Cala's Stokowski Conducts a Russian Spectacular is not to be confused with an earlier Dutton Labs issue of the same name with a very similar program issued in 1994. The recordings that Dutton used were taken from
Philadelphia Orchestra recordings ranging from the 1920s through 1940; this issue is drawn from recordings
Stokowski made for RCA-Victor with "his" symphony orchestra from 1950 and 1953, mostly consisting of players recruited from the
New York Philharmonic. Of these seven selections, only one -- the Glière Russian Sailors Dance -- has appeared on CD before.
Stokowski's tenure of principal guest conductor with the
New York Philharmonic had ended with the conclusion of the 1949-1950 season, so the bulk of these recordings fall into a grey area of his career where
Stokowski held no regular conducting post; however, his name was of such value to RCA Victor that they recorded him anyway. It was a good time, too --
Stokowski was at the height of his power both as a conductor and in the popular imagination, despite being "seventy-ish" and technically unemployed.
Stokowski identified strongly with Russian orchestral literature and, in his time, truly was one of the greatest interpreters of such music.
Stokowski must have regarded it in an almost proprietary fashion, as his approach to this same literature was highly interventionist; all but the short Glière, Tchaikovsky works, and In the Steppes of Central Asia of Borodin demonstrate the telltale signs of
Stokowski's added creativity. Although
Stokowski once announced he was to resurrect Mussorgsky's original 1869 score of A Night on Bald Mountain in the end he simply touched up the familiar Rimsky-Korsakov version, which became the basis of the music he used in Disney's Fantasia (1940).
Stokowski added a bass to intone the Church Slavonic melody found on a trombone in the middle of Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, and his selection of "Polovetsian Dances" from Borodin's Prince Igor is different from that used by any other conductor. The Khovantschina Suite presented here is a montage of two movements orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov and one by
Stokowski, and the difference is not so much like "night and day" as it is like the difference between night and a much darker, more ominous night.
In spite of his tweaking,
Stokowski's so-styled Dances of the Polovetski Maidens is one of the real highlights here; they are vibrant, exciting, and even at points, breathtaking. Though
Stokowski played the role of conductor-as-musical-middleman a little more aggressively than most of his stick-waving brethren, the results are usually very musical, even if they sometimes take us to places we are not so sure the composer would have wanted us to go. The main barrier here is the quality of the recordings, dating from the early days of hi-fi and at the tail end of a long period where the sound of RCA-Victor's classical recording was simply in the crapper. In 1954, RCA would resume its long dormant experiments in stereophonic sound, with
Stokowski serving as a very important part of that -- in the process, RCA would suddenly go from about worst to about best in terms of its sound. These recordings, in late RCA mono, share with their predecessors the same evils that had marked the RCA product since about 1939 -- they are alternatively blasty, excessively bright, excessively reverberant, unpredictable in volume level, and lacking in bass response. Yet for the conductor, some of these are classic interpretations -- compare the recording here of the Russian Easter Overture to the rather sloppy, burned-out version
Stokowski led with the
Royal Philharmonic in 1968. In some cases, good sound is just not the primary consideration, and for those who favor
Stokowski in Russian literature, although flawed, Cala's Stokowski Conducts a Russian Spectacular will be like an answered prayer. They can finally put their worn out, silver-on-blue label RCA LPs of this material to bed and enjoy Cala's fine restoration instead.