It is March 1940 in Amsterdam, merely weeks before the fall of Holland and some seven months before the enforced removal of Mendelssohn, Mahler and Hindemith from Dutch concert programmes. Yet Willem Mengelberg, king of the Concertgebouw since 1895 and the most famous Dutchman after Rembrandt, is about to conduct the world premiere of Paul Hindemith's Violin Concerto. His soloist is the orchestra's leader, Ferdinand Helman and the performance itself, although occasionally tentative on Helman's part, shows Mengelberg to have an impressive grasp of the score: the slow movement has surpassing tenderness (especially from the strings), the finale lashings of brassy sonority. But then we already know from other live recordings (Bartok's Second Violin Concerto, Kodaly's Peacock Variations, Bloch's Violin Concerto, etc) that Mengelberg had a rare talent for approximating the spirit of his creative contemporaries, and this clearly-transferred arrival offers valuable fresh evidence of that fact.
In 1941, Mengelberg and Helman teamed up again, this time for a studio recording of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. Mengelberg had conducted the work nearly 90 times in concert: it was dedicated to him and a 1928 Victor recording (with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra—RCA, 11/92) had been showered with critical accolades. The later performance, however, is grittier than its predecessor: Strauss's battlefield has become more frenetic, his troops transformed into a loud, disorderly bunch (the New Yorkers were both jovial and dapper) and his ''Works of Peace'' are now noticeably less serene than before. But Mengelberg is, as ever, 'on the qui vive' for detail, and even Strauss's own set from the same year (DG, 11/90—also his second, incidentally) has none of its charisma. It is also very well recorded for its age and Cedar hasn't hijacked too much of its ambience. However, the transfer engineers missed out on a side-join (3'15'' into track 4) which, as reproduced here (and on a previous Teldec CD incarnation, reviewed 11/89), gives us a closing chord at the end of one 78rpm side, plus its (musically unmarked) repetition at the beginning of the next. Having the chord played twice allowed purchasers of the original 78rpm set to enjoy something resembling musical continuity, but its repetition on CD is both senseless and misleading.
The 1920s and 1930s witnessed some of Mengelberg's greatest recordings, although his 1938 Don Juan trades sweep and bluster for Mozartian elegance and a rare sense of poetry; it's fascinating but fussy, and a far cry from the bolder readings of Toscanini, Reiner, Coates and Koussevitzky. A year earlier, he had been in Britain conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with repertoire that included the Overture, ''Nocturne'' and ''Scherzo'' from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Overture is vigorous and keenly attenuated, the ''Nocturne'' somewhat halting and the ''Scherzo'', although less pointed and translucent than Toscanini's live recording with the same orchestra (Testament, 4/93), is far superior to the untidy, tiresomely cut Concertgebouw recording that Mengelberg made in 1926 (due for release soon from Pearl). But the sound is terribly primitive: odd notes are missing and there's nothing of the presence that informs Toscanini's live BBC recordings.
It's certainly a lot less clear than the 1939 Berlin Radio version of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, an over-attentive reading, interpretatively similar to the Concertgebouw broadcast of 1940 (Philips, 4/86—nla). Tempos fluctuate remorselessly—ducking the barline here, lingering there and generally distracting one's attention away from the main musical arguments. Furthermore, Mengelberg leans heavily on to the Allegretto's first note (much as he was to do in Amsterdam a year later), thus setting a rather irritating precedent for what follows. Anacreon, however, is superb; a powerful reading, very well played and fully on a par with equally great recordings by Toscanini and Furtwangler (not to mention a more overtly brilliant 1927 reading by Mengelberg himself—Columbia, 1/28).
The Stravinsky items provide a curious but welcome bonus. The extended (26 minute) Le baiser de la fee rehearsal sequence is both amusing and revealing, while the Vom Himmel hoch Variations are quite well performed but dimly recorded. The highly dramatic, unspecified Persephone 'excerpt' is in fact the whole of the first part, ''Persephone abducted'', plus the opening few seconds of the second, ''Persephone in the Underworld''. Verina Zorina is Persephone, and the unnamed Eumoplus sounds to me rather like Richard Lewis—but one can't tell for sure. The sound here is, again, less than ideal.
Whenever he was invited to perform at the Concertgebouw, Stravinsky always insisted that Mengelberg himself conduct The Firebird Suite. Contemporary reports suggest it was quite an interpretation, and although a recording resides somewhere in a private archive, no one has as yet managed to release it. Let's hope that Michael G. Thomas 'gets lucky', as they say!'