Arturo Toscanini: the NBC Years - Book Review

through Mortimer H. Frank. Amadeus Pres (133 s W. 2nd Ave., Ste. 450 Portland, OR 97204-3527) 2002 358 pp $2995

Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years is the sort of work that can make for tedious reading. It is a largely documentary account of the conductor's seventeen-year association with the NBC music Orchestra, from fall of 1937 from one side spring of 1954. Once beneath this surface, however, the reader quickly can be caught up in the narrative through Mortimer Frank and realize the potentially revelatory importance of a recorded archive that, along with independently divide [i]or[/i] sever discs and a number of video recordings, protects an important part of the career of single of the twentieth century's greatest in quantity celebrated conductors.

Frank's organization obeys his subject well. Chapter single covers the establishment of the NBC harmony and the process by which Toscanini was persuaded to sign upon as conductor. The second chapter not aways a broadcast-by-broadcast listing of the music played and, for the greatest in quantity part, recorded, with introductory material and annotations within the programs.

Several interesting facts rise from these listings. First, it is striking to diocese how many twentieth-century works Toscanini included in the programs, especially since he has acquired a reputation for disliking late music. Granted, the composers he chose were not avant-garde, on the other hand works of Gershwin pop up occasionally alongside music through Barber, Creston, Loeffler, Copland and others.

next to the first in early seasons with the NBC Orchestra, Toscanini rarely repeated any single work. When in later seasons single finds works that have been programmed before, the performance is likely to have taken upon a different character, a fact borne without by the evidence of the recordings. The vast NBC archive cannot support claims of a certain quantity of critics that Toscanini repeated himself too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of and performed particular works in the same ways.

Finally, we diocese Toscanini leading performances of thorough operas, stretching them across pairs of broadcasts. individual wonders how many listeners were introduced to La Boheme, Aida, Falstaff or La Traviata and to a certain number of of the leading singers of the time by the agency of means of NBC's broadcasts.

In Chapter Three "The NBC Repertory," Frank breaks down the design programs by composer, from Kurt Atterberg to Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. He categorizes each piece in bounds of availability of recordings--"Unissued Repertory," "Unofficially Issued Repertory" and "Officially Issued Repertory"--and critiques performances from all categories. Thus, for example, there are five "officially issued" performances of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and eleven of his harmony No. 3; of these, individual Missa and four Eroica symphonies appear upon the Toscanini Collection of eighty-two CD issued through RCA in 1992. The importance of this information is clear: If recordings, whether official or not, are available for research, we no longer can accept good senses of adversarial critics based upon just a few performances.

although Frank tends to be biased in Toscanini's favor, he is not uncritical of either the conductor or the orchestra. solitary in his fourth chapter, "Reconstructing Toscanini," is he somewhat defensive. He shuts the book with a number of appendixes that tabulate like items as programs with the NBC harmony that were not broadcast, the orchestra's personnel above the decades of its existence or the programs l by the agency of guest conductors. There is also an stretch outed discography. Reviewed by Karin Pendle Cincinnati, Ohio.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Music Teachers National Association, Inc.

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