I wonder if Charles Munch would be pleased to see the issue of these live performances? Somehow I doubt it. He was an instinctive artist in many ways, carried along by the spur of the moment, and liable to improvise an interpretation in concert as the mood took him. In the recording studio he was more concerned to set down an interpretation for repeated listening, and while he could of course achieve exciting performances under studio conditions his readings were in general less idiosyncratic than here.
Take his 1964 Edinburgh Festival performance of Roussel's Third Symphony, for instance. This is a pretty hectic affair, with tempos which are not only fast but rather breathless. While Munch's treatment of the score was probably very exciting in the atmosphere of an international festival it sounds less effective 24 years later in a slightly confined, explosive mono recording. Turn to his commercial recording of this symphony made for Erato (nla) a year later with the Lamoureux Orchestra, and you find a beautifully paced, lithe reading. Munch's 1966 concert performance of Roussel's Fourth Symphony, in a much better stereo recording, gives the composer's motor rhythms more time to breathe—there's more bounce and spirit in the excellent playing of the French National Orchestra. But again in the 1966 Bacchus et Ariane suite (well recorded in stereo) Munch presses ahead excitedly in a way which destabilizes the music, and he makes a small but disfiguring cut. What a pity. Munch had won Roussel's approval for his pre-war performances, and we never have enough of this neglected composer on record in the UK.
In the Franck Symphony it's again the case of a fast and furious reading, with little poise or dignity. Boult's 1959 RCA performance (nla) of this symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra reflects interpretations he had heard by Franck's pupil Gabriel Pierne, and shows that it is possible to employ swift tempos and yet retain a sense of inwardness and nobility. Munch rather vulgarizes the music. In the Faure, too, Munch keeps changing the pulse and bending the phrases in a way which to me ruins an exquisite score. The Sibelius pieces played to a Finnish audience, show Munch on his best behaviour and are played quite straightforwardly and impressively. The recordings on this disc are good but in mono.
Berlioz was of course one of Munch's specialities, and both overtures are very well brought off. So is the Symphonie fantastique, but here again are some eccentricities' a cut in the ''Scene aux champs'' and a ''Marche aux supplice'' where the tempo is suddenly whipped up to a pretty brisk trot. The symphony and Corsaire are in good mono sound, while Benvenuto Cellini is in slightly over-reverberant stereo.
Munch was born in Strasbourg when that town was still part of Germany, and later he played violin in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Furtwangler and other great German conductors. So it should not be too much of a surprise that his performances of the Brahms and Schumann symphonies make up the most successful of these CDs. The Brahms is given a large-scale, warmhearted reading with broad, romantic gestures and a most exciting finale. If the French orchestral timbre doesn't sound quite right in Brahms, it tends to be a plus factor during the Schumann, which has an impressive clarity of texture. In this work Munch combines a romantic approach with plenty of drive, and I found his performance most satisfying. Both these symphonies are recorded in good stereo.
Nearly all the works in this set were recorded by Munch commercially and I can't help but feel his studio performances do a fine conductor more justice than these live performances. Notes are in French only, and there's no indication that some of the performances are in mono.'