It is only recently that the recorded legacy of Serge Koussevitzky has been getting the attention it deserves and this Biddulph collection is another welcome souvenir of a great, if unorthodox, talent. The inclusion of the oft-reissued Romeo and Juliet Suite (not without some unsteadiness of pitch) may strike older hands as unnecessary, but the rest of the material is rare and the transfers, by Mark Obert-Thorn, give us an excellent idea of the rich sonority of the Boston orchestra in the mid-1940s.
This is a first commercial release for the magnificent torso of Shostakovich’s Eighth, previously available only on a Boston Symphony Orchestra fund-raising CD. Quite why the packaging should imply that this Adagio constitutes the second movement of the symphony when the notes, in which I should declare an interest, do not, I cannot say. Nor is it entirely clear why the recording itself remained incomplete, although we do know that Shostakovich heard Koussevitzky’s April 1944 broadcast and was unhappy with aspects of it. Let’s just be grateful for a studio rendition of the first movement which has absolute conviction, fully living up to the conductor’s assertion that here was a score “which by the power of its human emotion surpasses everything else created in our time”. The opulent gravitas of Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony in what must still have been relatively unfamiliar music is remarkable even by today’s standards. Listen for example to the extraordinary control he exerts over the violins’ melodic lines; the apparently incongruous portamentos (of which Koussevitzky was very fond to judge from the examples of his double-bass playing appended to the main orchestral programme) actually heighten the intensity of expression. Or try the symphony’s very opening: Koussevitzky clearly understands how best to bring out those juddering seismic shocks from his cellos and basses. The conductor’s splendid readings of Rachmaninov’s Isle of the dead and Vocalise are not much more familiar, presumably because they duplicate repertoire recorded by the composer himself in Philadelphia. Here again is great depth of tone and a perhaps unexpected seriousness of manner which places the performances in a class of their own. Koussevitzky’s tempos can be frenetic in the larger work and yet every phrase is attentively shaped. Rachmaninov scored this version of the Vocalise especially for him.
Of the two (previously unreleased) ‘encore’ tracks, the excerpt from the Double-bass Concerto was in point of fact the first recording Koussevitzky ever attempted. This is a fascinating curio – despite six attempts at Side 2 it remained unpublished – but it is the Shostakovich and Rachmaninov items that warrant the strongest recommendation.'