Arguably, the most lasting musical achievement of the 1960s was the elevation of the record producer to auteur. The work of Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Joe Meek among others are well known, but their use of the recording studio as an instrument in and of itself had already been thriving among the practitioners of a genre from which they drew much inspiration. By the time the Eisenhower era ended in the United States, listeners of classical music were familiar with the electronically enhanced strings of Bruno Walter’s late Columbia recordings, the shifting colors and reverb of Leopold Stokowski’s Capitol discs, and the first installment of the “theatre of the mind” that Decca promised in their epochal Ring cycle. In 1964 Glenn Gould famously and permanently forsook live performance, which he regarded as a relic of a bygone time, in favor of “acoustic orchestrations” which were realizable only via the “autocracy” of the recording studio.
It would be tempting to view the success of George Szell as merely another product of this era. Not entirely uncoincidentally, the zenith of his career happened to overlap with that of hi-fi sound recording and reproduction. The fastidious perfection he drew from the ensemble he led for the last 24 years of his life, however, was no feat of electronic sleight-of-hand.
“The Cleveland Orchestra was a fine orchestra when I first heard it,” he recalled during his tenth anniversary as its music director. “When I took over, some of the best members had left and I made it my business to get them back. . . The orchestra today is an instrument of artistic expression ranking with the best in the world, and with certain special qualities I do not find in any other orchestra at the present moment.”
Crisp, transparent, and immaculately precise, the Szell touch proved to be rewardingly phonogenic for a growing audience of listeners, to say nothing for the record labels which profited from his art. While some conductors seemed to lose their footing before the presence of microphones, Szell came alive, understanding early on that the invention of the gramophone signified the greatest paradigm shift in musical performance and reception in history. As he would with any matter musical (and often beyond its purview), Szell was deeply involved in the recording process: From the control room right down to dictating choices for album covers. His players had become accustomed to (if not necessarily enamored with) the obsessive control of their “Papa Szell,” an appellation which not only denoted his attentiveness and even warmth for his musicians, but also the paternalistic unto quasi-omnipotent power he wielded over the Cleveland Orchestra.
“If God wills it, I accept,” Danny Majeske responded to Szell’s offer to succeed Rafael Druian as the orchestra’s concertmaster. “God has nothing to do with it—I will it!,” the conductor shot back.
As his eleventh season into his Cleveland tenure drew to a close, Szell prepared to show off his orchestra’s prowess to European audiences, eager to demonstrate to them the unanimity and polish which had left American critics grasping for superlatives.
“What has developed [since Szell took over the orchestra] was a kind of empathy, an ability on the part of the players to identify so completely with the style and purpose of the music that it might almost appear as though they themselves had taken part in the composing of it,” remarked Herbert Elwell shortly before the Cleveland Orchestra’s embarked on their 1957 tour of Europe. “[They] have learned in a remarkable way to listen to one another as chamber music players do. . . The result is an enormous increase in refinement and flexibility.”
In a letter to Charlotte Flatow penned two years prior, Szell was more direct.
“[The] Cleveland Orchestra, although a comparatively young one, is in every respect fully the equal of American orchestras heard up to now in Europe and, in some respects, even superior to them.”
Nonetheless, as the tour neared and then was underway, the conductor grew increasingly anxious. “The trip was hard on all of us but hardest on Szell,” Anshel Brusilow remembered. “In Berlin he went looking for places he remembered from his youth, when he had worked with Richard Strauss at the Berlin Opera. He found nothing he could recognize. Not just the buildings but the streets themselves were obliterated. Then he knew what World War II had done to Berlin.” His return to the continent which had nursed and developed his talents was a personally emotional experience. More importantly, however, he worried about how European audiences would judge his orchestra. With his typical sense of care and detail, he arranged for programs that highlighted the Cleveland Orchestra’s finest qualities, as well as accounting for variety. No two programs would be exactly alike. His worries would ultimately be unfounded: The European reception of the Clevelanders was rapturous.
“Ovations without end,” reported the Spandauer Volksblatt of the orchestra’s Berlin stop. “It turned into a festival.” The New Statesman and Nation in London wrote: “It is one of the prime virtues of the Cleveland Orchestra. . . that their brilliance is entirely subordinated to musical considerations. They play with the loving spontaneity of a fine European orchestra, as well as with the discipline, blend, and unanimity characteristic of America.”
Switzerland was the tour’s pivot. From there the Cleveland Orchestra would venture to neutral Austria, then to Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland. His final Swiss concert in Lugano, preserved here on this set, is marked by a nervous tension unique in his discography. The evocative mists of Debussy’s La mer are dispelled in favor of a scrupulous clarity which properly contextualized this score as a cornerstone of musical modernity, its play of sounds sounding as if they still were freshly scored. Schumann’s Symphony No. 2—a Szell favorite—has an air of nervy energy that at moments (especially in the Scherzo) strikes the listener as an unlikely foretaste of Shostakovich.
An anonymous critic for the Tribune de Lausanne who had attended the Lugano concert wrote that Szell “sometimes allow[ed] himself to be caught up in a frenzy of tempi which transcend the golden mean,” and had chided his selection of a work by Paul Creston (not included here). Despite that, he compared him favorably to Leopold Stokowski and Serge Koussevitzky. “What [the Lugano concert] revealed to us was that [the Cleveland Orchestra] is indisputably one of the premiere orchestras of our time,” he concluded.
Another reviewer, this time for the Journal de Genève, added: “The technical and artistic qualities [of the orchestra] are simply extraordinary. Unnecessary to add that this judgment is partially in respect to the conductor. Extremely dynamic and colorful, animated by a fire and an irresistible pulsation, the interpretations are coordinated by a master’s hand. Szell has the gift to inflame his musicians, who are individually and collectively admirable.”
On these recordings, the careful listener will find a George Szell wholly unlike the cold and clinical stereotype that has remained stubbornly persistent among record collectors. Instead, these performances are marked by a possibly surprising sense of adventure and risk. Here is evidence, as if any more were needed, that this vertiginously daring musical high wire act, which eschewed empty virtuosic display, could thrive without the safety net of the studio; further testament of a remarkable collective partnership between orchestra and conductor whose legend seems to only burn brighter with every passing year.
(This essay will be included as liner notes in a forthcoming reissue of this concert by ATS in Japan.
George Szell going plane crazy with friends in Prague (1930s).