Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
The Sleeping Beauty, Op 66 TH13 – excerpts (1889)
Francesca da Rimini, Op 32 TH46 (1876)
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Symphony No 1 in D major, Op 25 Classical (1917)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphony No 5 in E minor, Op 64 TH29 (1888)
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra (Tchaikovsky), USSR Symphony Orchestra (Prokofiev)/Arvīds Jansons
rec. live, 13 September 1971, Royal Albert Hall, London (Beauty, Francesca); 19 September 1971, Royal Festival Hall, London (Tchaikovsky 5); 17 November 1983, Ulster Hall, Belfast (Prokofiev)
ICA Classics ICAC5177 [2 CDs: 103]

ICA Classics’s pre-publicity material for this disc suggests that its importance derives from the fact that the Soviet conductor Arvīds Jansons (1914-1984) was an infrequent visitor to the recording studio. “The key point about this release”, it claims, “is that… [his] recordings are extremely rare and will be sought after by collectors”.

While that second assertion remains yet to be vindicated by sales figures, the first seems well founded in fact. Jansons’s brief entry in John L. Holmes’s magisterial study Conductors on record (London, 1982) suggests that the author had managed to hear only three of his recordings – Tchaikovsky’s third symphony, the same composer’s first orchestral suite and Boccherini’s cello concerto (in which he had accompanied soloist Daniil Shafran). In his book’s several thousand individual entries, Holmes was wont to use an overview of a conductor’s recorded output to identify his or her* characteristic traits and qualities. On this occasion, however, with such limited evidence of Jansons’ work at his disposal, he was apparently at a loss to describe any consistently distinguishing features or idiosyncrasies at all and consequently made no attempt to do so. I suspect that when, a few years later, Holmes wrote the far shorter Conductors: a record collector’s guide (London, 1988), he may well have been relieved that constraints of space forced him to discard Arvīds Jansons’ sketchy entry altogether.

In his very useful booklet essay for this new ICA Classics release, Jean-Charles Hoffelé also emphasises how few opportunities there have been to examine the conductor’s legacy. Referring to a “scant [number of] official recordings on the Melodiya label”, he adds to Holmes’s list only Dvořák’s ‘New World’ symphony, a performance of the Franck symphony and another of El amor brujo, the ballet pantomimico by Manuel de Falla.

Historical circumstances go a long way towards explaining why Jansons produced so few discs. Like many aspects of life in the Soviet Union, the workings of its recording industry were – and remain to this day – somewhat opaque. Nevertheless, it’s clear that non-musical considerations played a significant role in determining what recordings were made and, more significantly, by whom. As one might have expected, composers and conductors suspected of political dissent were shunned (or worse). Racism also came into play. Most obviously, Jewish artists such as Karl Eliasberg and Natan Rakhlin must have been constantly alert to the dangers posed to their careers by Stalin’s regular bouts of anti-semitism. Such racist and nationalistic considerations may, indeed, explain why Jansons – who spent his formative years and early career as a citizen of the independent Republic of Latvia, didn’t become a Soviet national until forced to by wartime circumstances in 1940 and had, moreover, a Jewish wife – failed to climb as far up the greasy pole as his talents might have otherwise allowed.

Thus, while, at various points in time, Jansons and Eliasberg held significant roles at the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, both were regularly sidelined during the 50 years’ tenure of the orchestra’s long-serving principal conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988). In political terms, the latter was the conducting equivalent of the composer Reinhold Glière – a yes-man who was prepared to sail with the prevailing wind and to help ensure that the USSR’s musical hierarchy supported whatever Communist Party line was in force at the time. Fully backed, in consequence, by the Soviet government and the nomenklatura, Mravinsky’s autocratic determination to become and to remain the public face of the Leningrad orchestra does much to explain not only why Jansons was largely frozen out of the recording studio but also why, as Hoffelé reminds us, the discs that he did make were marketed only within the USSR and not internationally.

While it’s true that a little online research throws up a handful of intriguing references to other Jansons recordings unmentioned by either Holmes or Hoffelé, they usually turn out to be of little-known repertoire. There are, for instance, accompaniments to violin concertos by Rosenberg and Arapov and a performance of Yevlakhov’s Third symphony that was favourably reviewed here a few years ago by my colleague Rob Barnett. Overall, however, it is impossible to deny that the skimpy state of the Jansons discography has precluded the formation of a fully-rounded, definitive impression of the conductor’s musicianship.

At first glance, it might be thought that, with only four new performances on offer, this new ICA Classics twofer isn’t going to transform that state of affairs to any great extent. That, however, would be an unduly negative response, for two particular features of these recordings do allow us to appreciate more clearly that Arvīds Jansons was a very fine conductor. Firstly, all the performances on these discs are of substantial and frequently recorded works, thereby facilitating a degree of wide-ranging interpretative comparison that would have been impossible in considering, let’s say, Jansons’ performance of Yevlakhov’s Third symphony. Secondly, even though they memorialise live concert hall performances, the recordings were made by BBC engineers who were expert at their craft and familiar with the various venues’ sonic idiosyncrasies. As a result, the performances have been preserved with greater orchestral transparency than that typically achieved in Soviet recording studios, where monolithic and near-impenetrable walls of brass-dominated sound (relayed to the listener, moreover, on poorly manufactured shellac discs) were often the norm. They thereby provide the attentive listener with sufficient sonic detail to permit a critical – if small scale – assessment of Jansons’ approach, especially to matters of orchestral balance and dynamics. So, heard in better sound and in works that we at least feel that we know what they ought to sound like, what do we make of these accounts?

The Sleeping Beauty introduction certainly gets us off to a striking start, as Jansons and the Leningraders pin us to the backs of our seats with an opening orchestral flourish (00:00 – 00:44) that’s urgent, dramatic and driven. The subsequent musical depiction of the Lilac Fairy is, in contrast, carefully controlled and notable for the way in which the level of emotional tension is first built up and then dissipated. Launched with some beautiful playing from the orchestra’s harpist, the well-known Rose Adagio provides a further demonstration of the way in which Jansons slowly introduces a degree of edginess that’s entirely appropriate to the stage action at that point, with strings expertly balanced against some premonitory interventions from the brass. One can easily imagine the grandest Kirov prima ballerina dancing to this particular account. Listeners familiar with the music will find Jansons’ Panorama – a depiction of the prince’s journey to awaken his sleeping princess from her slumber – rather slower and more deliberately paced than most. Moreover, it puts greater than usual emphasis on the rhythmic underpinning to the flowing “travelling” melody, thereby introducing a degree of dramatic tension that’s once again entirely appropriate at that point in the story. The final ballet excerpt, the famous Sleeping Beauty waltz, is once again taken rather deliberately, sacrificing a degree of excitement for some added stately grandeur. The clear recording allows us to hear lots of woodwind detail – as well as a rather odd noise (can it possibly be a whistle?) that briefly intrudes at 3:01.

My colleague Ralph Moore is a great admirer of Francesca da Rimini (“Tchaikovsky’s greatest work after his last symphony”) and, like him and many other listeners, I’ve always considered Leopold Stokowski’s 1958 hell-for-leather performance with the pseudonymous Stadium Symphony Orchestra of New York the benchmark recording because of its primary colours and sheer visceral excitement. The effectiveness delivered by such an approach is confirmed by another much admired account – that of Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov and the USSR Radio Symphony Orchestra (Olympia OCD 139), described as one of “no-holds-barred frenzy” by MusicWeb’s Founding Editor Rob Barnett. Stokowski’s and Ovchinnikov’s intensely driven accounts never leave us in any doubt of the inevitability of the violent end awaiting Francesca and her brother-in-law and illicit lover, Paulo. Jansons, however, favours a different path. For considerable stretches of the music, he adopts a more restrained and even, if one may use the word when considering Francesca, subtle approach, varying mood and tempo to suggest that real happiness might, at times, actually be a possibility and that the pair’s downfall is not necessarily preordained. He is, for instance, still comparatively relaxed at about the 15 to 17 minutes mark, by which time Stokowski has already begun screwing up the musical tension to confirm that there’s more than a little trouble brewing behind the scenes. While I still think that Stokowski’s way of things is more effective, there’s no denying that Jansons’s performance is well worth hearing – as proven, on this occasion, by the enthusiastic response of the Royal Albert Hall audience.

Prokofiev’s Classical symphony isn’t a piece on which conductors tend to place any individual stamps. It is relatively straightforward, eschewing anything much in the way of nuance, and its four movements are short and to the point, with each coming in, in this performance, at under five minutes in length. Full of joie de vivre, the Classical’s winning mixture of melodic charm and witty pastiche almost always brings a smile to the face. Here we have a wonderfully neat performance that gives the impression that the players – not, this time, the Leningraders but members of the USSR Symphony Orchestra – are really concentrating on the music. They certainly play with the requisite degree of skittish delicacy in the outer movements, but it is the very brief (2:02) Gavotte that makes, I think, the strongest impression. While many other conductors seem to treat it as little more than a charming interlude, Jansons’ careful and deliberate account accords it unaccustomed weight and significance. If anything could have taken the Belfast audience’s minds, at least momentarily, off the dreadful day-to-day circumstances of life in Northern Ireland at the time, one hopes that this hugely enjoyable performance might just have done so.

This twofer’s second disc is given over to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth symphony. Given that we are listening, once more, to the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, it is well-nigh inevitable that we will make comparisons with performances led by Mravinsky. The fifth was one of the latter’s calling cards and his best known recordings remain the two that he made for Deutsche Grammophon. Both his June 1956 mono account (DG 447 423-2) and its November 1960 successor (DG 00289 447 5911, reviewed here by Rob Barnett in a later remastering by Pristine Audio) retain their iconic status, to the extent that DG included each of them in its high-profile series The Originals – legendary recordings from the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue.

Booklet essayist Jean-Charles Hoffelé chooses to emphasises the differences between Jansons’ interpretation (“the pearl among these recordings… a remarkable performance”) and Mravinsky’s and it is worth quoting his words at some length. Jansons’ Tchaikovsky Fifth, he suggests, “sounds like the polar opposite to the imperious style that Yevgeny Mravinsky employed in this work. The tempos are expansive but full of pathos, his distinctly contemplative approach very much to the fore, with bitterness and violence eschewed until the finale whose [sic.] blazing presto allows the full virtuosity of the Leningrad players to shine. This almost precipitous outpouring is quite remarkable, especially coming after the expansiveness and profundity of the three preceding movements. The coda, avoiding bombast, is just as surprising. Clearly, it is Arvīds Jansons’s Fifth that the orchestra is playing, without the least hint of Mravinsky’s trademark histrionics”.

Having listened to both Mravinsky recordings and to this Jansons performance, I am rather more struck, on the contrary, by the broad similarities between the two conductors’ approaches which, to my ears, are just as significant as any differences. The qualities that have long drawn listeners to Mravinsky’s recordings – urgency, drive, precision and orchestral virtuosity – have lasted very well indeed, as Rob’s enthusiastic review of their Pristine Audio incarnation makes clear, and Jansons’ way with the symphony exhibits many of those much-admired characteristics. In general, his performance of the fifth is, I’d say, one so recognisably cut from the older conductor’s cloth that it might even be thought to originate from Mravinsky himself, albeit caught on a day when he was in uncharacteristically mellow form. Can M. Hoffelé and I both be right? I think we can. Listeners, after all, come to music from different perspectives and the emotional volatility of many of Tchaikovsky’s pieces openly invites – nay, encourages – a degree of subjective involvement and response that can overwhelm any notion of immutable objectivity. Thus, what Hoffelé regards as “trademark histrionics” are, I venture to suggest, merely an alternative way of regarding what Rob Barnett admiringly characterises as “feral vitality”. And let’s remember that even Tchaikovsky himself regarded his own music in very different – but equally subjective – ways from time to time: having declared his symphonic fantasy Fatum to be “the best thing I have written so far” at the time of its 1869 premiere, he destroyed it just a few years later in disgust.

However, even if I find myself somewhat at odds with M. Hoffelé on the specific issue of the Fifth symphony, I commend his broader attempt, in the difficult circumstances of Jansons’ slim extant discography, to draw a few conclusions about the conductor’s overall approach. Picking out just a few of the characteristics he identifies – “expressive restraint”, “pronounced fondness for expansive tempi”, “go[es] deeply into the sound and… savour[s] the harmonies”, “dolce playing”, “absence of effects”, “a sense of reserve” and “clarity of gesture, scrupulous respect for the score, distaste for effects of any kind… and… mastery of tempo” – gives a good flavour of the points that he makes. Nevertheless, by including almost as many instances of what Jansons doesn’t do as what he does do, the analysis also runs the incidental and unintended risk of implying that he may have been a somewhat penny-plain or even downright uninteresting conductor.

Such a judgement would do the man a definite disservice, for, on the basis of the material currently available, only an incomplete and tentative assessment of his musicianship is possible. Poorly represented on disc, it is regrettable but inevitable that Arvīds Jansons remains, to most collectors, merely a name. If he is thought of at all, it is probably as some sort of “missing link” between two rather better-known figures – Yevgeny Mravinsky and his own son Mariss (1943-2019). However, quite apart from his commercial recordings, we know that Jansons Sr. made rather more live radio broadcasts than just those heard on the disc under review. Listeners fortunate enough to have heard them recall, for instance, some superb performances of Shostakovich symphonies that, presumably, remain on tapes locked up in the BBC vaults. Quite simply, we need to hear more of Arvīds Jansons’s work and must therefore welcome this new release warmly as, one hopes, a promising start to that important process.

As already indicated, the BBC engineers of the time did a very good job of recording these performances and their achievement has been reproduced very well on these discs. There is, it’s true, distinctly more brightness and slightly more reverberation in the Prokofiev symphony that in the other tracks, but I suspect that that’s simply a reflection of the qualities characteristic of the Ulster Hall, Belfast, at the time.

My only irritation with this release arises from the subject with which I began this review – its marketing. The details on the discs’ rear cover somewhat perplexingly inform us that Prokofiev’s Classical symphony is a “bonus”. That’s a word defined in my Collins English dictionary as “something given, paid, or received above what is due or expected”. Without its inclusion, however, neither of the two discs would actually have reached a duration of 45 minutes, so I think we consumers have the right to see the inclusion of the Classical as less of a bonus than a simple commercial entitlement.

My trusty Collins does, it’s true, offer an alternative definition, “Brit. a slang word for a bribe”. However, that can’t possibly have been the intended meaning here. After all, no one in their right mind would think it necessary to bribe any admirers of fine musical performances to add this extremely welcome new release to their shelves.

Rob Maynard

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Footnote
*Holmes’s Conductors on record is a hefty volume of 734 pages, each one including up to half a dozen individual pocket biographies of often long-forgotten musicians. Trying to recall any women conductors who were active on disc at the time of its publication, off the top of my head I came up with Veronika Dudarova and Eve Queler (the latter accorded warm appreciation in a recent review by my colleague Mike Parr). Holmes includes them both. I have no doubt forgotten or missed a few others, yet, given that even today we still see only a disproportionately small number of women conductors in the recording studio, I’m not too hopeful of serendipitously coming across any more of their predecessors in the book anytime soon.