REVIEW POTPOURRI – Conductors: Charles Munch, Walter Bruno, Pierre Monteux

by Peter Cates

Charles Munch, Walter Bruno, Pierre Monteux

Charles Munch

Continuing with my on-going fascination with the great conductors of the past, I encountered a group photo of Charles Munch (1891-1968), Bruno Walter (1876-1962), and Pierre Monteux (1875-1964), who established the still existing Domaine School in Hancock for conducting students just over 80 years ago. The occasion for this get together at Carnegie Hall’s green room was all three maestros conducting the NBC Symphony in a 1958 memorial concert for its former music director Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), each of them featured in one piece.

Youtubes of each of the three conductors guesting with the NBC include a very good late ‘30s Mahler 1st Symphony, with Walter ; a 1953 Beethoven 7th with Monteux; and a Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin with Munch also from 1953, along with several others.

The NBC Symphony was created as a radio orchestra in order to lure Toscanini back to the United States from his native Italy where he was living since resigning as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1936 after seven brilliant years there. The NBC broadcasts have never been surpassed for long-term popularity.

However, by 1954, Toscanini, although still in good shape, was pressured to resign and his last three years would see a decline in health.

According to Monteux’s daughter, Toscanini and her father admired each other’s art; while Walter and Toscanini had been friends for decades, the older man once stated that “whenever Walter conducts a piece, he melts all over the place.” Munch appeared several times with NBC at Toscanini’s invitation.

Walter Bruno

I recently listened to a Columbia Masterworks cassette, MYT 38473, of Bruno Walter conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Linz and Prague Symphonies. This orchestra was a studio group assembled around 1959 to 1960 and consisting of Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians when Walter was living out his remaining years in Beverly Hills.

The Linz, #36 among the 41, is a sweetly melodic and graceful work suited nicely to Walter’s “melting” music making; the more perky Prague, #38, receives a decent performance but lacks the perky excitement of a 1960 London Symphony recording conducted by Peter Maag. Still, this is a very enjoyable pair of performances that have worn well.

A highly recommended performance from Pierre Monteux is a Brahms Second Symphony, the first of four different recordings, in which he led the San Francisco Symphony in a 1945 Victor Red Seal recording. This symphony has a sunny outdoorsy quality and Monteux drew out its beauties with a very exquisitely phrased spontaneity.

Pierre Monteux

A favorite Munch recording from the mid-’60s is a Nonesuch LP featuring two different Iberias, the first by French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and the second by a native of Spain’s Catalonia, Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909). Munch conducted the Debussy Iberia with a special flair for its pulsating rhythms and colorful instrumental effects and achieved a similar magic with Albeniz . As far as I know, Albeniz and Ernesto Halffter are the only two Spanish composers Munch ever conducted.

The album jacket mentions that Albeniz composed his Iberia in Paris whereas Debussy only spent a few hours in Spain to witness a bullfight, but the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla adored Debussy’s Iberia because its music evoked the Spain he knew so well.

I own many Toscanini recordings of outstanding merit and one I have returned to often during the last 40 years is a 1947 broadcast of French composer Hector Berlioz’s complete Romeo and Juliet Symphony which RCA Victor Red Seal first issued in 1967 and, as far as I know, still available on CD and accessible on YouTube.