The 13-year tenure of Charles Munch as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1949-62) was a watershed in the annals of orchestral performance. The great Alsatian conductor made that ensemble the finest French orchestra in the world, and his achievements in the non-Gallic repertory also secured his reputation among 20th-century masters of the baton.
Sony Classical is honoring his 125th birthday anniversary with “Charles Munch: The Complete RCA Album Collection,” a handsome, 86-CD box set containing all of the recordings he made with the Boston Symphony for RCA Victor, augmented by the few he taped for Columbia with the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra before and after his BSO tenure, respectively.
With nearly 65 hours of music — from Bach to Blackwood — some 16 recordings new to CD, and 29 newly remastered from the original analog tapes, this is an unmissable trove of performances that collectors will want to pounce on before it disappears.
Munch recorded 135 works with the Boston Symphony, several of them more than once. Sixteen of those recordings have not been previously available on CD. Many are classics that have never gone out of print. It is good to have all of them back in circulation and for a pittance — you can find it online for only $150, making it a grand gift for the classical music buff on your holiday list.
Munch’s arrival in Boston coincided with the end of 78-rpm recording, and his tenure bracketed the onset of the LP era and the golden age of stereophonic recording. It is our immense good fortune that his mature work spanned the entire Living Stereo era when RCA’s two- and three-channel analog tapes set new technical standards for the industry. Those recordings, made in Boston’s sonically superior Symphony Hall, still sound wonderful more than 60 years after their initial release.
Munch’s Boston recordings were big moneymakers for RCA Victor, at a time when the Nipper label and Columbia were vying to corner the nascent home-stereo market. And competition was cutthroat: Columbia had Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra and, later, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Victor’s top guns, besides Munch in Boston, were Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony, and Fritz Reiner with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Early in his Chicago tenure, Reiner complained that Victor marketed Munch and Toscanini more aggressively. In fairness, the company scarcely neglected Reiner and the CSO, recording them in 108 works during his decade in Chicago. Had Reiner’s heart condition not cut short his CSO tenure in 1963, his discography surely would have been as sizable as Munch’s.
If the music of Richard Strauss was the heart of Reiner’s repertory, the music of Hector Berlioz was the nerve center of Munch’s.
Works by Berlioz figured in Munch’s first Boston sessions in 1949 and his last in 1962. The Sony box includes his benchmark recordings of “Symphonie Fantastique,” “Romeo et Juliette” (two versions), “La Damnation de Faust,” “L’Enfance du Christ,” “Harold in Italy” and overtures. Munch’s authority in this repertory related as much to the brilliance and brio he inspired in his Bostonians as his Dionysian feel for Berlioz’s feverish romanticism.
Indeed, Munch performances were highly spontaneous, at times varying greatly from rehearsal to performance. At their best, they could sweep you along in a tidal wave of emotion, for, as the conductor observed, “Concert time is when feelings must be made to reach an extreme of intensity.”
Recordings he made at different stages of his BSO tenure reflect this. A case in point was the three versions of Ravel’s “La Valse” he made with the orchestra. His 1950 “La Valse” thrashes with cataclysmic fury, reflecting Munch’s stated belief that the piece is about “the end of the world.” The later interpretations are more centrist but no less alluring in tone color, pacing and rhythmic plasticity.
Victor invested heavily in making Munch-Boston synonymous with Debussy-Ravel. In Boston he recorded seven works by each composer, in wonderfully lucid performances that reflect his lifelong engagement with these French masters. Few conductors before or since have brought greater nuance to Debussy’s “La Mer” and “Images,” greater fervor to the rarely heard “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian,” a recording that offers Munch’s own eloquent narration.
His 1959 Saint-Saens’ “Organ” Symphony was one of the stereo spectaculars of its day and sounds as much nearly 60 years later. The box also holds such bonne bouches as his diabolical Franck “Le Chasseur maudit,” his gorgeous Chausson Symphony and his delicious Milhaud “La Creation du Monde.” Albert Roussel’s second “Bacchus et Ariane” suite, a longtime Munch specialty, makes its belated first stereo appearance here.
More than a third of the recordings comprise German and Austrian symphonic repertory, along with a chunk of Tchaikovsky and selected works by Dvorak, Wagner, Mahler and Strauss — so much for the stereotype of Munch as a “French” conductor. A mettlesome “Eroica” and Fifth highlight his almost-complete Beethoven symphony survey. Brahms’ First Symphony, another Munch specialty, is big on rhythmic dynamism and architectural solidity, and so is his Schubert “Great” C Major Symphony. A full-blooded Dvorak Symphony No. 8 makes one regret that he never recorded anything else by the Czech composer.
Munch’s wide-ranging commitment to contemporary music was a hallmark of his Boston years. As my colleague Alan G. Artner once noted, Munch programmed no fewer than 168 contemporary works with the BSO, many by American composers. Of the moderns he favored, Victor committed to disc symphonies by Arthur Honegger, Walter Piston, Bohuslav Martinu, Easley Blackwood and Alexei Haieff, along with scores by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Bloch, Menotti and Barber. How the industry has changed vis-a-vis domestic orchestral recording!
Soloists found Munch the most sympathetic of accompanists. The Sony-RCA omnibus includes his expert collaborations with Jascha Heifetz (the Beethoven, Mendelssohn and second Prokofiev violin concertos), Arthur Rubinstein (Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2), violinists Nathan Milstein, Henryk Szeryng and Jaime Laredo, and several other artists.
Of prime importance is the first-ever recording of William Walton’s splendid Cello Concerto, which cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and Munch premiered with the BSO in 1957 and recorded three days later; nobody has played the piece better. As much can be said for the sparkling account of Vincent d’Indy’s “Symphony on a French Mountain Air” that Munch made with pianist Nicole Henriot the following year.
Munch died, at 77, in 1968 in Richmond, Va., during a tour with the Orchestre de Paris, the ensemble he co-founded following his departure from Boston. If it is going to take his recorded legacy to do the legend-building the reclusive maitre avoided when he was alive, so be it – this boxed bonanza does the job nicely.
Robert Russ, who produced Sony’s recent boxed sets of Reiner/Chicago and Pierre Monteux recordings, has done has usual thorough job of it. The 162-page hardcover book includes a brief essay by Munch biographer D. Kern Holoman, and the original cover art is reproduced on each cardboard CD sleeve, with the original liner notes included on back.
“There will be joy,” Munch predicted at the start of his Boston tenure. Prophetic words. Now we have his entire American discography, gathered in a jumbo package, proving how much joy Munch and his Bostonians actually did produce together.
Sharps and flats
The PBS “Great Performances” presentation of Lyric Opera’s world-premiere production of Jimmy Lopez’s “Bel Canto” is scheduled to air locally at 9 p.m. Jan. 13 on WTTW-Ch. 11. The opera, based on Ann Patchett’s novel inspired by the Peruvian hostage crisis of 1996-97, was recorded in performance here last January. Lyric creative consultant Renee Fleming, who curated “Bel Canto,” will host the national broadcast.
The WFMT-produced “Relevant Tones” and its creator-host Seth Boustead have received a 2016 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson radio broadcast award for the program’s coverage of contemporary classical music from around the world.
Alex Klein, principal oboe of the Chicago Symphony, will join the DePaul University School of Music faculty as adjunct instructor of oboe at the start of the 2017-18 academic year, DePaul has announced.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @jvonrhein
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