Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony no. 40 in G minor K.550 (1788)
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Ein Heldenleben, op.40 (1898)
Grand Orchestre Symphonique de la RTB-BRT / Carlos Païta
rec. live, 1968 (Mozart) and 1969 (Strauss), Brussels, Belgium
Le Palais des Dégustateurs PDD050 [72]

Many of us who collect classical CDs have, I suspect, a tendency towards what might be termed subjective cultism.  When a particular performance strikes our fancy, we can’t help seeking out others by the same artist(s).  Then, if we particularly enjoy them, we like fancifully to imagine that we are among a select few who have seen the light.  Thus, on the basis of just one or two chance discoveries, I once collected everything I could find by the early 20^th century German conductor Max von Schillings and could barely understand why the rest of the classical music world had almost completely overlooked him – though the fact that he was a fervent and rather unpleasant Nazi hadn’t exactly helped his cause.  My most recent fixation has been on the recordings of Artur Rodziński, a man who, as far as I am aware, was certainly no fascist but who, given his reported propensity to carry loaded revolvers into orchestral rehearsals, was not, I suspect, the kind of conductor you’d want to see in front of you if you were having a bad day with your cello.

A little closer to our own time, the conductor Carlos Païta (1932-2015) offers another interesting example of a cult figure.  Idolised, it seems, by a few keen admirers, he has been largely disregarded – or, perhaps, as the Païtistas might claim, has merely remained undiscovered – by the rest of us.  Back in 2010 he was the subject of a couple of articles in the now defunct but much-missed quarterly magazine Classic Record Collector.  One of those, written by Richard Freed, posed the question Carlos Païta – a neglected master conductor?  Perhaps the recent slew of Païta re-releases on the Le Palais des Dégustateurs label will now enable us to come up with at least a provisional answer to that provocatively-phrased query.

The performance of Mozart’s 40^th symphony is certainly very distinctive.  As booklet notes author Max Trébosc points out, the composer wasn’t regularly featured in Païta’s programmes and some listeners, having heard this performance, will no doubt proclaim themselves rather pleased that that’s the case.  This, particularly in the first and last movements, is Mozart on steroids – driven, relentless, bold and dramatic.  M. Trébosc’s essay implies that the strings may have been quite substantially augmented for this performance and he is surely correct when he suggests that Païta directs the symphony with a forward-looking eye to Beethoven, putting his musical emphasis, as a consequence, on clarity and, above all else, sheer power.  [Anachronistic “big band” approaches to Mozart were, of course, not uncommon at the time.  Wide acceptance of the idea of Historically Informed Performance practice was still a few years away.]  While, however, I have previously found Païta’s general preference for propulsive, driven accounts quite attractive in his performances of Beethoven and Brahms (PDD040), on this occasion it is applied too broadly and indiscriminately across the board.  With the well-deployed utilisation of dynamics that I identified in that previous disc only notable, on this occasion, for its almost complete absence, this is a performance that’s pretty well devoid of very much at all in the way of either clarifying light or atmospheric shade.

Even so, anyone looking for a very different way of approaching Mozart might find this to be an intriguing prospect.  At the same time, others who appreciate orchestral virtuosity may also find it to their taste, for the Brussels string players exhibit bucketfuls of it, especially in Païta’s manically delivered finale.  I must admit that, as something of a guilty pleasure, I was quite seduced by the performance’s sheer verve and the boldly deployed panache with which it’s all carried off.  I suspect that many audience members at the time would have enjoyed themselves too, although, at this point, I cannot quite decide whether the remarkable noiselessness that they maintain throughout the performance is a reflection of their innate good manners or of their utter shock and bewilderment at what they were hearing.

By the way, although these recordings were made nearly six decades ago, there’s no need to be troubled by their age.  After all, as we all appreciate from CDs in our own collections, 1960s recording technology can still sound very impressive indeed.  With that said, however, it is worth noting that the performances on this particular disc were not recorded under studio conditions but at public concerts.  These days, of course, basic economic considerations mean that very many new releases derive from such live performances.  Advanced digital technology allows them to be recorded on the spot in superb quality and for extraneous coughs, sneezes and other noises to be invisibly edited out.  I suspect, however, that any recording of a 1960s public concert would almost certainly have been originally intended merely for the purpose of live or subsequent radio transmission, a supposition surely supported by the fact that the orchestra for both these particular performances was Belgian radio and TV’s own in-house band*.  Sadly, a recording engineered to a standard appropriate for home listening on domestic radio sets in the mid-20^th century will almost inevitably fall significantly short when judged against 21^st century audiophile standards. 

That point becomes a real issue when one of the recorded works is the thematically complex Ein Heldenleben.  M. Trébosc strikingly characterises the piece as a “sonic orgy” and it’s certainly one that requires the greatest possible clarity of sound in order to cut through the mass of writhing, lubricious limbs and make its maximum musical impact.  My earlier encounters with Païta’s Beethoven and Brahms performances demonstrated that he possesses real skill in maintaining effective orchestral balances.  Nevertheless, even the most adept conductor’s good intentions can be thwarted – or, at least, severely compromised – by less than ideal technical recording standards.

The sound quality of the Strauss performance on this disc is clearly inferior to that of the previous year’s Mozart.  Was a different venue used?  Were new sound engineers employed, bringing with them different technical preferences?  The CD’s booklet is silent on those points, but, whatever the cause, the recording’s sonic deficiencies virtually hole this Strauss performance below the waterline from its very opening.  The immediate impression is of constricted, boxy and very bass-heavy sound, sufficiently congested as to render some of the contributions from the orchestra’s lower registers as little more than vague, undifferentiated thumps.  At the same time, the sonic bouillabaisse is further muddied by an excess of reverberation that overloads the microphones and obscures much of Strauss’s meticulously detailed writing.  I could easily go on, but what’s the point of criticising the glassy, rather screechy strings that actually make for quite painful listening when playback is set at a reasonable volume?  Or observing that the unnamed solo violinist’s impressively delivered contributions are essentially wasted in the context of this recording’s manifest deficiencies?  OK, I concede that, should you be so inclined, it is possible to listen through the audio mush.  Why, however, should you have to, when other equally good performances of this much-recorded work can be heard in far better sound? 

Audio engineering ought surely to aim, unobtrusively and invisibly, at providing a neutral – or even flattering – sound in which to showcase a performance.  Here, however, is an instance where it comes a cropper by unnecessarily drawing attention to itself and its deficiencies and thereby takes our attention away from the music itself. 

That is a real shame, for the conductor’s strengths seem to have been greatest in this sort of late Romantic repertoire.  In a characteristic paean of unbounded admiration, M. Trébosc claims that “Maestro Carlos Païta, faithful to his generous style, brings the score to a strikingly immediate level of listening… [and] inhabits the autobiographical work of Richard Strauss”.  While a few smiles may be raised by his combination of hyperbole and pretention (“brings the score to a strikingly immediate level of listening”, indeed!), his basic point is, I think, essentially sound. 

On the basis of the recordings preserved on this disc, I fear that we are still unable to assess whether Carlos Païta was, as Richard Freed put it, a neglected master conductor.  The Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and Strauss recordings that I have so far encountered do, however, suggest a few interim conclusions.

In the first place, it’s fair to say that he’s a conductor who is able to come up with some thought-provoking ideas.  Of course, any interpreter can produce wacky accounts that are self-evidently antipathetic to the composer’s own conception.  There is nothing to admire in that.  Some others do, though, offer genuinely imaginative perspectives that can enhance pieces of music in creatively positive ways – Leopold Stokowski is, perhaps, the most obvious example.  Païta’s interventions don’t even begin to approach the scale and scope of Stokie’s, but he is certainly no automatic slave to the Urtext.   In the second place, the way in which, for instance, he balances the orchestra’s component elements to give all of them a chance to register and be appreciated, while simultaneously demonstrating effective mastery of dynamic contrast, points to the fact that he was something rather more than a mere jobbing conductor.  And, thirdly, Païta was clearly a figure who was able to galvanise an orchestra.  I can find nothing that suggests that the 1960s Grand Orchestre Symphonique de la RTB-BRT was anything other than a no doubt perfectly competent radio band.  Yet its players, here and elsewhere, frequently rise to the challenge and play out of their skins for him, even while many of them must have entertained serious doubts about his musical idiosyncrasies. 

A final conclusion?  With my tongue slightly in cheek, I can say that I am at least persuaded that Maestro Païta was at least as good a conductor as Max von Schillings – if not quite up there with gun-toting Artur Rodziński.  Nonetheless – and in spite of Le Palais des Dégustateurs’s valiant efforts – even a provisional consensus on where exactly he stands in the profession’s pantheon remains, at this early stage of critical reassessment, tantalisingly elusive.

Rob Maynard

* I have taken at face value the CD’s claim that these are, indeed, live recordings made by Carlos Païta with the Grand Orchestre Symphonique de la RTB-BRT.  However, one of our readers has suggested, in a somewhat intriguing comment appended to an earlier review, that the issue may not be quite as clear-cut as it appears.