There are conductors history swallows whole — not because they lacked talent, but because the machinery of the album industry, the politics of concert life, and the sheer randomness of reputation conspired against them. Carlos Païta, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1932 and died in 2015, belongs in that category, or at least that’s what his admirers insist. Whether he belongs there on merit is precisely what these two Brussels broadcasts from 1968 and 1969 force us to decide.
Start with the Mozart. Symphony No. 40 in g minor is one of those works that reveals a conductor’s deepest assumptions almost immediately — the opening viola figure alone, with its breathless repeated notes and the falling sixth that follows, tells you whether you’re in the presence of someone who has actually thought about this music or merely someone who has conducted it many times, which is not the same thing. Païta’s tempo is brisk, almost impatient, and the first movement generates genuine anxiety — but it’s a somewhat blowsy, romanticized anxiety, as if Brahms were lurking behind the arpeggios. The string portamentos, the occasional swelling of phrase-endings that should simply close and be done — these are choices that will delight listeners who came of age with Furtwängler and Bruno Walter and will exasperate anyone whose ears were formed by Mackerras or the Hanover Band. Neither reaction is entirely wrong.
The slow movement, the Andante in E-flat major, is where things get complicated. Païta takes it at a pace that allows each phrase room to breathe, and the Belgian Radio Symphony strings produce a genuinely exquisite sound — warm, slightly dark in the lower registers, with a vibrato that feels organic rather than applied. But then comes an accelerando into the development section that seems to arrive from nowhere, a sudden surge of energy that Mozart neither asked for nor, I think, would have welcomed. It is the kind of interpretive decision that makes you sit up in your chair and then immediately wonder whether you’ve been manipulated.
The finale is another matter altogether. Fast, fierce, relentless — this is Mozart as pure dramatic force, and Païta drives it without apology. The contrapuntal passages in the development crackle, the dynamics are genuinely varied rather than merely indicated, and if the whole thing occasionally sounds less like late eighteenth-century Vienna than like a very good post-Romantic orchestra playing Mahler at half his normal weight, there is still something compulsive about it. Not a interpretation I’d recommend first to anyone new to this symphony — Walter’s 1956 recording with Columbia Symphony, or the Mackerras/Prague Chamber Orchestra version, would serve that purpose better — but one that demands to be heard on its own terms.
Ein Heldenleben is something else entirely. This is the piece Strauss wrote at 34 to celebrate — with characteristic immodesty — his own heroism, and it demands from its conductor not merely technical authority but a certain willingness to inhabit grandiosity without irony. Some conductors — Reiner, Kempe — manage to make the piece feel inevitable, as if every excess were earned. Others — and there have been many — simply wallow.
Païta, improbably, earns it.
The opening is magnificent: the hero’s theme in the low strings and horns, that great rising sixth followed by the descending chromatic tail, arrives here with genuine weight, the tempo slightly broader than Reiner’s but never sluggish, the brass balanced so that the texture breathes rather than suffocates. What Strauss requires from an orchestra in this piece is almost grotesque in its ambition — eight horns, five trumpets, a solo violin of considerable gifts for the “companion” section — and the Brussels orchestra is not, to be honest, a world-class ensemble. The winds have their uncertain moments. The solo violin playing Strauss’s portrait of Pauline de Ahna — his prickly, difficult, adored wife — is capable rather than ravishing.
But Païta holds it together through sheer conviction and through an evident understanding of the architecture. The “hero’s battle” section, which can easily become mere noise — a kind of orchestral rugby scrum — is here genuinely dramatic, the different motives fighting for space with real purposefulness. The retreat to the pastoral “hero’s works of peace” section, where Strauss quotes from his earlier tone poems, is handled with exactly the right mixture of nostalgia and self-satisfaction. And the closing pages — the long, slow unwinding toward death or transcendence, it’s never entirely clear which — are deeply felt, the strings sustaining their long lines with remarkable discipline.
This is live, 1969, Brussels, and the sound has the limitations you’d expect: some congestion in the loudest passages, a slightly boxy acoustic, the ambient noise of an audience trying very hard to be quiet. But the immediacy of the occasion comes through — you sense an orchestra playing at the edge of its ability, responding to a maestro who is asking for more than they normally give.
Does all this make Païta a neglected master? The word “master” carries obligations — consistency, a body of work substantial enough to support the claim, recordings that continue to instruct and move long after the novelty wears off. On this evidence, he was a conductor of genuine and sometimes remarkable gifts, with a natural feeling for large-scale structure and a refusal to play it safe that occasionally illuminates and occasionally irritates. The Heldenleben alone would be worth seeking out by anyone who cares about Strauss. The Mozart is for specialists and the curious. Together they make a case — not conclusive, but real.
