In The Orchestra Speaks (Longman: 1938), Bernard Shore, then Principal Viola with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, gives a remarkable account of that orchestra’s first encounter with Willem Mengelberg. This was also in Ein Heldenleben, and Shore’s blow-by-blow account of the rehearsal is not only very amusing (“Zo, in dis verk of Strauss; I haf been great friend of Richard Strauss since I vos a boy, and I know joost what he wants, and ve vill make some changements also!”) but informative, the “changements” being designed to emphasize the score’s brilliance. So the opening triplets are bowed separately rather than slurred and Luftpausen are inserted to articulate the phrasing. Later in the work, Mengelberg’s famous portamentos are worked on and the melodic lines put together gradually to perfect intonation and ensemble.
Illicit emendations are clearly audible in this 70-year-old recording. You might expect such interventionist conducting to sound artificial or calculated, as it almost invariably does in the forays made by present-day period orchestras into early twentieth-century repertoire, but nothing could be further from the truth. Whatever Mengelberg’s methods, there is nothing artificial about this glorious, ardent account of Strauss’s score. The hero can seldom have sounded more ebullient, whether in love (astonishingly rich string textures from the New Yorkers) or war (here dispatched with a swagger that makes the outcome inevitable). The critics’ mixture of incomprehension and petty spite is realized to perfection, and those string portamentos (sounding utterly natural) are well to the fore as the hero retreats from worldly concerns. The secret of all this has to lie in Mengelberg’s familiarity with the score, although it may help that the American orchestra’s style of playing was markedly more ‘modern’ than that of Mengelberg’s Concertgebouw. As Pearl’s excellent documentation states, by the time this recording was made Mengelberg had “nearly three decades’ worth of Heldenlebens under his belt” (Shore says that he rehearsed from memory). Only hours after these sessions were completed, the orchestra gave the first performance of An American in Paris.
In Mark Obert-Thorn’s new transfer, the recording seems little short of miraculous given its age; apart from the restricted dynamic range, it sounds better than many made 20 years later, combining deep, solid bass with astonishing clarity – including, alas, perfect reproduction of the subway trains passing underneath Carnegie Hall! So what if there is a whiff of contrivance about the 1938 Concertgebouw performance of Don Juan. The main work remains indispensable for anyone remotely interested in Strauss or in the history of recording. Reiner and Karajan will have their devotees but perhaps, as the booklet says, this is the definitive Heldenleben. The bonus item, Wagenaar’s Cyrano de Bergerac Overture, makes little odds; it is Don Juan crossed with Die Meistersinger and here we have the real thing. '