The Minneapolis Concerts in the 1950s
Newly Discovered Recordings
Minneapolis Symphony/Antal Doráti
rec. 1956-58
Antal Doráti Society ADL365 [6 CDs: 330]

The Antal Doráti Society has now released a 6-CD digipack containing live Minneapolis Symphony broadcasts taped between 1956 and 1958, principally in their home location of Northrop Auditorium but in one case on a tour to Tehran. A few bonus tracks are conducted by the orchestra’s assistant conductor at the time, Gerhard Samuel. As usual from this source, each disc is accompanied by a four-page, stripped-down track-listing with the occasional contemporaneous review quoted. 

The first disc is all-American and contains six works taken from six separate concerts. The first is Alan Shulman’s Laurentian Overture, rather dryly recorded but misdated to 1942 in the notes – a typo obviously. Doráti brings this vibrant orchestral showpiece splendidly to life and is a little quicker than the work’s first performer, Guido Cantelli. Samuel Barber’s Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance was his Op.23a, a standalone piece composed in 1955 drawn from the 1946 ballet suite. If Mitropoulos is the first name that comes to mind here, Doráti lacks for little in sculpting its terse, unflinching drive. Henry Cowell is represented by his Music for Orchestra which to British ears may sound, in a few places, uncannily like early Malcolm Arnold in Scottish mode but otherwise offers piquant orchestration and colour. Rather more recherché fare is provided by Everett Helm’s Divertimento for Strings, for which I’ve not been able to locate a composition date. It’s a neo-classical work revealing the influences of Stravinsky and, in its concerto grosso feel, Martinů added to which there’s a touch of Britten’s string writing (in the Frank Bridge variations). Variously austere, antique and taut, it’s an attractive work and makes me wonder why Helm’s name is now largely forgotten. We all love Hovhaness, though the Prelude and Quadruple Fugue for all its exciting power is hardly the best of him. Finally, there’s Howard Schuman’s American Festival Overture which was commissioned by Koussevitzky in 1939, a pacy, syncopated, celebratory and none-too-serious affair ending in a percussion-laced finale. Bernstein’s is the best-known recording of this.

In CD 2 Bronchitis was in the air in December 1955 for the Sibelius performances. The Swan of Tuonela is dispatched with competence but no great affection – nothing like Rosbaud, for example. Doráti’s commercial recording of the Second Symphony with the Royal Stockholm orchestra in 1968 is very similar in outline to this reading but is somewhat less blatant and a more complete statement. That said, the orchestra plays well and there is interest in hearing what the reprinted review from the Star-Tribune called the ‘episodic’ nature of the performance, which can draw attention to inner part writing. The cumulative grip of the finale is effective, no question.  After this, the languorous pleasures of Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune, from a concert given three weeks later, offer balm.

The third disc is a bits-and-pieces Classical and Romantic mélange drawn from individual concerts.  The first track is the conductor introducing Cimarosa at a Young Person’s Concert in February 1956. The sound is not great here and the performance unfocused and fallible. Cherubini’s Ali Baba overture is a lot better, both sonically and in terms of the orchestra’s expertise. One seldom encounters Weber’s Preciosa overture so it’s good to hear this vivacious reading with its witty profile and role for the gentlemen of the percussion department, as Doráti’s erstwhile colleague, Thomas Beecham would have put it. The Suite attributed to Benjamin Franklin is arranged by Alan Shulman. The score was found in Paris in 1945 and, since Franklin is not known to have been able to compose, it’s almost impossible to believe it’s by him. Anyway, whoever wrote it, it’s slight, light and just a bit vapid. Franklin apparently invented the glass armonica so it’s appropriate that the same 1956 concert contained Mozart’s Adagio for Glass Armonica, K.356 (c.1791) arranged by Doráti himself. The disc ends with a rather severe, dogged performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony accompanied by obbligato coughs in December 1957. The bonus is a performance of Weber’s Oberon overture conducted very competently by Gerhard Samuel.

CD 4 is 20^th Century Rarities and starts off withJulían Orbón’s Tres versiones sinfónicas. This was a newish work when Doráti and the Minneapolis performed it in 1957 and its fresh-air Coplandesque qualities must have appealed. It possesses deft lyricism in the central slow panel whereas the finale is a zesty Congolese rhythmic dance. Doráti directs with real gusto but never lets the playing becoming overexuberantly ragged. Juan Orrego-Salas’ Symphony No.2 “To the Memory of a Wanderer” was composed in the same year as Orbón’swork, 1954 and is best known from Robert Whitney’s Louisville recording, coupled with Panufnik’s own Second Symphony, reissued on CD in 2013. It leans to the neo-classical, with brassy writing in the opening movement, reveille calls in the second – which develops into an implacable march theme full of threnodic power – and a tensile, driving finale which has a jubilant chorale-like feel. Doráti establishes an immediate sense of identification with the works he conducts and there’s nothing hesitant in his direction. The final work on this disc is one of the Madrigals by Mario Labroca, sung well by John Langstaff, and another exercise in assured neo-classicism.

The fifth CD features two prominent members of the Minneapolis Orchestra. The first is Rafael Druian, its concertmaster, in the Mendelssohn Concerto, a zippy but not sleek reading predicated along Heifetz’s lines. It has a youthful verve and some piquant slides though it’s not, phrasally speaking, ideally elastic. Incidentally, the little black and white picture reprinted in the notes shows David Nadien not Druian. The piano soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No.1 is Eva Knardahl who proves a lucid and cohesive soloist not given to bombast. She was something of a Grieg specialist so perhaps the Tchaikovsky drew from her a higher quotient of poetry. The bonus here is Gerhard Samuel’s Romeo and Juliet, itself a lucid reading and given at a Young People’s Concert in January 1956.

The final disc captures the orchestra on tour in Tehran on 16 September 1957 and recorded in the city’s Golestan Palace. The sound here is significantly the worst in the digipack, crumbly, distant and needing a volume boost to attempt to capture something of what was going on. One can hear that the Rossini opener is a bit crude in places but exciting, and that the Haffner Symphony features some aggressive dynamics in a generally pugnacious reading. Till Eulenspiegel is almost identical in outline to the recording he made two years earlier with the orchestra for Mercury, only in much less good sound. Once again, it receives a vigorous, even blustery interpretation.  The bonus in this disc takes us back to a Subscription Concert in Minneapolis directed by Gerhard Samuel in 1958. Handel’s Water Music Suite, arranged by Hamilton Harty, gets a spirited and successful reading – solid, and sensible and in much better sound than the Tehran concert.

The sound in the six discs is generally good, with the Tehran concert an exception, and the interpretative level throughout reasonably high. The peaks of the set, for me, are the Latin novelties Doráti introduced to the city and the finely-played album of Americana, but you’ll find plenty to interest and entertain you throughout.

Jonathan Woolf

Contents
CD 1
Doráti conducts Americana, from Barber to Shulman
Alan Shulman (1915-2002)
Laurentian overture (1951)
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Medea: Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, Op.23a (1955)
Henry Cowell (1897-1965)
Music for Orchestra (1957)
Everett Helm (1913-1999)
Divertimento for Strings
Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000)
Prelude and Quadruple Fugue (1936 rev. 1954)
Howard Schuman (1910-1992)
American Festival Overture (1939)
Minneapolis Symphony/Antal Doráti
rec. ?1952 (Shulman) and 1956-58, Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota

CD 2
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Lemminkäinen Suite: The Swan of Tuonela (1893–95)
Symphony No.2 in D major, Op. 43 (1902)
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune L.86 (1894)
Minneapolis Symphony/Antal Doráti
rec. December 1955, Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota

CD 3
Doráti conducts Classical and Romantic works
Introduction by Doráti
Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801)
Giannina and Bernadona; overture (1781)
Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)
Ali Baba: overture (1833)
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Preciosa; overture (1820)
Attrib Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790)
Suite for Strings (c.1788) arr. Alan Shulman
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Adagio for Glass Armonica, K.356 (c.1791) arr. Antal Doráti
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No.8 in B minor D.759 ‘Unfinished’ (1822)
Bonus
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Oberon; overture (1826)
Minneapolis Symphony/Gerhard Samuel
rec. 1956-58 Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota

CD 4
20^th Century Rarities
Julían Orbón (1925-1991)
Tres versiones sinfónicas (1954)
Juan Orrego-Salas (1919-2019)
Symphony No.2 “To the Memory of a Wanderer” (1954)
Mario Labroca (1896-1973)
Eight Madrigals on texts by Tommaso Campanella: Third Movement (1958) °
John Langstaff (baritone)°
Minneapolis Symphony/Antal Doráti
rec. 1956-58 Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota

CD 5
Doráti conducts Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op.64 (1844)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor, Op.23 (1875)
Minneapolis Symphony/Antal Doráti
Rafael Druian (violin)
Eva Knardahl (piano)
Minneapolis Symphony/Antal Doráti
rec. 15 February 1956, Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Bonus
Romeo and Juliet, fantasy-overture (1869 rev.1880)
Minneapolis Symphony/Gerhard Samuel
rec. 10 January 1956, Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota

CD 6
Minneapolis Symphony in concert in Teheran
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)
La gazza ladra; overture (1817)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No.35 in D major ‘Haffner’ K.385 (1782)
Richard Strauss (1865-1949)
Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Op.28 (1895)
Minneapolis Symphony/Antal Doráti
rec. 16 September 1957, Golestan Palace, Tehran, Iran
Bonus
Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Water Music Suite in F major, HWV 348 (1717)
Minneapolis Symphony/Gerhard Samuel
rec. 24 January 1958, Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota