César Franck: Monteux; Igor Stravinsky: Pétrouchka

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Music reviews of César Franck: Monteux; Igor Stravinsky: Pétrouchka

Music Review: Parting the views
Rating: 3 Stars

Monteux was an accessible, communicative, oftentimes interpretatively astringent artist whose walrus physical appearance led the press to assign a persona to him that was not necessarily true. Oftentimes he was maddeningly sloppy, even unprepared, and as we give his recorded output more consideration, we finally come to notice he too often didn't get the standard of performance he could have.

This disk of Franck and Stravinsky is a case-in-point. The Chicago Symphony was a lousy choice for RCA to do a Monteux remake of this work, back in 1960. His '48 San Francisco reading was leagues better--lean, powerful, responsive, dramatic amid some scruff here and there. The CSO gives him Parsifal brass, Ringstrasse winds, heft and heave that makes the work heavy-footed and Teutonic to the point of distraction.

To make matters worse, the recording session orchestral set up with violins divided across the front, gives a pretty lame impression of an attempt to lighten the texture through neo-choral presentation. All it adds is busyness in a dark, turgid proceeding. It's not pleasant and it's certainly not Franck. It's Monteux allowing himself to be led around by Lewis Layton and his engineers. Yet this has been the fashionable Franck production for those who do not truly listen to Franck performance paradigms they expound.

The Stravinsky is quite a bit better (and an odd coupling), and again, we get some shaky chording that could have been supervised better and a reading that goes some way away from the dance that this ballet is. Overall, the performance is nicely proportioned and finished, though, but only better than the conductor'searlier Paris effort due to more expert execution. Yet, both recordings show little executive scraps, leavings, debris that give the impression of slovenliness.

All this renders this issue a Monteux document, more informative of what it says about him than it does of the music at hand. For the Franck, get Monteux's confrere Paray on Mercury and have a powerful, dramatic, colorful, transluscent, kinetic and, above all, Gallic experience of the lion that the composer was. For the Stravinsky, grab Antal Dorati in Minneapolis or Detroit for a compelling dance theatre experience where you can smell the sweat and feel the grit of the boards...and why the music was so revolutionary.

Sorry to say, comparative listening renders this Monteux release to the dusky corner of a memorial. I urge everyone to look into Monteux's very fine Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy (a bit sloppy again but wonderful) for the artist at his best. With these we begin to wonder at what could have been if Monteux had worked more along those lines.

Description of César Franck: Monteux; Igor Stravinsky: Pétrouchka

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