Koussevitzky Live: Shostakovich, Debussy and Tchaikovsky

Grief has a way of clarifying an artist’s priorities, and whatever else can be said about Koussevitzky’s brief, sorrowful return to the New York podium in the spring of 1942, there is no mistaking the intensity that grief seems to have burned into these performances. His wife Natalie had died in January, suddenly, and the maestro postponed his engagement with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony while Bruno Walter and Fritz Busch filled in. When he finally mounted the podium weeks later, something had shifted. You can hear it.

Start with the Shostakovich, since that is where this set stakes its claim on our attention. The Fifth Symphony was not yet a decade old in 1942, still warm from controversy, still trailing the political anxieties of its 1937 premiere under Mravinsky. Koussevitzky, never much of a Shostakovich advocate compared to his championing of Sibelius or the home-grown Americans he prized, digs into it here with unexpected ferocity. The first movement’s climax arrives with real violence, brass biting hard against the string tremolos. The Largo, that long modal lament, unfolds with a weight and patience that tells you Koussevitzky understood exactly what kind of music this was, grief wearing the mask of abstraction. Whether he intended the autobiographical parallel is unknowable. But knowing what we know about his state of mind that winter, it is hard not to hear it.

The engineering is 1942 radio-broadcast engineering: thin above the staff, congested in tuttis, occasionally swallowing the timpani whole. Anyone coming from Mravinsky’s visceral 1950s Leningrad recordings, or even Bernstein’s plush 1959 New York remake with this same orchestra, will need to adjust their ears downward, forgive some crackle, some wow in the transfers. It’s worth the adjustment.

The Corelli that opens the first disc is a curiosity, really, a Respighi-adjacent orchestral confection, all string-choir sonority and antique gestures dressed in modern tailoring, courtesy of the Pinelli edition that Koussevitzky evidently found charming enough to program as a curtain-raiser. It is not a performance that will change anyone’s understanding of Corelli. But it does tell us how mid-century American orchestras thought about the Baroque: plush and unapologetic, decades before anyone worried about gut strings or period bows. Treat it as a period piece twice over.

Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2, fares rather better. Koussevitzky’s French sympathies were never in doubt, and this orchestra, whatever its reputation problems in that fractious era, produces playing of real sensuous shimmer in the “Lever du jour.” The flute solo breathes. The string tremolos glow rather than merely vibrate. It’s not Munch — nobody in this repertoire ever quite matched Munch’s mixture of abandon and control — but it’s a reading of considerable atmosphere, phrased with an old-world rubato that today’s more metronomic Ravel interpreters have mostly abandoned, for better and for worse.

The second disc is where the set turns from historical footnote toward something genuinely compelling. La Mer receives a reading of enormous color and surprising violence. Koussevitzky was never a subtle Debussyist, and here he treats “Jeux de vagues” less as impressionist haze than as symphonic argument, brass and winds thrown into sharp relief against churning strings. Some will find it too muscular, insufficiently gauzy. I found it bracing.

And then the Tchaikovsky Fifth, nearly fifty minutes of it, expansive even by the standards of a maestro who never rushed anything he loved. The horn solo in the Andante cantabile is taken with unhurried breadth, phrased with a kind of vocal freedom that recalls nothing so much as an old-fashioned operatic tenor unwilling to let a luminous phrase pass unsavored. Some listeners will find the tempo relations willful. I confess I did too, in the finale, where the accelerandos feel less inevitable than imposed. But willfulness was always part of Koussevitzky’s genius and his limitation both — the same interpretive audacity that made his Boston recordings of Sibelius and Copland so persuasive occasionally tips, in less congenial repertoire, into indulgence.

Historical context matters here. This was an orchestra Koussevitzky may have been angling to lead permanently, following the Federation of Musicians dispute that had sidelined his own Boston players from release and broadcasting. Whether or not he seriously coveted John Barbirolli’s old job is a matter of some biographical dispute, and I’d gently note that the tired narrative of Barbirolli’s New York “decline” has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked by scholars who’ve actually listened to the surviving broadcasts. Toscanini himself, on returning to guest-conduct the orchestra in 1942, reportedly said it was playing just as well as when he’d left it. Whatever institutional intrigue swirled around these concerts, the playing under Koussevitzky here needs no invidious comparison to sound distinguished on its own terms.

This is not, finally, primary listening for anyone assembling a first Shostakovich Fifth or Tchaikovsky Fifth library. The sonics simply won’t permit it, and modern versions offer more refined orchestral execution.