Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Foreword by Harvey Sachs
- Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- ARTURO TOSCANINI – CHRONICLE OF A LIFE, 1867–1957
- CHAPTER 1 1900–30: TOWARDS THE PHILHARMONIC TOUR
- CHAPTER 2 1931–35: THE LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL 1935
- CHAPTER 3 RECORDING THE 1935 CONCERTS
- CHAPTER 4 1936–37: THE LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL 1937
- CHAPTER 5 THE FIRST HMV RECORDING SESSION
- CHAPTER 6 AUTUMN 1937: TWO CHORAL CONCERTS AND MORE RECORDS
- CHAPTER 7 1938: THE LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL 1938
- CHAPTER 8 1939: THE LAST LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL
- CHAPTER 9 1940–45: WAR EFFORTS AND BEYOND
- CHAPTER 10 1946–51: LA SCALA
- CHAPTER 11 1951–52: ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL
- CHAPTER 12 THE LONDON RECORDINGS – A STUDY IN STYLE
- ANNEX A DISCOGRAPHY OF EMI RECORDINGS 1935–51
- ANNEX B THE CONCERTS 1930–52 – PROGRAMMES AND RECORDINGS
- ANNEX C BRAHMS AND TOSCANINI – AN HISTORICAL EXCURSUS
- Bibliography
- Index
CHAPTER 12 - THE LONDON RECORDINGS – A STUDY IN STYLE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Foreword by Harvey Sachs
- Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- ARTURO TOSCANINI – CHRONICLE OF A LIFE, 1867–1957
- CHAPTER 1 1900–30: TOWARDS THE PHILHARMONIC TOUR
- CHAPTER 2 1931–35: THE LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL 1935
- CHAPTER 3 RECORDING THE 1935 CONCERTS
- CHAPTER 4 1936–37: THE LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL 1937
- CHAPTER 5 THE FIRST HMV RECORDING SESSION
- CHAPTER 6 AUTUMN 1937: TWO CHORAL CONCERTS AND MORE RECORDS
- CHAPTER 7 1938: THE LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL 1938
- CHAPTER 8 1939: THE LAST LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL
- CHAPTER 9 1940–45: WAR EFFORTS AND BEYOND
- CHAPTER 10 1946–51: LA SCALA
- CHAPTER 11 1951–52: ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL
- CHAPTER 12 THE LONDON RECORDINGS – A STUDY IN STYLE
- ANNEX A DISCOGRAPHY OF EMI RECORDINGS 1935–51
- ANNEX B THE CONCERTS 1930–52 – PROGRAMMES AND RECORDINGS
- ANNEX C BRAHMS AND TOSCANINI – AN HISTORICAL EXCURSUS
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
An interpretative traversal: its character and origins
Toscanini's extensive legacy of recordings remains, including those made in London during the years 1935–39. The latter have their distinctive qualities, as this chapter attempts to demonstrate. But as Toscanini's era recedes in time, as living witness vanishes and as judgement relies (sometimes with malice aforethought) upon selective recordings made in his final years, the perception of Toscanini's special attributes has over succeeding generations undergone a change, and not for the better. Retrospectively some commentators have transmuted the conductor into the very figure Newman and Constant Lambert always, and rightly, insisted he was not – the apostle of ‘objectivism’ and ‘literalism’, forever pitted against, as some current proponents would again have it, the intuitive thrust of his polar opposite, Wilhelm Furtwängler. Toscanini would not have recognised himself in such straitjacketed, simplistic terms; his constant concern was to approach as near as possible to the composer's creative process as revealed in every particle of the score. The correct appreciation of the notes, and everything entailed by that in terms of tempo and phrasing, was but the end of the beginning, the springboard for realising with all the passion at his command the composer's intentions in sound – as he himself put it, ‘my ideal dream … is, to come as close as possible to expressing the author's thoughts’.
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- Toscanini in Britain , pp. 235 - 258Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012