<<  -- 6 --  Bill Newman    LIFE'S FULFILMENT

Readers should at this point refer to Doráti's autobiography, Notes of Seven Decades, a highly readable, entertaining, informative and often amusing tome which has a place on every serious music lover's shelves. Other than what he had told me personally about his early life, musical training, the Dallas Symphony appointment -- which included recordings for RCA, and his invaluable views and opinions on music and musicians, the writing style and atmosphere created sums up the thinking man himself with all his personality virtues and occasional foibles. The natural ability to sign his name forwards and backwards, simultaneously with both hands, and the instinctive desire to draw and paint with great skill are well remembered and documented.

At the age of fifteen, I had acquired his London Philharmonic 78rpm recording of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, which I still consider superior to the two Minneapolis Mercury versions, and there are other 1937-9 LPO collector items: D'Erlanger Les cent baisers (The Hundred Kisses), Dargomishsky Danses slaves et tziganes, Chabrier (arr Rieti) Cotillon, Boccherini (arr Francaix) Scuola di ballo (School of Dancing) which have just reappeared on a Dutton CD CDBP 9757 in brilliant retransfers. One also looks back to his associations with Colonel de Basil and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and marvels afresh at the complete recordings over a considerable period of Delibes Coppelia, Tchaikovsky Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, where time seems to stand still as we listen once more with brand-new appraisals. But this is not intended to be a complete discography of Doráti's enormous contributions to the industry. For a complete listing of record labels, composers and their works, the orchestras and other artists, one should study the relative Discography and Concert Register.

With opera, one reads with considerable interest whole lists of repertory by Verdi and Wagner while turning the pages back to Münster and Johann Strauss II's Die Fledermaus, Paul Ábráham's Ball at the Savoy, along with Puccini's Il Tabarro and Gianni Schichi. Two Stravinsky concert performances stick in the memory: The Flood and Oedipus Rex, the last of which possessed a stark profundity and continuity of utterance as to make the Royal Festival Hall audience shake in their shoes. At the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, I attended the English translation of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerell but wondered at the supposed wisdom of endeavouring to reach a wider audience and just what I missed out on compared to a previous year when Mattiwilda Dobbs, Howell Glynne and Hugues Cuenod sang and acted their roles in the original version with far more fantasy realism. Two opera recordings make firmer impressions: Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer, with the incomparable George London and Leonie Rysanek. Produced by RCA's Richard Mohr, the ominous sound of a heavy length of chainlink being dropped to resemble the anchoring of the phantom ship, and the Royal Opera House Orchestra and Chorus rising to the occasion under Doráti's inspired direction; the other is Richard Strauss's Aegyptische Helena on Decca with Gwyneth Jones, for so long the only commercial recording of the opera.

With the knowledge that Doráti was influenced during his early years by such German School luminaries as Franz Schalk, Richard Strauss, Clemens Krauss, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Fritz Busch causes me to wonder if a consensus of styles played a part in his own interpretive conceptions of the Symphonic works of the Great Masters. From the middle 1950s to the early 1960s, recordings of Beethoven 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 and Brahms Symphony 1 modelled the tortness of drama so typical of Toscanini, yet by the time of his book, published 1979, he was to write: 'Meticulous to the last detail, in fullest command of the music he performed ... he was able to release orchestral sound directly from the page in such pure substance that it seemed to happen without any kind of mediation ... I became completely devoted to it and learned only later that it did not quite suit my own temperament and led me towards rigidity ... "Toscanini's approach" was only valid for Toscanini himself ...'

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