Launy Grøndahl (conductor)
Legacy Volume 8
Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Launy Grøndahl
rec. 1950-1956, live broadcasts
Danacord DACOCD888 [2 CDs: 140]
The latest volume in Danacord’sLauny Grøndahl Legacy series is top-heavy with violin concertos. The broadcasts were made in 1950 – the Peder Gram Overture, Sibelius Concerto with Max Rostal and Sibelius’ Symphony No.1 – in 1952 (Dvořák and Hindemith) – and finally the Gram Concerto in 1956.
Dvořák’s Concerto is played by Jaroslav Suchý, Czech-born, a Ševčik-student and long-standing member of the Vienna Philharmonic. He made this concerto something of a calling card, having performed it, the notes tell us, with Rudolf Moralt in December 1940 adding the Brahms Concerto and the first movement of Paganini’s Concerto, Op.6 for good measure. He seems to have specialised in concerto concerts as I’ve found a date from the following year in which he played the Dvořák alongside the Beethoven and Spohr’s No.9, again with Moralt, and in 1946 he played the Glazunov and Goldmark with Fritz Sedlak. He’s a fine player, rhythmically idiomatic and tonally attractive, phrasing with refined elegance and employing old school portamenti in strategic places. Perhaps he can be a touch heavy once or twice in the first movement but the finale dances adeptly with some excellently voiced ‘pesante’ passages. It’s a fluid, vibrant reading abetted well by Grøndahl and his Danish Radio forces.
Hindemith’s splendid Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber comes from the same concert. String sonorities are aptly stirring, and the percussion and brass are on good form, the syncopated fugal moments of the Scherzo being well done – jazzy and brassy. There’s an especially fine first flute in the orchestra. The finale is forceful and rightly exciting.
I wrote about Kai Laursen’s live recording of Peder Gram’s Violin Concerto (1919-20) in the context of Danacord’s colossal haul of Danish concertos on 10 CDs, all played by the implacable Laursen. I wrote there that ‘the violin’s line is at times seemingly independent of the orchestral material, soaring as if utterly abstracted from the orchestral context in which it finds it’s the protagonist’ and that will still do. Villy Kær, unlike Suchý and Rostal, has no mini-biography in the notes so I’d better add that he was the first violin of the Musica Vitalis Quartet, a notably good ensemble, who recorded Nielsen and Vagn Holmboe amongst other Scandinavian composers. He has no more success than Laursen in teasing out the essence of Gram’s rhapsodic work which, as usual for Gram, lacks a tune (as conductor Fritz Busch once noted of his symphonies) but he’s a good player of some intractable material.
Disc 2 starts with Gram’s Overture in C, a compound of Strauss and Sibelius with little Nielsen-like elements; very busy, with chattering material that fails to develop. Max Rostal left behind no studio recording of the Sibelius, so this is a valuable adjunct to his discography. He’d played it at that year’s Proms with Malcolm Sargent, so he was well prepared for this December 1950 broadcast. There is, however, a caveat: the first movement is incomplete. There’s a lacuna at 2:05 into the first movement after which the music picks up again at 2:11. I’d guess that there is a loss of two minutes. Rostal was the opposite of a richly voiced tonalist, but this is a concerto that can admit a number of differing approaches from the cool, wintry highly effective Anja Ignatius to the beefy, burnished Oistrakh and everything in between. Rostal makes a good go at it though I find his pinched, unvarnished tone rather unattractive, and his intonation buckles slightly in the finale.
That leaves Sibelius’ Symphony No.1 which comes from the same concert as the concerto, one that celebrated the composer’s 85th birthday in December 1950. This is a torso. Its outer movements are incomplete, the Scherzo is half the length it should be and the entire second movement is missing. What remains was well recorded, as indeed was the Concerto, which only adds to the frustration. Should these torsos be included? The Concerto, yes, but the Symphony is much more problematic. If you treat it as indicative of the conductor’s idiomatic way with Sibelius, you won’t go too far wrong. In fact, treat it as an appendix and remember that this twofer is priced ‘as for one’.
The notes are fine – but why silent about poor Villy Kær? – and I see volume 9 is in preparation.
Jonathan Woolf
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Contents
Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904)
Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53, B96 (1879)
Jaroslav Suchý (violin)
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)
Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943)
Peder Gram (1881-1956)
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 20 (1919-20)
Villy Kær (violin)
Overture in C, Op.21 (1935)
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 (1904 rev 1905); incomplete first movement
Max Rostal (violin)
Symphony No.1 in E minor, Op.39 (1899): missing second movement and passages from the other movements
