STOKI IN STEREO

This is the image that many people retain of Stokowski, and, indeed, of all conductors. Accompanied by Fantasia’s wordless animation, he conducted, among other works, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (in a dazzlingly virtuosic performance). Children were especially enthralled by the antics of Mickey Mouse, who at one point walked up behind Stoki, pulled on his tails, and shook his hand. Stokowski made the cover of Time magazine, which read: “Leopold Stokowski: He and Mickey Mouse put on a brand new act.”

Stoki’s celebrity endured into the mid-1970s, when he was a provocative nonagenarian, maintaining an active concert and recording schedule and teasing interviewers like Dan Rather, as he did during a prime-time CBS special in January 1977, Stoki’s ninety-fifth and final year. Someone had fed Rather an inane question, which came out, “I know that you have never taken a composer’s work absolutely literally, have you?” Stoki replied, appropriately, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘literally.'” He then allowed that “emotion” had its place, because, “If your father had no emotion, you wouldn’t exist now — because he loved your mother.” (Stoki’s mind, when not on music, was usually on the sensual, and often it was on both at the same time.)

To this day, Stokowski’s musical reputation can be hard to disentangle from feelings about his fame. He is revered by a certain cadre of musicians, which regards him as underrated, penalized by snobs for his collaboration with the likes of Disney. He is reviled by other musicians, who consider him a pompous showman. Many older members of the general public admire him as the man who introduced them to serious music. And there are self-supposing cognoscenti who sneer at him for his very popularity. Rarely, though, is a negative opinion about Stokowski offered on strictly musical grounds. Those who will not forgive him for Fantasia might be surprised on re-watching it: It is an excellent two-hour musical education, middlebrow (at best) for its day, but indisputably high culture in ours. Stoki’s performances — even if narrow- eyed mushrooms bob to the “Chinese Dance” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker — are original, exact, and vibrant.

A musician — certainly a dead one — is judged by his recordings, and no one was more fanatical on this front, more posterity-conscious, than Stoki. He cut his first record in 1917; he did not stop until May 1977, four months before his death. These recordings form the Stokowski legacy, and they will be enjoyed and evaluated long after the affair with Garbo, the marriage to Gloria Vanderbilt, the hokey (other) Hollywood movies, the self-parodic airs, and the relentless publicity-hunger are forgotten. A fourteen-disc set, the ” Stokowski Stereo Collection,” has just come out from BMG (formerly RCA Victor) , encompassing all the surviving stereo recordings the conductor made for that label. Most of these were made during his twilight years, when he was a wizened old man with long, wispy hair who often sat to conduct and sometimes seemed barely able to lift his arms.

These recordings had their first releases only a generation ago — Stoki was a modern conductor, not a relic of a bygone age. Yet he was born in 1882. And it is impossible to write about him without having some fun with the numbers, so here goes: When Stoki was born in London, Dvorak was 40 years old, Tchaikovsky 41, Brahms 48, Mahler but 21. Victoria had almost twenty more years to go in her reign, and President Garfield had just died. Stoki conducted past Jimmy Carter’s inauguration.

Stokowski was a tireless advocate of new music — he gave the world or the U.S. premiere of over 400 pieces — yet some of that music now seems as established as Handel’s Messiah: Mahler’s Song of the Earth, Falla’s Amor brujo, and various symphonies of Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich (all of whom he knew well). He may sometimes be remembered as a purveyor of light classics, but it was his insistence on championing contemporary composers that landed him in trouble with the Philadelphia’s governing board and that probably cost him his job with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, of which he was “co-conductor” with his rival Arturo Toscanini: Half the audience walked out on the Schoenberg piano concerto (which Toscanini had warned him not to try).

Stoki was — and he might even agree with this, after initial apoplexy — a typical American in that he came from across the ocean and utterly reinvented himself. When he left England in the early 1900s to become a church organist in New York, he was a Londoner through and through — the grandson of a Polish immigrant, yes, but also of three native Britons, and a product of the Royal College of Music. He had never traveled beyond British shores. But by the time he assumed the directorship of the Philadelphia in 1912 (after a three-year stint in Cincinnati), he had become a Slav, affecting a thick Polish accent and employing fractured Continental syntax (although these lessened in private speech). He wanted Americans to take him for a complicated European — fleeing from political persecution, and so on — and they did. He was aided in this metamorphosis by his first wife, the pianist and pedagogue Olga Samaroff — nee Lucie Hickenlooper in Texas.

Stoki told different stories at different times, heedless of the specifics of his previous lies. He once stormed off a radio set when an interviewer suggested that he had been born in London. In his more outrageous moments, he claimed such things as that he was the illegitimate offspring of the Kaiser’s sister, reared by a governess. So dense was the fog that Stoki threw off that it has been difficult to ascertain the facts about him. One biography of him is titled The Mystery of Leopold Stokowski; the opening chapter of another is called “Misterioso.” The maestro’s mischief is even now doing its work: The new Random House Encyclopedic Dictionary of Music lists Stoki as having a Polish father and an Irish mother. He always wanted his nationality indistinct, asserting that he belonged to no country, but to music, alone.

Even so, he returned to his native England in 1972, after an almost 70-year career in the United States. The recordings he made for RCA were with the sundry orchestras of London — the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the New Philharmonia Orchestra — all of which were (and are) practically interchangeable, sharing much of the same personnel. Other recordings in the new collection are from the 1950s and 1960s, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra (one of the two orchestras that Stoki founded, along with the New York City Symphony), and RCA’s own orchestra.

No matter what group he was in front of, he demanded, and got, the ” Stokowski Sound,” also known as the “Philadelphia Sound,” which is more readily recognized than described. It comes from the free bowing, rather than the uniform bowing, of the strings and is like liquid silk or the just- exposed pulp of a fresh orange, smooth and glistening and unconfined.

The sound is especially luxurious — though not to everyone’s taste, by a long shot — in Stoki’s Bach transcriptions, which he recorded for the last time in 1974. These transcriptions — arrangements of instrumental and vocal pieces for the modern symphony orchestra — are deemed shockingly impure in today’s back-to-basics climate. But they are formidable achievements of conception and orchestration. Stokowski emphasizes Bach’s melodies, elevating them from the brilliant contrapuntal clutter in which they are occasionally lost. Opponents contend that he adulterated and diminished Bach, but they forget that Bach was seldom heard in the concert hall before Stoki came along and that it was his reverence for Bach that led him to popularize him in the first place.

Stoki’s late recording of the Bach D-minor chaconne is technically unimpressive, but carries a spiritual potency that comes from long companionship with a piece and a thorough understanding of it. That same Stokowskiian force lies behind the E-major preludio, the ethereal Air on the G String, and the hymn Ein’feste Burg (the Gregorian theme used by Martin Luther for A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, later harmonized by Bach), which Stoki perfectly shapes and imbues with angelic strength. Those who decry these transcriptions on grounds that they are not Bach are not incorrect; but they are Bach-Stokowski, which has its own merits.

Stoki’s recordings of Handel’s Water Music and Royal Fireworks music, on the other hand, are less successful — ponderous and undisciplined. They cannot be blamed on his dotage, either, because, first, he had none, and, second, the recordings were made in 1961, when Stoki was a green 79. Listeners thinking to flee to Stokowski because they are weary of authentic- instruments performances should turn instead for these pieces to George Szell’s accounts with the London Symphony Orchestra, on London Weekend Classics.

Surprisingly for a man who spent six decades amid what he called ” meekrophones,” Stokowski recorded Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony only once, in 1974. It is one thing for a man at that stage of life to conduct a gentle Bach air, but it is another to take on this Mahler, which is a gigantic, sprawling work for full orchestra, a vast chorus, and two vocal soloists. The managerial problems alone are forbidding. But Stoki does not conduct like an old man. (He attended Mahler’s own rehearsals for his Eighth Symphony in 1910 and later gave the U.S. premiere of that work in Philadelphia.) One might expect this reading to be on the contemplative side, but instead Stoki wants still to be the dazzler. He traverses the music with tremendous vigor and muscularity.

The choicest bits of the collection? First, there is a 1954 recording (with the NBC Symphony Orchestra) of a suite from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, in which Stoki simply puts on a conducting clinic. It is incandescent, demonstrating his extreme sensitivity, acute ear, and awareness of musical architecture. To conduct music that requires continual threads of sound, with no undercurrent of rhythm to rely on, is a special challenge, and Stokowski met it. And like Sir Thomas Beecham, he excelled in lending profundity to music of less than divine inspiration.

Second, there is a Brahms Fourth Symphony, recorded in 1974, that is head- spinning, for it is a young man’s performance, robust and ebullient, alert and taut, stormier and more energetic than almost any other. The tempos are joltingly quick, and the ending of the first movement is almost frightening for its ferocity. The conductor is clearly leading his players, stamping himself on every measure. The second movement sighs and glimmers. The third bursts with confidence. The fourth movement is less fine, but the recording is nonetheless extraordinary.

There are, however, poor performances in the set that do not credit the Stokowski legacy and could have been omitted. His “New World” Symphony of Dvorak is lackluster, and his “Pathetique” Symphony of Tchaikovsky merely pathetic, with Stoki either exhausted or distracted.

In these sessions, Stokowski sometimes had good minutes and bad minutes within the same piece. His Coriolan Overture of Beethoven is like that — here perfunctory, there perked up — as is his Academic Festival Overture of Brahms, which begins playfully and impishly, falls into indifference (the notes “placed” rather than sung naturally), and then concludes with great cascades of sound, as Stoki rouses himself.

The collection is garnished with a few curiosities, such as a group of religious and semi-religious choral pieces that came out in 1962 on an album called Inspiration; Tchaikovsky’s rarely heard Lord’s Prayer is movingly rendered here.

There are also selections from Stoki’s rehearsals, both in 1954 and in the London sessions. The later snippets provide a sense of the atmosphere in the studio, with Stoki, in his by-then-tiny, barely audible voice, saying, “Is my beat clear? Anything not clear? Any questions?” In the D-minor toccata and fugue, he says to the brass players, “That G was spluttered, it wasn’t clean.” It was still spluttered the second time. But the third time, it was ” splendid! Give it, don’t keep it in your pocket.” (Stoki was speaking more or less British English in these rehearsals.)

In his nineties, Stokowski did not consistently reach the level of his prime, but he was recognizably himself, and he sorely wanted to record some of his principal repertory in stereo. He loved technology, rejoiced in gadgets, and always wanted to be the first to try the latest thing (he experimented with stereo at Bell Labs in 1932 and made the first longplaying records shortly thereafter). Like other musicians who lived into their nineties — Pablo Casals and Artur Rubinstein, for two — he would hobble or be helped to his post, seeming incapable of functioning, and awaken, transformed, on re-engaging with his craft. The companies obviously wanted the superstar’s “last recordings” (they had to keep making them for years), in whatever shape they were, but Stoki did not have to lower his standards dramatically. His final recording, of Bizet’s Symphony in C (made in 1977 for CBS), is not his finest, nor the finest of that symphony, but it is reputable and in no way the work of a once-great man being rewarded merely for breathing.

There is undeniably such a thing as performing genius, and Stokowski had it. He was a complete conductor, lacking no trick of the trade, deprived of no significant musical insight. He was a ham, certainly: He had spotlights trained on the podium; he discarded the baton for effect; he kept his feet together because it made him appear all the more elegant. But when it came to the music, his integrity held firm. Every piece of music he made musical, from the frivolous to the heroic.

Stoki’s intellectual prowess is occasionally questioned, and his image (self-fashioned) is responsible for that: He gave a good interview, chased glamorous women, titillated the public, and was charming to all. If he had been an irascible s.o.b. and a crazed martinet like Toscanini, he might be given more credit for the strength of his mind. His Beethoven Ninth (no souffle), recorded in 1967 and available on London/Decca, proves that he understood the permanent things about music as well as anyone. The recordings reveal the truth. The man who shook the hand of the mouse was sublime.

Associate editor Jay Nordlinger, music critic Of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, last wrote on Franz Schubert’s bicentenary.