Icons, Angels, and Mussorgsky's Demons
Twenty years into the Internet Age, I remain amazed by the slow speed of change--not the rate at which technology itself changes, but the rate at which our culture adapts to it. Money, matter, and models of materialism turn over quickly, but mindsets turn over ever so slowly. Our values creep unconsciously forward and mindlessly backward, forcing new technologies into a dubious relationship with their alleged properties of progress. The new is more of the old.
The discouraging finding of this short essay: the Pittsburgh Symphony's 1958 recording of Mussorgsky'sNight on Bald Mountain sounds hardly any different in its 2011 compact disc release on EMI's "Icon" boxed set of 20 CDs of William Steinberg than it did on its 1995 CD release on EMI's Seraphim imprint. The baseline recording level was raised for the later release; it thus sounds louder than the earlier recording and makes more audible a greater level of detail to be heard at the same volume than the earlier recording.
It all reminds me of my research into photographs of mountains. One would think that a portrait of Bald Mountain, the "Isla Gora" in Kiev, would be readily found through a .61-second Google Image search. But no. There are too many competing candidates and too little controls for accuracy to be confident about which of 31.5 million hits on Google depict the witch-infested mountain of legend made famous in Rimsky-Korsakov's arrangement of Mussorgsky's music. The mountain reminded me, however, of the spookiest hill I've ever seen. When I lived in Germany's Freiburg im Breisgau, in 1993-94, I worked for a while as a janitor at the Sportplatz Post Jahn, located a longish bike ride east along the canal from the Freiburger Uni. Before I entered the gymnasium early in the morning, I would cock my head skyward and marvel at the supernatural topographical anomaly to the north: a hill pulled abruptly, unnaturally heavenward by demonic powers, capped with everpresent swarms of circling crows, exuding dread from its every twisted angle, hiding Black Forest secrets worthy of Samiel and Weber. Alas, finding internet photos of this marvel, too, is a goosechase, with no photo matching that imprinted in my memory.
Ancient or modern, it's all the same. And so it is with the alleged remastering that allegedly updated the 1995 Seraphim Night on Bald Mountain with the 2011 EMI Classics A Night on Bare Mountain, both from the 1958 recording of the PSO under Steinberg.
The sound quality--which matters a great deal in general but even more for anything orchestrated by Rimsky--lies closer to my 1996 recording by the Toronto SO under Jukka-Pekka Saraste on Finlandia than on my 1990 remaster of Stokowksi's recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra for 1940's Fantasia, which lops off two minutes and more. Despite its shortcomings, Stokowski's version has much to recommend it. He conjures music, not notes. With extreme tempos and headstrong interpretations, he replaces refined technique with special effects--to great effect! Stokowski's Mussorgsky is all drama. By way of comparison, I would rather listen to Steinberg's Rimsky rendition than to the brilliantly performed and recorded original version, with its flabby structure, by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Phil, recorded in 2006.
Given that Steinberg recorded this Bald Mountain in Pittsburgh's long-gone Syria Mosque, he and the musicians achieved a tremendous recording, thanks to producer Richard C. Jones and balance engineer Frank Abbey. Though the highs are low and the lows are high, the limited frequency range nonetheless permits an enormously powerful, passionate, and controlled, yet flexible, performance. The boomy acoustics can be heard after the cymbals forty seconds into the track, but then the fog of rosin is nearly visible on many of the violin licks. The bite on the virtuosic trumpet attacks at 6:32 turns virtuosity into awe of the demonic. Here is a brutal, primitive account, a forerunner of the Rite of Spring, as both Disney and Salonen saw, too.
My initial comparison of these two CD re-releases suggested that that EMI had truly cleaned up the mud from the older Seraphim release when it honored Steinberg in its Icon series. But turning up the volume on the Seraphim revealed its sound to rival the subtleties, the quiet inner voices, the ringing harp tones, present on the later release. Neither release benefits from a single word about the music on a program note; the Seraphim foregoes a note altogether, while the 20-CD Icon release understandably limits its program note to an essay by Mark Kluge about Steinberg. In the contest of old Seraphim versus new Icon, the loser is the new EMI and the winners are the old EMI, Steinberg, the PSO, and Rimsky's arrangement and orchestration of Mussorgsky. I doubt if any recording from the 1950s could match the combination of brilliance, polish, extraversion, and timbral vitality of this recording.
Oh, wait, there's Reiner with Chicago from the previous year. Yes, they have Living Stereo technology and few thoughtful phrasings. They have, frankly, more power and terror than Pittsburgh. But I find that what I like about the PSO today, in contradistinction to the CSO, is its relative intimacy. Even back in 1958, this CSO chestnut shows the City of Broad Shoulders marking its orchestra with a similar broad brush. Like its skyscrapers and its ambition, the CSO sound even then was just big. This recording also suffers from a few oddball balancing errors. By contrast, the PSO offers, as it does today, a greater sense of intimacy, a quality of human music-making, a sense of chamber music and individual ownership of the music from player to player. Here is another case of la plus ça change, but one that is for the best.
