In a conversation with the French musician and film-maker, Bruno Monsaingeon, in 1976, Glenn Gould remarked: ''Personally, I think that, along with Stokowski, Mengelberg was the greatest conductor I've ever heard on record.'' The praise was not unequivocal, since Gould goes on to discuss what he calls Mengelberg's occasionally ''strange'', ''arbitrary'', and sometimes ''un- l necessary'' tempo changes. But Mengelberg was probably unequalled in his time as an orchestral technician, and as an interpreter of something like Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben of which he was a joint dedicatee. His 1928 New York recording of the piece changed people's lives, even so late as 1962, the 30-year-old Glenn Gould had yet to recover from the impact it made on him as a teenager.
Why, then, do we hear so relatively little about Mengelberg, and why is what we do hear often vaguely, or not so vaguely derogatory? The whims of chronology and politics have a good deal to do with it; that, and what seems to have been a certain short-sightedness by Mengelberg and his colleagues in the recording business about how best to lay down for posterity evidence of his work. Even where Telefunken did make good recordings of Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the late 1930s before the onset of war, the shells seem often to have been badly kept. After the war, Mengelberg was banned from conducting by the Dutch authorities, stripped of his passport, and left in silent exile in Switzerland until his death in 1951. An Indian summer in recording studios equipped with rapidly advancing technology was thus denied him. Approaches were made to him to record, Michael G Thomas was one of the intermediaries, but as a touching letter written to Michael Thomas in August 1950 proves, there was not only the Dutch government to deal with, but also Telefunken who continued to hold Mengelberg to the letter of his contract with them.
In a detailed and fascinating essay accompanying his two-LP set of Mengelberg recordings Thomas argues that Mengelberg was ill treated by the Dutch Crown and the Dutch government in 1945 and 1947. Certainly, the prima facie evidence is that he was a scapegoat, a Nazi by public election rather than personal action or private inclination. Like many musicians on the continent of Europe during 1939–45, he made music where he could and attempted to defend his musicians and his freedom to programme specific works as he was best able. His last concerts were in Paris in the summer of 1944, alongside musicians like Cortot, Tortelier, Schneiderhan, and Stravinsky's son, Soulima. A year later he was stripped of his honours by the Queen, before his case was heard Thomas tells us, and his career ended. Had he survived his 80th birthday, he would have resumed work, but he died on March 22nd, 1951, six days short of that birthday. His memorial concert was conducted by Klemperer, a true Nazi-lover (sic)! Did Klemperer's gesture, one wonders, give the authorities any inkling of the injustice they had perpetrated?
Of course, the profession of conducting, by its very nature an authoritarian affair, has made it doubly difficult for some of its company to withstand the mud-slinging that has gone on since the war. I am ashamed to say that there have been times when, armed with minimal information about Mengelberg's last years, I have fancied hearing the jingle of spurs and crash of jackboots in the finale of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as Mengelberg directs it. The fact is, more often than any of us dares admit, we hear what we expect to hear; which is why the kind of prolonged study of Mengelberg's work that these dozen or so records invite is a salutary corrective.
With the exception of the Thomas LPs and an EMI on CD ''The First Mengelberg Recordings 1926–31'', ali the records come from the Telefunken lists and the years 1937–42. The Beethoven recordings from 1937–38 reached the UK and were noticed in these columns, the rest are new to the UK. Every disc in the Telefunken series carries the same essay on Mengelberg by Helmut Haack and a date of recording, but nothing else. The assumption is that these are not live recordings but it is frustrating not to have confirmation of the fact, and though insert notes may be a foregoable option where Beethoven is concerned, many collectors will be irked to have no background information on the intriguing collection of Dutch compositions assembled on 8 44157. In these respects Teldec have served us badly.
In other respects, they put us substantially in their debt, though there are technical blemishes on several discs—the Brahms Fourth Symphony is particularly badly affected—that the non-specialist collector will blench at. At best, though, these records allow us to more than glimpse the sheer sonic splendour of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in its heyday. Too many of the original Mengelberg recordings that Philips have reissued, including the 1977 LP Beethoven cycle some of which is now on CD, have suffered from anaemic sound, the orchestra distantly and palely caught on live radio transmissions. The results were a bit like trying to drink claret through a straw, where the Telefunken recordings gathered here generally give one a goblet and the bottle and something altogether more full bodied.
The 1937–8 recordings of the Fifth and Eighth Symphonies of Beethoven have greater firmness and presence than Philips's 1940 Hilversum recordings. Here we really do catch the weight of the basses and the trombones, the fierce ring of the trumpets, and something of the sheen, weight, and fire of string playing that we have probably heard since only from the Leningrad under Mravinsky of the Berliners under Karajan. Mengelberg's reading of the Fifth Symphony is vital, powerful and well paced without any taint of fanaticism. There are hints of triumphalism in the finale and in the slow movement, but the latter has a fine coursing energy that avoids dullness and generally shows the music to good advantage. In this April 1937 recording the Fifth Symphony has its exposition repeat (missing on the Philips) but the 1938 Eighth loses it. The finale of the Eighth, steadily paced, shows Mengelberg's unflagging command of his forces, the music opening out like a Chinese flower in water. Everything is expertly balanced top and bottom—the climax of the first movement sounds in all voices and registers—and though the Allegretto scherzando is taken below the metronome mark at a somewhat consequential strut, the playing has great keenness and style. The trills are richly sounded, genuinely droll, and gracious touches of portamento give the music a charmingly bitter-sweet afterglow. The account of the Pastoral, one of the Philips successes, sounds unyielding by contrast. There is no exposition repeat and the transfers are seriously marred by the poor quality of the record used of the final four minutes of the first movement. This is a pity because in spite of one particularly nasty side-change, the performance of the Meistersinger Overture on the same disc is lively and joyful, finely voiced, with nothing snatched or over-driven.
Listening to the newly released performances of standard repertory works, I was surprised how level-headed much of Mengelberg's conducting is. When Pearl reissued his 1928 Concertgebouw recording of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony on LP in February 1982 RL drew attention to moments of ''hysterical intensity'', ''agogic posturing'', poor intonation, and cuts. In those days the Concertgebouw woodwind playing did have a certain characteristic rawness that is not always congenial to us now, and there are cuts in the Tchaikovsky which are retained in the 1940 Berlin recording. Two substantial portions of the finale go, including the whole of the start of the coda. If anything the Berlin Tchaikovsky Fifth is rather bland, with the Berliners evidently enjoying a less symbiotic relationship with Mengelberg than the Amsterdam players. In general, I think Mengelberg's reputation as a free-wheeling hysteric, much given to altering the scores of the great masters, has been exaggerated. In many instances, he moulds the music far less freely than Furtwangler, though perhaps with Mengelberg one is more conscious of even the smallest agogic adjustment because of his extraordinary control of the players. He also makes much more extensive use of portamento and in this respect is perhaps the last great European conductor to do so on this kind of scale.
The 1937 Amsterdam recording of the Pathetique Symphony is very fine, with few distortions, one or two strongly underlined 'points' notwithstanding. In the hall itself, the power and richness of the orchestral tone must have been truly astonishing. The burnished string playing is still a joy, the great melodies tenderly and passionately inflected, with extensive but always stylish use of portamento. The concluding Adagio is played really rather quickly, with fierce attack and great clarity of line but with a surging commitment in the central outbursts that kindles the music freshly into life. As that most dispassionate of orchestral observers, Bernard Shore, wrote in his book The orchestra speaks (London: 1938): ''His interpretations, intensely personal and vivid, have his great conviction behind them.'' In the 1812 Overture which accompanies the Pathetique on the disc there are no histrionics; only firm direction and string tone that glows like a Byzantine mozaic.
Another performance I greatly enjoyed, despite a slightly recessed recording, is the 1941 account of Dvorak's New World Symphony. It is worth recalling that when Mengelberg took over direction of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1895, this symphony was barely a year old. Yet here, within a few days of his 70th birthday, Mengelberg directs it with a zest and lyricism that bring it up newly minted in a manner few German-born conductors could emulate. The slow movement is played with a great sense of longing, expressive but never maudlin, and in the Scherzo, Mengelberg ensures that the music's strong dance impulse also embraces the symphony's continuing song. No wonder Monteux admired Mengelberg in this repertory.
A profound, almost Elgarian sadness and sobriety casts its shadow over the slow movement of Brahms's Fourth Symphony as Mengelberg conducts it. Elsewhere, one or two gestures apart—an acceleration in the first movement coda, a comma before bar 5 of the scherzo, mannerisms you will find in Klemperer's LP Philharmonia recording (nla)—this is a remarkably classical reading. I only wish the transfers were not so poor. At times the sound breaks up almost completely, as though there was a giant piece of fluff on the stylus. There are also problems with the recording of Brahms's Second Symphony: a shift of level near the start of the slow movement and a noisy record in the quietest part of the finale just before the recapitulation. But this, too, is fine Brahms, a Second to think of in the same general league as the 1931 Max Fiedler recording with the Berlin Philharmonic or the several post-war KaraJan versions.
If Mengelberg had a mannerism, it was his almost fanatical concern to get the cleanest attack on—or articulation of—a chord or a note that launches some key motivating phrase. In his chapter on Mengelberg, Shore describes in detail how Mengelberg prepared the opening bars of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, inserting a comma into the tie in bar I and ensuring a brilliantly clear arpeggio not just a dumpy slur of E flat major; and how he gave the players space in bar 2 to attack the up-beat, the violas and cellos striking the E flat with the point of the bow. It is this kind of conscious articulacy that makes his reading of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for strings so compelling (it is coupled with an unexceptionable performance of the First Piano Concerto with the Edwin Fischer pupil, Conrad Hansen, as soloist) though I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the Amsterdam Heldenleben. Here, after all, are the dedicatees at work, though I don't suppose any players survived from those heady days at the turn of the century when Strauss, Mengelberg, and the Concertgebouw dazzled audiences (including London audiences in 1903) with the piece and the orchestra's masteriy realization of it. In the event Mengelberg's 1928 New York Philharmonic recording (RCA—nla) remains unchallenged. There one senses Mengelberg at the peak of his powers, characterizing the music brilliantly and holding the orchestra in his thrall with that concentrated mastery that few conductors have ever achieved. (Karajan has it, but he told me it took years to achieve; one of his models was Vaclav Talich, another conductor who, despite the best efforts of BBC Radio 3, is too little noticed these days.) By Mengelberg's standards, the 1941 Ein Heldenleben is oddly raucous and free-wheeling. The recording does not help, with the trumpets subject to some unpleasing distortion and discolouration, but where things do work out well there is often a sense of meticulousness turning into mannerism. The 1938 recording of Strauss's Don Juan, coupled with the Brahms Fourth Symphony, is also oddly lethargic. The orchestra do not seem to warm up until the second love bout and the poorly played glockenspiel is horribly prominent in places. The orchestra were to play better for Karajan in 1943 (DG (D 423 527-2DO6, 4/88). Even Toscanini has his failures with this piece in his last years. It is not music for old men to conduct.
The record of Dutch music is of particular interest. The Wagenaar Overture has always led a reasonably successful independent life, and there is the elegiac Giaconna Gotica by Cornelius Dopper (1870–1939) who had been Mengelberg's deputy at the Concertgebouw from 1908–31. The two charming Dutch dances by Roentgen are music after the manner of Respighi's Ancient airs and dances. Jo Vincent is rather distantly recorded in the Andriessen but it is interesting to hear snippets of music from the early twentieth century flowering of the Dutch Catholic choral tradition.
The two LPs issued by Michael G Thomas in a limited edition of 500 copies include a singing, surging account of the Tristan extracts, some old-fashioned Handel, and Bach with hints of a move to a new-found buoyancy and grace that some younger conductors were now looking to in the performance of music of that period. In the Mahler songs, Mengelberg's aim is clarity of textures and diction. I don't have from Hermann Schey the kind of burning insights Fischer-Dieskau brought to the songs in his EMI recording with Furtwangler ((CD) CDC7 47657-2, 6/87), but the performance is of interest, as, in a rather more tangential way, is Gaspar Cassado's aristocratic playing of his own arrangement for cello and orchestra of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata.
The EMI collection, carefully assembled and annotated, is of great historical interest, though with no substantial works on the disc it is very much a collection of orchestral lollipops. In December 1911, The Musical Times described Mengelberg's conducting of Liszt's Les preludes as ''one of the most magnificent performances of an orchestral work that has ever been given in the Queen's Hall'', though many people missed it as they had trains to catch and Rachmaninov had hogged the stage playing endless encores. Perhaps a few of them were able to console themselves for the loss when this 1929 recording was issued. The classical good sense of Mengelberg's conducting is evident in his account of Cherubini's Overture Anacreon, but by far the most significant item on the disc is the 1926 recording of the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony. I have long thought this movement should be played relatively swiftly, at around seven minutes rather than the now usual 12, as Mengelberg and Walter used to treat it (with Kubelik and Barbirolli at least still vaguely in touch with this tradition). In a long and absorbing essay ''Aspects of Mahler's Fifth Symphony: performance practice and interpretation'' in the May Musical Times, Paul Banks examines the question in great detail, drawing, among other things, on Mengelberg's annotated conducting score of the Fifth Symphony that dates from the initial period of work on the symphony with Mahler himself. From this it is clear that the Adagietto, far from being some piece of death-haunted nostalgia, is far more probably a love-song that prefaces a joyous celebration of love. In this, as in many other things, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Mengelberg, both as technician and interpreter, is someone younger musicians lose sight of at their peril.'