melodist.. Brahms once said that other Composers could make a career using the chips that flew off his workbench. However a lot of his works can sound formulaic, as he tries to make those gorgeous tunes fill up a structure they can’t support. When he was inspired however, he soared, and this Concerto is one of his peaks. Written after several years in America when he was pining to be home with his family, he also learned that his sister in law, who was his first love and with whom he stayed close after his own marriage, had died. He incorporates some songs that he had written for her in the piece, and the juxtaposition of the symphonic scope of the work with the interludes of aching nostalgia is irresistible.
It was years before I heard another recording and they all sounded somewhat slick in comparison. They just don’t seem to be inside the work as my favorite. Is this for real or was I so shaped by my initial impression.
Lately I’ve been listening to Alissa Weilerstein with Jiri Behlolavak (who died soon after the recording) and the Czech PO. I finally have a recording that has supplanted the long term favorite. I still prefer some of the rubato in Gendron/Haitink, but Weilerstein still dishes the emotion but more as a Polka then a Waltz. And her tone is golden. She floats a pianissimo at the end that is to die for
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@melm I can't say always, as I haven't compared every recording but in my experience, newer recordings generally sound better than vintage unless the older recordings were successfully remastered from the original tapes. I have many remastered recordings from the golden age of recording, 1918 to early 1960's and very much appreciate what they are but most are in mono and the very early recordings sound rough. On the other hand, I was listening to a recent Deutsche Grammophon Taneyev Chamber Music CD and it sounded just better than average with some poor sounding patches throughout. I ditched it after the piano quintet and played an early Wilhelm Backhaus recording which to me was much easier to enjoy. |
@mahler123 There's also the Cologne WDR Symphony and Chorus and the Cologne Philharmonic but many orchestras from throughout Europe travel to Cologne. I've also been to Berlin but not much seemed to be going on there during Xmas/Hanukah. Paris has a lot going on with six or more concert houses. I was there when the Salle Pleyel scheduled Martha Argerich and Friends and it sold out in less than two hours.I didn't get a ticket. |
I couldn’t remember the name of the WDR before…thank you for jogging the memory bank. I am listening to DuPre/Barenboim now. It’s better than I remembered it to be, but I still think DB gets a bit to cute with rubato in some of the melt in your mouth nostalgic parts. The beauty is there in the music and it doesn’t need italicizing from a 30 ish wunderkind Conductor. However as I stated previously it isn’t as blatant as I had thought, and if this were the only recording of the piece I could easily live it. Like most Classical works in the pantheon it faces stiff competition, and the great is the enemy of the good |
@goofyfoot Now, a cello sounds very different close up than at a distance. In the context of a concerto with a full orchestra and the cello at a distance, it's my personal experience that a cello will sound thinner and somewhat more nasal than when close up. IMO that sound is captured by the 3 mike Mercury technique, the cosest mike being (probably) at least 16 feet from the cello. The sound of the cello in the Dvorak sounds quite different than in Starker's famous Bach set, also on Mercury and more closely miked. Modern recording, Decca or not, uses a forest of microphones to a mixing console. They likely do place a mike or mikes on a soloist and get a different kind of sound that's not available to an audience member. They mix a close-up of the solo instrument (sometimes with "proximity effect") with the sound of the orchestra. The difference may be in whether we get a sound per our audio preference, or one that is closer to an actual performance. No different here than in so many other aspects of audio. |
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