Antonin Dvorak
                Late Symphonies

* Dvorak: Symphony No. 7 in d, op. 70
* Dvorak: Carnival Overture, op. 92
* Smetana: Overture to The Bartered Bride*
* Smetana: Quartet in e "From My Life" (orch. Szell)*
* Dvorak: Symphony No. 8 in G, op. 88
* Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 in e, op. 95

*Monaural
Total Time: 79:29 + 75:23

Cleveland Orchestra/George Szell
Sony Masterworks Heritage MH2K 63151

Summary for the Busy Executive: Classics of the stereo era.

What a remarkable country Czechoslovakia has been!  With a language few
not born there speak, its artists have found their way into the general
culture of Europe - literature, film, drama, and especially music - all out
of proportion to the size of the country.  Its audiences have consistently
been among the most enlightened and progressive, eager for art, especially
but not exclusively their own.  The adult Mozart enjoyed his greatest
successes in Prague, and I can't think of too many countries that would
have elected a playwright as head of state.  For that matter, I can't think
of too many playwrights who could function credibly as head of state.

Still, Dvorak, despite several bona fide hits, seems to attract
condescension, much as Mozart did in the late 19th century.  It usually
comes from people who mistake solemn for profound, not realizing, as G. K.
Chesterton pointed out, that funny and good-humored are much harder to pull
off.  The genuinely humorous or good-natured work of art comes along fairly
seldom.  As great a critic as Shaw, sharp enough to shape our current
perception of Mozart, nevertheless tended to dismiss Dvorak in much the
same way he dismissed Brahms.  Tovey can't refrain from bringing up
"crudities" in Dvorak forms (although almost every one of his examples
comes from Dvorak's youth), even as he praises major compositions.  Until
the past forty years or so, much of Dvorak's principal work was rarely
heard, including symphonies 5 through 8 and the Carnival Overture.  To a
great extent, this state of affairs persists.  The cello concerto gets lots
of recordings.  The wonderful violin concerto does not.  The choral works,
operas, tone poems, and a good deal of the chamber music remain pretty much
unknown quantities.  To me, it expresses yet again the paradox that the
music we know least comes from the nineteenth century, the major source
of the current standard rep.

Certainly Szell had a hand - as Michael Charry points out in his liner
notes - in bringing Dvorak's music to public attention, even though he
never performed a symphony other than the last three.  He did program all
three concerti.  His account of the Slavonic Dances I consider among the
greatest of all postwar recordings.  From what I'm told, many professional
orchestra players listen to this CD when they listen for pleasure.  He also
did similar work on behalf of Smetana's music.  In fact, Severance Hall -
the Cleveland Orchestra's main venue - was known as the "U. S. Temple of
Czech Culture" - behind Szell's back, of course.  Szell brought to this
music not only his customary elegance, but great wit and fantasy, which
contradict directly the rap against him as some dry-as-dust pedant.  The
people who usually make this charge prefer a more "Romantic" reading -
softer attacks, more portamento, and often some bizarre touch of
"personality." Szell didn't help himself much either by his physical
appearance (somewhat resembling one of Dracula's minions) or by his
public insistence on precision of ensemble.  Many people have come away
with the idea that's all Szell was about.  But the precision worked
toward a larger end, one which honored the composer above all.  In Szell's
performances, you generally hear exactly what the composer wrote.  The
precision of attack is allied with a musical line of steel which produces
an irresistible forward momentum.  Szell's orchestras not only could get
louder in a smooth continuum, they could also get softer the same way.  And
they could turn on a dime.  This resulted in a musical line of great shade
and subtlety and great energy.

Szell not only made the Austro-Germanic European classics the core of his
repertoire - from Haydn through Richard Strauss - he excelled in lighter
music as well.  Bizet, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Grieg, the Strauss family,
and Rossini received the same loving care as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven,
Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Richard Strauss, and
Tchaikovsky.  Both sides of him - the grave and the light - come together
in his Dvorak.  As an interpreter of this composer, Szell has few peers.

The Symphony No. 7 may qualify as the composer's most popular symphony
among those who don't particularly care for Dvorak, perhaps because it's so
solemn.  On the other hand, it is without much doubt Dvorak at the top of
his game.  For me, conductors err when they try to turn it into Bruckner,
to go for a massive sound and tragic attitudes at the expense of rhythmic
articulation.  If nothing else, jolly or somber, Dvorak's music dances.
The last three symphonies in particular present an orchestra with a
cornucopia of rhythmic subtleties.  For example, the final three notes of
the opening movement's first strain - two sixteenths and a long note -
often get varied to a sixteenth, eighth, and long note, even though the
pitches might be the same.  That variety contributes to the richness of
invention the listener feels in the symphony, and the contrast between the
two rhythms constitutes an important structural building block of the
movement.  To slight it simply spoils one of the composer's major
surprises.

Right from the opening measures, Szell and the Cleveland take the symphony
airborne.  It sweeps through like swift storm clouds and rolling thunder.
Szell never allows the weight of the material to drag the movement's
progress.  Consequently, Szell shifts from high drama to song seamlessly
and without resorting to hokey tricks.  Naturally, the rhythmic oppositions
stand out clearly.  The unanimity of attack gives the musical line a lovely
spring, and each player's awareness of his proper strength in the texture
makes the inner lines clear in this reading as in no other.  To the latter
point, at the climax of the recapitulation, about two minutes before the
end, one can hear Dvorak juggling his major themes in one magnificent
contrapuntal fitting.  The woodwind chorale that opens the "Poco adagio"
sets a tone of dignified lyricism for the movement's length.  Even at the
entrance of the strings, Szell resists the urge to schmaltz it up, instead
giving us a gorgeous glide of instrumental colors from clarinet-dominated
winds to strings to brass, all melting into flute- and oboe-led winds,
accompanied by plucked strings.  The movement relies a lot on the blending
of melody instruments, and the Cleveland plays so tightly that the
combination of instruments often sounds like one new instrument.  Dvorak
constructs transparent, delicate textures, and in the Cleveland's hands,
they rapture the listener out.

It sounds a bit odd even to me as I write this, but in the background of at
least the last three symphonies, I keep running across footprints that seem
to say, "Beethoven was here." I find this particularly true of the scherzi,
particularly in the rhythmic games under way.  In the seventh, it's the
syncopations and hemiola shifts (the fact that a 6/8 measure can be tapped
as two groups of three or three groups of two) that recall the scherzi of
Beethoven's Seventh and Ninth.  Dvorak's syncopations are less wildly
original than Beethoven's.  They essentially work a device at least as old
as the Renaissance, but it's a damned effective use, strongly related to
folk dances.  Tovey complains of the "four-square" themes of the finale.
To him, this leads to a movement where the themes lay simply side-by-side,
rather than engender a sense of "becoming." I would counter that Dvorak
knows the exact nature of his themes, because he's always extending them
with odd, asymmetrical "tails," thus fulfilling the requirement Tovey sets.
Furthermore, the movement does contain one asymmetrical theme - with a
strong, "stamping" rhythm (you'll recognize it immediately when you hear
it) - whose importance Tovey seems to minimize by calling it a "transition"
motive.  But to me he has gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Again, it helps to achieve that dynamism Tovey wants.  A "transition"
passage implies that it merely gets us from here to there.  This theme has
far too distinctive a shape for that, and furthermore Dvorak repeats it at
important rhetorical points.  We would do well to recall that Tovey wrote
his essays mainly as program notes to concerts he conducted.  I strongly
suspect that this was probably the first time he had ever heard this
particular symphony, since a performance tradition outside Czechoslovakia
hadn't yet built up.  It makes me wonder how Tovey's own performance went.
At any rate, Szell's account gives this theme far more emphasis than
Tovey's comments imply and shapes one of the great finales in symphonic
literature.  I don't think this a matter of luck - either Szell's or
Dvorak's.

Szell and the Cleveland don't play the Carnival Overture so much as shoot
it out of a gun.  The first time I heard this, the opening immediately
snapped my head back, the first chord ringing out sharp as the crack of a
whip.  This piece counts as undoubtedly one of my favorite Dvoraks, if not
one of my favorite overtures, and the Szell as my favorite account, with
thrilling brass work.  Tovey again admits its popularity but claims it has
nothing to do with the "intrinsic quality" of the piece.  Dvorak, in his
opinion, had written far greater.  I have no idea what he's talking about.
The remark strikes me as, again, the simple inability to comprehend the
difficulty of writing a truly joyous piece of music.  For me, there's
more sheer brilliant invention in this work than in, say, Parzifal, and
it's a lot shorter.  Szell and the Cleveland will start you dancing as
if possessed.  At any rate, I can't keep still.  But it's not all manic
energy.  The lyrical minor-key subject moves along in a grand sweep.  The
pastorale middle section sings nostalgically, without wallow.  Here, Szell
manages to remind us of the quieter passages of Beethoven's Sixth.  It's as
if we listen to nature holding its breath.  As to the dance sections, much
of the energy of course comes from the Cleveland's unanimity of attack.  A
spectacular example comes at the recap, when the horns give out wild, quick
fanfares - in chords yet - and rhythm stays razor-sharp.

Szell's account of Smetana's Bartered Bride overture is more of the same,
in spades.  For some reason, Columbia recorded it only in mono, even in
1958.  In the rapid figurations, so susceptible to smear, particularly in
the strings, each note maintains a diamond-like distinctness.  Yet, the
line is never stiff.  The orchestra not only maintains its killer pace, but
crescendos and decrescendos within the long chains of quick notes.  For a
few, this may be even too exciting an account.  I must admit that had it
gone on a little longer, I would have been pooped.  The overture races
almost without letup, and yet Szell gives the piece a definite shape, with
the momentum especially strong three minutes from the end to the final
measures, where I can almost see dancers flinging out their arms.

Szell's orchestration of the Smetana e-minor string quartet ("From My
Life") has a curious history.  He began it in the early Forties, when he
struggled to build an American career.  To some extent, it served him as
a calling card.  But what do we make of an orchestration from a conductor
known for his obsessive attention to the details of a score and concern for
the composer's intent? At the time, few string quartets active in the U.S.
had this work in their repertory, so few of the classical audience knew
the work.  To some extent, Szell used his orchestration to proselytize
the quartet.  Significantly, he never performed it live after 1948.  This
recording, from 1949, represents his last performance ever of the piece.
The orchestration, like almost all of Szell's original music I've heard,
shows great good taste, and that's the trouble.  Nothing leaps out and
shakes you.  For me, almost all really wonderful music risks going
over-the-top.  Compare the quartet's last movement of Czech dance music to
Smetana's Bartered Bride overture, and the difference between damn nice and
jaw-dropping immediately hits you.  To paraphrase Shaw, Szell's music would
have benefitted had it been a little less nice and a little more damned.
At any rate, I prefer the original string quartet, where the music
threatens to bust the medium.

I have heard only two other recordings of what turns out my favorite
Dvorak symphony, the Eighth:  Rowicki's and Kertesz's.  Kertesz's rhythm
is too spongy for me.  Rowicki does better, but I find myself comparing him
to Szell, who turns in one of the greatest readings of his career.  I'm
willing to admit the possibility of a finer account, but, like Joshua, it
would have to stop the sun.  The opening is alone worth the price of the
CD.  The introductory chorale and the skipping theme of the flute create
another air of hushed expectancy, and, before you realize it, you're in the
middle of the first climax.  That skipping theme, of course, turns out to
be one of the key signposts of the movement, even though, since it doesn't
seem to go anywhere, it doesn't promise much for development.  Yet Dvorak
squeezes incredible mileage out of it.  As in the Seventh, Dvorak ties the
themes of his movement together mainly through rhythmic correlations,
particularly the skipping rhythm.  Essentially, the composer has his cake
and eats it:  a memorable idea which births a litter of other themes.  The
joy of the movement recalls Mendelssohn, even down to turns of phrase,
particularly from the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture." The climax of the
recap blazes and glows.  The Adagio second movement seems to me one of the
toughest to bring off.  It tends toward stasis.  At one point, a pedal
point on the dominant of the scale lasts close to three minutes.  The
forward movement comes from, among other things, Dvorak's changes of color.
The incredibly clear textures Szell gets from the Cleveland promote this,
as, of course, do the long spans of melody he draws, mainly from inner
parts.  In the Verdi-like canzonetta theme (with the downward runs from
flutes in thirds), Dvorak gives the lower strings long notes.  Szell uses
these like a skater gliding on ice.  The Cleveland players don't merely
hold the note, they infuse it with a sense of forward motion.

Dvorak gives us a Brahmsian allegretto rather than a scherzo for the third
movement, my favorite of the work.  Filled with new orchestral textures of
great imagination, this section sings in triple-time, for the most part
bitter-sweet, with a dancer's surprise at the end, like Dvorak's favored
dumka.  Szell's reading approaches the Mozartean grace and elegance of
his account of the Slavonic Dances.  It meditates as it sings, finding
unexpected depths in the almost parlor-piece material.  At least, it
staggered me when I first heard it.

The finale - a sonata-rondo with variations - takes for its main idea
a variant of the skipping theme of the first movement, this time as a
Brahmsian chorale.  The playing here never falls short of superb, with
seamless transitions from the opening trumpets to one of the low winds to
the timpani to the celli.  Perhaps the Berlin Phil on its best day with
its best conductor lucks out and does as well.  The movement juxtaposes
essentially two moods:  noble and fiercely energetic.  The latter puts
Szell and the Cleveland in their Carnival Overture mode - delicate in
some passages and wildly exuberant in others.  Significantly, Szell picks
his spots and his dynamics.  He never runs out of room if he needs to
get louder, and one hears only one loudest point in the movement.  The
breakneck finale whizzes by, but not in a smear.  Even the brass runs cut
like diamonds.  Even though this kind of talk undoubtedly brings to mind
Szell the technician, the performance nevertheless comes across as one of
great humanity.

The "New World" Symphony has won and deserved all the popularity it gets,
but all that love can make it a little sticky, like a toddler with ice
cream.  Then there's the parochial interest we United Statespeople take
in it and the sentimental thrill we get when someone has noticed us.
Finally, there's the still-heated controversy over the slow-movement tune:
Spiritual? Czech folk song? Dvorak's own? One of the many things I like
about Szell's reading is that it scrubs off all this cotton-candy smear
and allows me to hear the symphony in a new way:  as an heir of Beethoven.
The sound of the Cleveland here is remarkably Beethovenian - not simply a
matter of Dvorak's orchestration (since other accounts don't sound like
this), but of Szell's springier rhythms.  In the slow intro, for example,
I hear the syncopation Dvorak actually wrote - for once neither hammered
nor slurped over - just taking its natural place clearly in the melody.
It's an amazingly beautiful passage, right up there with the intro to
Dvorak's Eighth.  But the opening of that symphony generates most of the
musical ideas.  Here, however, the composer essentially throws the passage
away.  It appears and leaves, not to return, just like the intro to
Beethoven's Seventh.  It also has the distinction in this symphony of being
one of the few ideas not based on an articulated triad.  It's this last
feature that ties so much of the symphony together and allows Dvorak's very
bold, experimental coup to triumph:  a union of cyclical procedures (themes
appear in more than one movement) with classical forms.  Beethoven, of
course, does (in the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies) mix themes from different
movements to telling effect, but it's not a classical effect, rather a
sublime one.  It's because of the family resemblance among ideas and the
fact that ideas thus constructed combine so easily that each reappearance
of a Dvorak theme, regardless of the movement, seems an organic part of the
symphonic argument, rather than a striking interruption.

The intro has the edge of a threat, which Szell takes in a masterly
transition to the first full-fledged theme.  The main glue of the movement
is, as you'd expect by now, the syncopation of that first surging theme
and its quick, dance-like answer.  Szell's rhythms sizzle, always good for
dances.  In many ways, this reading has less weight than others.  The power
comes not from a heavier beat or orchestral color, but from the crackle
and snap of the orchestra's articulation.  In the second movement, Szell
resists all sweetly sentimental extra-musical references and simply lets
Dvorak sing, although apparently there's nothing simple about that, since
this is one of the few readings which makes no overt effort to tug at the
heartstrings - like the tear painted on a mime's mask.  The movement has
the beauty of a freshly-scrubbed face and shows how to maintain linear
intensity at low dynamic without obvious push.  The scherzo whirls like a
dervish, taking from the corresponding movement in Beethoven's Ninth, down
to the timpani punctuation and quasi-canonic entries.  But Dvorak, for all
the borrowing, retains his own voice, strongly assertive in the trio.  The
finale starts out like a thrill ride - I have a hard time not letting out
a "wheeeee!" or "yippee!" All the energy seems unleashed, mainly because
Szell has never relinquished the intensity of the scherzo, not even at the
end.  Indeed, he fashions the scherzo's coda as the gateway to the finale.
The last movement broods and erupts.  Even the relatively joyful passages
- especially the delightful "Three Blind Mice" variant - contain the dark
undercurrent of rolling timpani.  Finally, Szell and the orchestra reach
the peak of the movement - the chords that opened the slow song, now
glorious as a god of storms - and negotiates the tricky, suddenly soft end
without mishap.  In all, the power of the reading comes from its grace,
rather than from the conducting equivalent of a broad wink and a nudge.

Sony has improved the sound of the Dvorak items remarkably over the
original LPs.  Strings and winds sound fuller.  On the LP, they had a
steely, even shrill edge, worlds removed from their sound live.  A slight
tape hiss still remains, but you have to listen for it.  Even the mono
sounds good, excepting the Smetana quartet, which really does seem to come
from another era, and the Bartered Bride overture contains, I believe, some
Szell grunts (I hear them on earphones, not through speakers).  Perhaps the
conductor spurs the orchestra on.

For those of you interested in more of Szell's Dvorak, I recommend the
complete Slavonic Dances (Sony 48161), the only stereo recording other than
this one still available.  Keep your eyes peeled, however, for the Cello
Concerto with Fournier (stunning!) and the Piano Concerto with Firkusny,
as well as for Smetana's Moldau and dances from The Bartered Bride.

Steve Schwartz