I remember with great affection the Schubert symphony cycle that Menuhin recorded for HMV with the Bath Festival Chamber Orchestra in the mid 1960s. More recently, he and his new-found love, the Sinfonia Varsovia, gave us a memorable disc of Mozart’s last two symphonies. The performance of the G minor was EG’s choice on BBC Radio 3’s “Building a Library” some time ago; and when the coupling reappeared on the Virgin Classics mid-price label, Ultraviolet, in November 1994, IM wrote, “The performances combine drama and freshness with apt tempos, lyrical feeling with incisiveness and the correct degree of weight”.
Beethoven offers a stiffer challenge, of course; but like Casals, who mined gold with some of his Marlboro Festival recordings of the Beethoven symphonies, Menuhin has the flair, the know-how and the wherewithal to make us sit up and take notice even in repertory as overfamiliar as this. Indeed, there is rather a charming reference to Casals or, rather, Casals country, in one of the brief interpretative notes which Menuhin has written for the accompanying CD booklets. He is talking of the need for the Pastoral Symphony’s “Scene by the Brook” to be Andante molto moto (his emphasis) “without the least deviation from the even flow of the stream”. To which he adds, “One of the most wonderful sensations I have ever known was, lying on my back, looking at the sky and overhanging branches, drifting downhill in a narrow irrigation canal at the foothills of the Pyrenean Mountains, following the contours of the hills”.
It is a charming memory. What is even more charming is the fact that, when it comes to the actual performances, Menuhin often ignores – or in the heat of the movement subtly modifies – what his published notes have proposed. This is particularly the case in the matter of tempo and tempo relationships. As Klemperer was, and others of his generation, Menuhin is a great believer in the need for the conductor to sense in advance the pulse of the work as a whole and the concomitant need to work out the mathematical relationships between individual tempos within that overall pulse. (I should add that this has nothing whatsoever to do with Beethoven’s metronome marks which Menuhin rightly spurns as an aid to interpretation. In his note to the Fourth Symphony, a charming and ebullient performance in which the pulse of the first movement Allegro vivace and the second movement Adagio are mathematically related to the nicest possible effect, Menuhin lets fly this splendid broadside: “May I at this point declare my total opposition to the false notion of that new slavishness to the metronome markings, supposedly of Beethoven but often far off the mark. To allow a printed number to dictate an interpretation is as mad an idea as to allow legal verbiage to dictate a letter of love.” Quite so.)
That said, Menuhin is not always as level-headed as Klemperer when it comes to implementing these subtle gearings of individual tempos to the larger pulse. With Klemperer, one bar of the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony often did equal half a bar of the finale. Menuhin, by contrast, suddenly cuts loose at the start of the finale, moving off in a pulse which is marginally faster.
In general, Menuhin seems more inclined to play by the rules he enunciates in the booklets when Beethoven is in playful or Apollonian mood. That is to say in the first two symphonies, in the Fourth, the Pastoral and the Eighth. As for the Fifth, here there is a slightly wild-eyed quality about his reading of the outer movements. (In his note, he fulminates against those conductors who play the opening four-note motto as a kind of slow Churchillian summons. But who, since Sargent died, has dreamt of doing such a thing?) Interestingly, though, Menuhin conducts one of the most beautifully nuanced performances of the Fifth Symphony’s slow movement I have ever heard. So often in performance this lyric interlude seems like otiose salon music. No so here.
The Seventh Symphony also has a touch of wildness to it, in the finale. The first movement, by contrast, is splendidly measured, with a brooding atmosphere and a powerful dance impulse born of a close regard for the proper articulation of the 6/8 rhythm. The slow movement is also dark and measured, slow but not too slow. Yet here are two more curiosities. The first is Menuhin’s preference for a modern seating of the orchestra. Not having the first and second violins divided antiphonally is always a drawback in Beethoven, especially in the finales of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. The second curiosity is Menuhin’s policy on repeats. First movement repeats he observes; elsewhere, though, they often go by the board. There are none at all, for example, in the third movement of the Seventh Symphony. More of this and Menuhin will find himself on a charge of unlawful discrimination between movements.
I also wonder slightly at the orchestra’s degree of preparedness in these matters. In the slow movement of the First Symphony, where the repeat is not observed, the oboe makes a somewhat tardy entry after the double bar as though he expected a more extended respite (“Blimey, guv, it’s me”). And first time round at the double bar in the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony a whole bar’s silence is inserted, whether by design or as a result of corporate indecision is not entirely clear.
The performance of the Pastoral Symphony is a joy from start to (almost) its finish, and since it is coupled with a gracious, beautiful and ultimately cheeky account of the Second Symphony this is a strong possible recommendation if and when the discs are marketed separately.
This disc is also representative in as much as it shows off the playing of the Sinfonia Varsovia at its stylish best whilst at the same time highlighting the orchestra’s – or, perhaps, more properly, the project’s – Achilles’ heel. This is a disinclination to ‘cover’ the more serious of those momentary lapses that inevitably occur in live music-making. The odd squeak is neither here nor there. And you may find amusing rather than irksome the continued jangling of some of the pots and pans in the Turkish kitchen after the end of the Alla marcia in the finale of the Ninth. But a botched attack on the penultimate tutti of the Pastoral Symphony’s finale (bar 190, 9'53'') is the kind of thing that, on repeated hearings on record, you know is coming. And that, as Pooh Bear might say, can be very bothersome indeed.
The string section is the Sinfonia Varsovia’s principal glory. The buoyancy and fleetness of Menuhin’s Beethoven – his feeling for syncopation, how it makes the music spring and dance, and his natural sense of the lie of a phrase – all make large demands on the strings. Rarely, though, are they found wanting. The woodwinds are also excellent. If there are weak points in the playing, relatively speaking, it would be the horns – more Endsleigh League Division 1 than Premiership – and a timpanist, who is inclined to bang.
As an ensemble the Sinfonia rise nobly to the demands of the Eroica Symphony. In the first movement, which Menuhin paces more or less to perfection, there is not that weight of tone that helps mark out some of the greatest recorded performances of this movement (Furtwangler’s or Klemperer’s); though the Funeral March that follows, beautifully shaped by Menuhin, is by any standards a sonically powerful reading, especially in the central fugato. The Ninth Symphony is more of a problem and by the latter stages of the finale a bit of a scrum. (The choir are good though inclined to snatch at notes, the bass sounds nervous, the soprano fluttery.) Menuhin again characterizes the first movement superbly but the playing can be haphazard and, by the time of the arrival of the difficult 12/8 section in the slow movement, more than a little tired.
I will not go on yet again about how irksome I find applause at the end of recordings that are intended to be – how shall I say? – domestic/definitive rather than documentary. I should warn you, however, that IMG have decided to start each disc (though not each performance) with applause. This is a deplorable idea since it puts the performer before the music, something I would have thought quite alien to Menuhin’s way of doing things. There is no applause on the Gramophone Award-winning Teldec set featuring Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, a set that is also much better groomed when it comes to getting orchestral detailing right for repeated hearing. (If only Harnoncourt had Menuhin’s feel for rhythm, above all his feel for a single sustainable pulse, the Teldec set would indeed be the triumph it was widely claimed to be at the time.)
Since Menuhin’s set is at super-budget price, buying the whole thing will not break the bank. I suspect, though, that the seasoned collector will be looking – as with those Casals recordings I mentioned earlier – for the best representative examples of this instrumentalist-turned-conductor’s way with Beethoven. And here I would put the coupling of Symphonies Nos. 2 and 6 at the head of the list (the gaff in the Pastoral’s finale notwithstanding), alongside the disc coupling Symphonies Nos. 4 and 8.'