After listening to conducting like this, you might ask why the Romanian Silvestri, during his final decade in France and England, didn’t occupy a more elevated position in the musical hierarchy and public consciousness. Fortunately, Alan Sanders’s essay in the Testament issue, in providing the relevant facts and details, allows us to arrive at our own answers. The matter is perhaps best left there, but I was interested to read that Silvestri was ‘seldom satisfied’ with his recordings, feeling that, among other things, ‘he was conducting the wrong orchestra for a particular style of work.’ It would be fascinating to know what Silvestri himself felt about the relative suitability of the French and English orchestras here for the Manfred Symphony.
Their very different identities and temperaments certainly have a huge effect on the way Silvestri’s interpretation comes across; the more individual characteristics and powerful resources of the French orchestra prompting from the conductor a consummate display of old-fashioned theatre – emoting in dark tones and quivering voice (vibrato prominent throughout the orchestra) with steep phrasing, wide tempo variations, lengthy dramatic pauses (superbly timed silences that really ‘speak’), bolstered orchestration, hair-raising attack and bold accentuation – all of which might be thought ‘ham’ were it not for the obvious heartfelt sincerity, the sureness of every move and the wonderful delineation of character. Next to which much of Silvestri’s Bournemouth Manfred sounds neutral, the orchestra comparably lacking in body (partly a result of the ‘admirable’ BBC balance), occasionally appearing to run out of steam, and hardly in the mood for an unbridled orgy, but, unlike the French orchestra, able to bring an aerial delicacy of movement and texture to the second movement’s rainbow spray. Then there is Silvestri’s extraordinarily free treatment of the Astarte theme in the first and last movements, fine enough in Paris, but in Bournemouth, something of a minor miracle. It was Balakirev who urged Tchaikovsky to write the Manfred Symphony, adding that Astarte’s music ‘must be light, transparent, like air.’ And so it is here, seemingly floating in on the most delicate of breezes, initially with no discernible pulse whatsoever, and reminding one (aptly, in certain respects) of the opening of Part 2 of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Heaven – and Bournemouth – only knows how the players managed to time it all so perfectly, while simultaneously responding fully to Tchaikovsky’s dynamics and accentuation.
The symphony’s close (a passage Balakirev called Manfred’s ‘Requiem’) is a problem. Despite Tchaikovsky’s score indicating a harmonium, these final pages are nearly always augmented – and often overawed – by an organ. But Bournemouth and the BBC’s solution, even if one must credit them with addressing the problem, is to wheel on something that sounds like an outsize Hammond organ (with attendant amplification gremlins). I have no doubt that most of us will respond more favourably to the spectacle of the Paris recording’s brazenly inauthentic, rampaging Gothic giant.
Silvestri’s 1957 Paris Manfred is the only mono recording here. Testament would have us believe that the coupling is also in mono. But astonishingly fine Kingsway Hall stereo (also from 1957) greets our ears for Tasso, as does prime Philharmonia playing. And this is without question one of the greatest ever recordings of any Liszt symphonic poem; every facet of the journey from lament to triumph rich with the kind of expression it needs for that journey to be worth making. However, the single performance among these four most likely to carry the Silvestri phenomenon to the largest number of amazed ears is the Bournemouth Respighi Pines of Rome. This is a concert recording, unlike the Manfred Symphony (which was recorded without an audience), Colston Hall in Bristol imparting a lustre and depth to the orchestra’s tone lacking in Manfred (recorded in the Winter Gardens in Bournemouth), and it must represent some of the best BBC engineering of the 1960s, or indeed of any other decade you may care to mention. More than three years further into his tenure in Bournemouth than Manfred, the orchestra for Pines has clearly become Silvestri’s orchestra, with no English reserve whatsoever (the augmented brass power in the work’s final stages, probably too much of a good thing, though it must have been electrifying in the hall). It would be wrong, I feel, to claim the orchestra here as world-class in all departments – woodwinds and horns, yes; strings and trombones, not quite – but the heart of the matter here is the riveting music-making: once again, that fluidity of line and the poetic marvels it yields, along with the care upon care lavished on the tiniest detail. In short, a score and an orchestra allowing Silvestri’s imagination and ideals to become reality.'