This all-Tchaikovsky Vienna Festival concert here receives its first ever issue three decades after the event (the tapes had apparently been misfiled!). The concert was recalled in a recent BBC Radio 3 feature on Monteux, by Barry Tuckwell, then the LSO's first horn. ''It seemed exciting at the time but would it bear examining on CD?... And indeed it does'', he added, ''it is an extraordinary concert.'' Fortunately for the listener at home, the opening minutes of the concert's first item—Romeo and Juliet—announce stereo sound of warmth, presence, clarity and spaciousness (it will only disappoint those seeking the widest possible dynamic range); one which faithfully relays a typically fresh, vivid and poised play of colour and movement. In fact, Monteux's illuminating and enlivening art has not been better served by the gramophone.
''I have learned to play Tchaikovsky's music as he wrote it,'' Monteux claimed, perhaps unwisely for our authenticity conscious age. A brief increase of speed in the fifth bar of the Overture is an early indicator of things to come. Of course, inflexibly maintained tempos were alien to Monteux, and although he mostly chooses a moderate range of basic tempos, he often speeds or slows from them very considerably. Spontaneity is often cited as a Monteux characteristic, but it is interesting to find that the extreme and exciting first stringendo of the Overture and the push-pull of the love music also turn up in a roughly contemporary Hamburg recording (HMV Concert Classics—nla). Equally, in the Fifth Symphony's finale, the sudden slowing for the cadencing chord theme that ends the opening Andante (from 1'57'') is also to be found in his 1955 Boston recording (in RCA's 15-CD Monteux Edition) and an indifferently played 1958 live Paris taping (part of a two-CD set on Disques Montaigne). This particular slowing is not unusual (cf. Muti, Temirkanov), and is doubtless one example that has occasioned complaints of 'mannerisms' when Monteux's Tchaikovsky has been analysed in these columns over the decades, but what validates Monteux's use of this slowing is his return to it for the extended variant of the same theme at the end of the main Allegro (from 8'48''). In my view, there is a considered consistency and symmetry to most of Monteux's adjustments of tempo, however spontaneous they might seem (and the longer view is always there behind them).
Perhaps surprisingly, it is mainly on the stave adjustments where Monteux is more experimental, for example in Romeo and Juliet where trumpets double the woodwinds' falling seconds in the feud music (from 6'41'' and 13'23''), the brass swell (at 15'10'') after the climax of the love music, and the timpani continue their roll under the final chord. Not one of these modifications can be heard in the Hamburg recording, and both accounts vary in their placing of cymbal clashes.
So, maybe not 'authenticity' in the strict, textual sense, though it is worth mentioning that in the symphony's slow movement, where Tchaikovsky did write in the animatos and ritenutos, often in consecutive bars, Monteux effortlessly accomplishes them all (even the animatos after the climaxes, which is rare). But there is another, and infinitely more gripping kind of authenticity here—of performance. This is not, as has become customary for live recordings, a collage of rehearsals, concerts and patch-up sessions. And it shows, possibly in the very occasional wrong note and lapse of ensemble, but more positively in the chain reaction that is fuelled by sustained concentration and an awareness that great things were being achieved, both individually (Tuckwell's atmospherically floated horn solo in the Symphony's slow movement) and corporately. The audience is aware of it too, as is the listener at home. You only need hear the opening minutes of Monteux's Boston Fifth Symphony to realize how much more was being, and was about to be, achieved at this Vienna concert.
Ogdon's piano in the concerto starts on the left, but centres up after about a minute. As recorded, the instrument is warm and woody, and more closely balanced than in his studio recording with Barbirolli (EMI, 6/63—nla) made six months earlier (the gain in clarity of the piano writing is rarely at the expense of orchestral detail). There is no hint of flashy or aggressive showmanship in either account, but this Vienna performance has playing of greater authority and imagination (you can hear both consecutively in the first movement, from 8'08'', as powerful and clearly articulated downward double-octaves yield to impressionist, barely articulated arpeggios that float back up to the heights). It has a little more spirit (and speed) too, in the way Ogdon launches the Allegro of the first movement, the prestissimo of the second, and Monteux, the start of the finale.
All in all, a real find; actually for both the aficionado and the general collector.'