The idea of Dame Myra Hess being accompanied by Toscanini suggests a fable Aesop never wrote about the butterfly which was pursued by the wasp. In the event it is not at all like that. True, Toscanini sets off at a lick that would have surprised even Czerny (Beethoven’s contemporary whose suggested metronome marks for the First and Third Concertos have been commended by, among others, Alfred Brendel) but Dame Myra is entirely unperturbed by this.
She herself is all fire and grace, more than happy to go along with the spirit of Toscanini’s exposition. As the first movement unfolds, she is neither corralled by Toscanini nor inhibited by him. It is a wonderfully gracious and free-spirited performance, yet properly tense and dramatic. (In no other Beethoven Allegro movement, says Brendel, is the development so noticeably placed in parentheses. One certainly senses that here with Hess and Toscanini.)
The partnership reaches even greater heights in the slow movement where the exquisite cantabile string playing of the NBC Symphony Orchestra perfectly mirrors Dame Myra’s own sense of the ineffable. In the finale, there are one or two slips and fudges by her, though this is more to do with fatigue than with the reading itself, which is nicely judged as to pace and emphasis.
The sound is very good. It is also nice to hear a proper attacca into the finale, the pianist’s opening G-A flat (=G sharp) wittily contradicting and then reaffirming the violins’ G sharp (often blanked out, but not by Toscanini) in the slow movement’s concluding chord.
The Wagner extract is also very fine, wonderfully fiery and clear-sighted, with nicely balanced off-stage horns. So, too, some will argue, is the very brilliant performance of Beethoven’s overture, Coriolan, with which the disc begins. As for the 18-minute rehearsal sequence, this is both predictable and bizarre, Toscanini railing and bellowing in a way that nowadays would have him locked up. His tirade against the double-basses – “Give all yourself – I give everything I have” – is illogical and self-obsessed. A man who is getting all the glory and ten times the money should have the courtesy to keep his own work-rate out of the reckoning.
Which brings us back to Coriolan itself. Toscanini was a political naif. Though determinedly anti-Fascist (at least in his later years), he never seems to have tumbled to the fact that when he went on the rampage he was every bit as absurd as the carpet-chewers he so despised. When Furtwangler conducts Coriolan we hear real drama, a true struggle within; with Toscanini it becomes (to my ears) a tale of sound and fury, signifying very little.'