MOZART : Symphony No.41
BRAHMS : Liebeslieder Waltzes
w/Bartlett & Robertson,pf.
BBC Singers Leslie Woodgate. Chorusmaster
BBC Symphony Orchestra
ARTURO TOSCANINI
The concert was to contain two of the greatest C major symphonies in the repertoire, Mozart’s Jupiter and Schubert’s Ninth, prefaced respectively by the Rossini overture and the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, performed by the sixteen full-time BBC Singers accompanied by Britain’s foremost duo pianists, Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson.
Present at the final rehearsal on the day, Britten thought that ‘Toscanini is worthy of such music’ - he was referring to the two symphonies - ‘the highest praise’.

The next morning all the critics were delighted save, as to the Brahms, the Times (‘magnificent but it was not Brahms’) and, as to the Schubert, Cardus, who, obstinately alone, found it four-square. Everyone else thought it superb without qualification, even if a few of the tempos occasioned comment: ‘convincing at all points’, said Bonavia in the Telegraph, with ‘moments of supreme beauty’ in the Andante.
The Times analysis of this performance was particularly close and acute. Toscanini solved the problem of the ‘joins’ between first and second subjects and elsewhere using less variation than usual, but ‘his general method was to make a slight ritardando at the end of his exposition or development, and refrain from returning to a tempo immediately on entering the new section’. This method secured ‘flexibility of rhythm and an increase of momentum’. In the finale’s coda ‘each time those four tremendous consecutive minims were pulled up just enough to increase their impact, but the intervening passages reverted at once to full speed’. The whole symphony gave the impression of a steady crescendo of energy, with the finale ‘swept forward with fresh accessions of energy at each stage of its progress’.
Newman, in the Sunday Times of 5 June, agreed fully but allowed most space for the Jupiter Symphony, which gave the impression that ‘we were watching the music in the very process of composition, so lucid was it all, so inevitably did one phrase grow out of another’.

A few days later, on the morning of 9 June, Toscanini listened without enthusiasm to the results of his recording session of a week earlier; he seems, nonetheless, to have approved them, although the transfers of the test recordings had yet to be made. In the afternoon came his second recording session, located at Abbey Road (Studio 1), for which the Brahms Second Symphony was scheduled; hut this was not to be.
Gaisberg’s memoirs corroborated Toscanini in every detail, if more diplomatically: he recollected a session ‘arranged in our own studio When [Toscanini] arrived we detected dark clouds on his brow.’ At first he declined to ascend the podium, but eventually did so and started to conduct; but he ‘halted the musicians after twenty bars or so and said “I do not like the placing of the instruments and the acoustics If I conduct records today I shall not be able to conduct your concert tomorrow.” And with that he slipped away to the waiting motor.” Principal trumpet Ernest Hall (the orchestra’s chairman) indeed warned the engineers that, seated as he and his colleagues were, Toscanini would be unhappy but was assured that, once in place, the Maestro would do just as they (the engineers) wanted — a foolhardy assumption: as soon as the instrumental sounds came from unaccustomed directions, that, said Hall, was the end of the session. Gaisberg and his colleagues were left to reflect that Toscanini, if rather drastic in his reaction, ‘was right about the acoustics and the placing of the instruments’.

Recordings: The first half was recorded virtually complete on shortwave transmission;. The Schubert was recorded by an amateur from the BBC broadcast and has parts missing from all movements. Nevertheless, enough remains with sufficient sound to disclose it as the finest of all Toscanini’s many extant statements of the score. The tempos and general approach do not differ substantially from the air check of Toscanini’s performance in his final concert as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic on 26 April 1936 (which is more relaxed than the overly tense first NBC broadcast of 1 January 1938). However, the suavity of the orchestral palette and the typical spontaneity of feeling that pervaded Toscanini’s work with the BBC orchestra – the extra oiling of the joints and the natural changes of pace in the finale (features sized upon by the Times) mark this out from other versions; so, too, do the contributions of Aubrey Brain’s horn, MacDonagh’s oboe and Thurston’s clarinet in the second movement, and their joint contributions to
the Trio.
Christopher Dyment “Toscanini in Britain”

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