Not everyone loved Monteux. Stravinsky was not a fan (‘What a sad person, that Monteux!’) but many ordinary folk, disinterested music-lovers, thought him special. True, the list of ‘great’ Monteux recordings is not as lengthy as that of some conductors one could name. But those recordings that are special – some made with the LSO around the time Monteux became its principal conductor in 1961 at the age of 86 – are unforgettably so. A name to conjure with, then, the more so when we find the great man off home territory, ‘up north’, doing a spot of Brahms-and-Rossini.
In fact, as Robert Layton reveals in his fine booklet essay, Monteux was something of a Brahms veteran. As viola player in the Geloso Quartet, he played a Brahms quartet in the composer’s presence (after which Brahms apparently said, ‘It takes the French to play my music properly, the Germans all play it much too heavily’) and he later recorded the Second Symphony on no fewer than four occasions. As it happens, this Manchester performance of the Third Symphony is strikingly Germanic, very northern. (Brahms was a northener, from Hamburg.) It is gruff and imposing with a rugged first movement, complete with exposition repeat, a slow movement that has seriousness and shape, and a thrusting, baleful finale. I was especially moved by the sense of melancholy Monteux brings to the first-movement recapitulation. Like Elgar’s Second Symphony, Brahms’s Third is one in which the great climaxes come early, after which it is a case of what Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach calls the ‘long melancholy, withdrawing roar’.
The Brahms-playing of the BBC Northern Orchestra is not always perfectly tuned or glitch-free but this is one of those performances which is greater than the sum of its parts. I am probably not the only one who remembers the orchestra with affection from this period. It broadcast regularly on the BBC Home Service, often at lunchtime, ‘…leader Reginald Stead, conductor George Hurst’. Hurst was a good conductor – still is: witness his superb Elgar Symphony No 1 on Naxos (2/94) – a legend to some of us if not, alas, a likely candidate for BBC Legends.
In contrast to his strikingly Germanic Brahms, Monteux’s Schumann has a good deal of Gallic dash. Fire and drive are clearly preferable in this symphony to burgher-like stolidity but, striking as this performance sounds once through, I wouldn’t think it likely to bear a great deal of repetition. This is a 1961 Festival Hall performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. With fast tempos and a recording that is less precise than that of the Manchester Brahms – the sound-source less immediate – crucial detail often gets submerged. Ostinato brass figures, for example, are strangely muffled, unbalancing the textures and blurring the obsessive element in the symphony’s psychopathology.
The performance of the Rossini overture is the least successful of the three. Monteux appears not to have balanced the winds properly nor attempted to catch the icy chill of the sul ponticello string passages. With a heavily slowed second subject and a barnstorming finale, this is Rossini from an age that judged his music more suitable to Blackpool Pier than Manchester Town Hall.
The brief interview with Monteux is pretty pointless, though it is nice to hear again the voice of old BBC hand, Roy Davies. It would be interesting to know where the excellent booklet photographs were taken (there are no captions); interesting to know, also, why two of them appear to be back-to-front