Many conductors of the past were interesting, but there aren’t many to whom I would apply the adjective ‘fascinating’ as readily as to Willem Mengelberg. I can’t think of a better demonstration of that quality than this pair of CDs. It isn’t simply that Mengelberg’s Schubert sounds different from his Kodaly; they are such different types of performance that to realize that the same man conducted both is a shock. In the Unfinished Symphony he lavishes the most extraordinary care on every detail of expression, phrasing and rubato; one doesn’t know which to wonder at the most, the fact that he has apparently thought of everything, or the control with which he draws every one of those details from the score without a single orchestral dropped stitch. You admire it vastly but then, if you’re me, begin to wonder whether he isn’t underlining the obvious. Yes, the recapitulation in the first movement has a deep poignancy to it, but so it does in quite a few readings I’ve heard which don’t insist quite so much on your noticing that poignancy; readings, perhaps, which trust Schubert and the listener rather more than this one.
And then you turn to Hary Janos, and the mind boggles. Not only does this seem like a different conductor (and a different orchestra, with its solo viola biting deep into the strings, its first oboe sounding like a folk instrument), it is a conductor doing something quite different with the music in front of him, immediately recognizing the individuality, the modernity, the Hungarian-ness of Kodaly’s orchestra and remaking the Concertgebouw in its service. It is the same with his Ravel: it isn’t merely a question of knowing that French and (say) German orchestral sound are different, but that Ravel’s diction is personal to him, that there is reticence even to his most refulgent pages, that the word ‘luscious’ wasn’t in his vocabulary. There were not many conductors in 1942 (there aren’t many now) who realized how coldly menacing, vicious even, are Berlioz’s will-o’-the-wisps.
Mengelberg’s Bach comes into the ‘interesting’ category: why! a piano continuo! But isn’t that infinitely flexible long-term rubato, though a wonder to listen to, just a trifle mannered, as though Mengelberg thought we would be bored without it? His Peacock Variations, apart from the interest of being a ‘creator’s recording’ (he commissioned the work and gave its premiere two years before this performance), has the sort of eloquence, vigour and vibrant colour that can easily change your mind if you’ve ever dismissed the piece as about ten minutes too long.
The sound on the Pearl disc is hoarse and acid in Bach and Mozart, better elsewhere. Archive Documents’ live recordings – although someone at the time had a nervously twitchy hand on the volume control, and there are one or two brief patches of heavy surface – are very good indeed.'