I was talking to The McBee last weekend about the
amazingness of Dvorak’s cello concerto. It goes without saying that it’s the
greatest cello concerto ever written for all those musical reasons which you
can’t put into words without seeming like an idiot. It has better melodies,
livelier rhythms, more beautiful harmonies, and more emotional wallop – not just
moreso than any other cello concerto, but perhaps more than any 19th
century concerto for any instrument.
(Dvorak – a song composer for the ages)
Dvorak was not a natural composer. He was a natural musician
who apparently played both the violin and viola beautifully. His compositions
had an effortless command of all the basic musical elements – the only problem
is that he rarely knew how to make it interesting for more than five minutes at
a time. If he’d stuck with songs and dances, he could have been a miniaturist to
rival Schubert and Chopin.
But for better or worse, Dvorak wanted to write long-form
compositions. And in the stead of miniatures he wrote opera after opera,
symphony after symphony, every one of which has dull spots as he clumsily negotiates
the clichés of German symphonic development. Nothing Dvorak wrote is without
interest, and yet there is so much music by him that feels like all the good
parts should be spliced together by an editor with a good pair of scissors and
no conscience (Stokowski?).
Even most of his greatest works – the New World Symphony,
the late sacred music, the American Quartet and the A-Major Piano Quintet – all
of it has dull spots. The only exception in this regard is the Cello Concerto.
It is the one long-form work by Dvorak that is absolutely perfect. A decent
performance will hold our attention and never let us go. It is as moving and
exciting in the first bar as it is in the last. So how inspiring would Dvorak’s
Cello Concerto be if its performances were any good?
The McBee inspired me to go back and listen to performances
of it. He maintained that Yo-Yo Ma was the best performer of the piece, I said
that it was Rostropovich. I went back and listened to them both. Sure enough,
Yo-Yo Ma was precisely as I remembered. Exciting, charismatic, extraordinarily
expressive, and so exaggerated that I almost felt queasy. The slow, lyrical
sections were milked to the point that the baby was drowning. So this is what
diabetes feels like.
(Vaclav Talich’s Dvorak)
I then went back to good old Mstislav Rostropovich, or should
I say young Rostropovich? When I was 20, I went to a record store in Prague and
bought a recording of a 25-year-old (but still bald) Rostropovich performing
the Cello Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic and their fabled music director –
Vaclav Talich. Talich learned Dvorak’s great scores at the feet of the composer
himself, and as conductors go, his authority is final. You hear the inimitable
Czech Philharmonic sound which Talich worked so assiduously to cultivate that’s
so perfect for Dvorak. When every other orchestra plays Dvorak, Dvorak sounds
gruff. When the Czech Philharmonic plays him, it sounds like a folky version of
Schubert or Mozart.
…So why is this recording so bland? Why does every single phrasing
and dynamic marking in the score seem to go unheeded? Why is the entire score
played at almost a single tempo when Dvorak is constantly indicating tempo
changes? Why is everything played at a comfortable jaunt rather than with the
manic Mahlerian frenzies which Dvorak clearly wanted? Rostropovich’s later recordings are more
interesting, but at no point does Slava feel as though he cares much about what
Dvorak wants. He’s doing his own thing, making his own points, and I have no
problem with that if what the performer’s doing is more interesting than what’s
written on the page (it often is). But in this case, Slava’s Dvorak is no improvement
on Dvorak’s Dvorak.
Later in his career, Slava made something of a religion of
this piece. While Slava (perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest
instrumentalist) occupied himself with hundreds of more interesting projects,
he funded them by making famous recording after famous recording of this piece with
high prestige conductors: Karajan, Giulini, Ozawa. Whereas Yo-Yo Ma at least
seems like he’s staying within the general guidelines of Dvorak’s phrasing and
dynamics, Rostropovich’s phrasing is just plain random. ‘Oooh! This is
interesting’ Slava seems to be saying in another in a series of moments brought
on by interpretive ADD. It’s bloated, inflated approach full of well-manicured,
luxurient sounds…but why does it exist?
(Pablo Casals)
And hearing the comfortableness of Slava makes me long for a
more dramatic approach. I then remember that first recording, the ‘classic’
Dvorak Cello Concerto. Pablo Casals in 1939 with the Czech Philharmonic and
George Szell conducting. Even with the Czech Philharmonic, you lose the Czech ‘tang’
right away through the antiquated sound. But, for once, it’s nice to finally
hear things at Dvorak’s tempos. The orchestral accompaniment is truly
fantastic. Szell really understood Dvorak and would loosen up quite a bit for
his more folky music. But then Pablo comes in… and this giant of the 20th
century, this sensitive humanitarian of a musician should be perfect for this
most human of pieces. Yet like his two great heirs, the Dvorak completely
eludes him. After a few minutes, you begin to notice something striking… he
does not play a single soft dynamic. Whereas Yo-Yo Ma is soporific and
sentimental, Casals is damn brutal.
(Feuermann playing Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto)
Still more brutal than Casals is Emanuel Feuermann, whom it
seems that nobody told that the Dvorak Cello concerto is not a showpiece. This is,
for once, a performance that’s faster than Dvorak wanted it. And it’s kind of
terrifying how easily this loveable piece can be turned into something
resembling Prokofiev, and would be even if the recorded sound didn’t match the
performance in shrillness.
Still soppier than Yo-Yo is Jackie. No one - not Slava, not
Yo-Yo, not Feuermann, not even Casals - had a more charismatic way with that
instrument than Jacqueline Du Pre. Yet she pulls the entire piece apart, and
all that effort which Dvorak made to build a perfectly constructed piece of
music was for naught.
Still soppier than Jackie is Mischa. Mischa Maiski is the
cellist you turn to when the extremes of every other cellist are just not
extreme enough. In all fairness to Maisky, three things should be mentioned. 1.
He was working with Leonard Bernstein who at the end of his life pushed every
extreme as far as he could get. 2. He made another recording of this piece with
Zubin Mehta that was not nearly as extreme in its slow speeds as the slow
sections this. 3. Except on issues of tempo, he’s hewing much closer to Dvorak’s
dynamics and phrasing than most cellists dare. Even so…jeez….
But most cellists fall into the Slava category –
Piatagorsky, Tortellier, Starker, Fournier, Rose, Mork, Isserlis – they all
simply seem too lazy to put together a great performance - as though they’re
hauling out their cello for yet another performance of the Dvorak Cello
Concerto. They all sound tired of this piece. I don’t doubt it takes an
enormous amount of effort to put it together, but imagine what would happen if
some cellist was determined to play this piece with the dedication they’d give
to a world premiere. Every time people talk about the tiredness of the
classical music world, the cliché is mentioned that maybe we ought to ban
certain pieces for a while so we can come to them afresh. I doubt there’s a
single piece of music which seems to need such a ban more than the Dvorak Cello
Concerto. To hear this piece properly, really hear it, we need a hybrid with Pablo
Casals’s discipline and Yo-Yo Ma’s care. In the meantime, to truly hear the
greatness of this piece, listen to Maisky and Bernstein once, then never listen
to them again.
(Slava at the Proms Part I)
Though maybe there’s one way to get closer to its greatness.
I once found a youtube clip that always burns in my mind as the best performance
I’ll ever hear of this piece – but it’s only of the last movement. It was Slava
Rostropovich in 1974, right after he was forced to defect from the Soviet
Union for offering shelter to Soviet dissidents. There was the greatest classical performer of my lifetime, probably penniless
at that moment, playing his calling card at the Proms at Royal Albert Hall with
a regional British orchestra (Royal Liverpool Philharmonic) and a C-List
conductor (Charles Groves). As never before or since, Slava was honoring the tempos
and dynamics, not perfectly but well enough to show he cared. He played with an
urgency we never again heard from him in this piece which he played ad nauseum.
THIS is the greatness of Dvorak.
(Part II)
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ReplyDeleteWhat about Heinrich Schiff or Sol Gabetta?
ReplyDeleteGood question. I'm only a little familiar with Ms. Gabetta, but I do find her appealing. The late Heinrich Sxhiff gave one of two great performances I heard live in Los Angeles. The other was Lynn harrell. Just picked up Schiff with Haitink. I like it, but don't love it yet. For me the great one is still Fournier with Szell. And, I do like the recent Queyras pared with a great "Dumkky". Just a word about Evan Tucker. His comments about Dvorak are just plain wrong. Dvorak was one of the greatest natural composers. Brilliant, moving, enduring, and far from boring. But, then again, anyone, I suppose, can have a blog!
DeleteThe compilation you look for is on Pre's performance. Just listen to it. Its not a classical piece nor a baroque, its a romantic one.
ReplyDeleteOne of the only essays on Dvorak that I am in complete agreeance with. I have a soft spot for the Rostropovich/Boult version. This posted version with Groves calls for superlatives. Without doubt this Dvorak masterpiece is almost always detuned and very much lost in translation. It's almost as if it is played without oomph because the audiences are that fickle they would walk out if as much as a string broke during a really lively live performance and customers would feel cheated if the studio versions they bought of the piece varied radically from the live versions they may have become accustomed to on their social outings.
ReplyDeleteThere are very good recorded performances of this work by Fournier / Szell, Gendron / Haitink, Chuchro / Waldhans, Thauer / Macal. Also some not so good as the writer has stated - Maisky, duPre, Webber, etc.
ReplyDelete