Decca publishes Solti London, The Orchestral Recordings “, a box retracing the journey recorded in London by the naturalized British Hungarian chef Georg Solti. It is a goldmine spanning over four decades.
The name of Georg Solti (1912-1997) is closely linked to the city of Chicago, where he directed the famous orchestra from 1969 to 1991. He was at least as important a musical player in the English capital, as musical director of the Royal Opera of Covent Garden from 1961 to 1971. He brought this very good European scene to the rank of a great international operatic institution.
Solti had received the offer to lead the London opera house in December 1959 after performances by rose knight. He was not unknown in the English capital. The London Philharmonic was the second orchestra entrusted to him by Decca in 1949 for recording as conductor. This is one of the great rarities found here.
The lucky star
What an incredible journey that of Gÿorgy Stern, born in October 1912 in Budapest! His surname Solti was chosen by his father in 1919. It means “inhabitant of the town of Solt”, a town 80 kilometers south of the capital. The regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, had then enjoined the Jews to adopt a Hungarian name. A very gifted pianist, a student of piano and composition at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Gÿorgy’s teachers were Kodály, Weiner and Dohnányi.
His calling as a conductor came to him after hearing Erich Kleiber conducting a symphony by Beethoven. Having become rehearsal at the Budapest Opera, he directs a single performance of the Wedding de Figaro (“I must have been the first Jew since Mahler in the 1880s”, he will say). Bruno Walter took him on as an assistant in Salzburg in 1935, Toscanini in 1937. His two models are there, Toscanini above all: “For the first time in my life, I understood that talent was only part of the profession. The rest was perseverance, hard work, endurance and studying again and again” (interview with Helena Matheopoulos, MaestroHutchinson).
In 1939, Solti lost his job due to anti-Semitic purges. He left for Switzerland, married his first wife and won the Geneva Piano Competition in 1942. His first Decca disc was recorded as a pianist, accompanying the violinist Georg Kulenkampff. At the end of the war, the intendant of music for the Allied armed forces in Bavaria was Edward Kilenyi, an American of Hungarian descent, a former pupil of Dohnányi. Solti asks him for help.
With denazification, there are opportunities. Bavarian State Opera initially rejects bid, but Kilenyi sends Solti to conduct Fidelio in Stuttgart, where he triumphed. Munich recalled him, offering the position of Principal Conductor of the Bavarian State Opera to a 33-year-old conductor who in his life had only conducted a performance of Wedding in Budapest, two Wether in Geneva and a Fidelio in Stuttgart. After two months he was so convincing that he was appointed musical director, ie successor to Bruno Walter, Hans Knappertsbusch and Clemens Krauss. “It took them three years to realize I was running everything — Salome and Valkyrie understood—for the first time,” Solti laughed afterwards.
In six years, Solti learned his trade as an autodidact in a dazzling way, dazzling being moreover a major characteristic of Solti’s art. After Munich, the chef goes to Frankfurt (1952-1961). When the offer from Covent Garden arrived, Solti was about to give up opera for a concert career. It was Bruno Walter who asked him to accept, telling him that he would love England and the English, and that he had to preserve the link with opera at a time when a generation (Furtwängler, Toscanini, Krauss , Kleiber and him soon) is about to disappear completely.
Uncle Maurice
Decca’s history is associated with John Culshaw. But an important figure in the artistic policy of the label is Maurice Rosengarten. “Uncle Maurice,” as Culshaw called him, who had ties to Switzerland, had spotted Solti, the starving pianist, during the war and paired him with Kulenkampff. It was Rosengarten who acceded to the young musician’s wish to be chiefly a conductor and who entrusted him with the orchestra of the Tonhalle in Zurich to record Egmont and Leonora III by Beethoven in 1947. The same Rosengarten will later spot Zubin Mehta, still a student, in Vienna.
Solti’s London symphonic saga began on August 29, 1949 with the recording of the Symphony noh 103 by Haydn. Unlike the interpretations of the time, which were often opaque and heavy, Solti’s is lively and transparent. Toscanini is the model, with his quick-wittedness and hard work. The frenzied character of Solti could frighten. When he came to conduct the Chorus of the Orchester de Paris in the Seasonsof Haydn, the dominant feeling before his arrival was fear. Yet it was almost a big child who showed up, jumping from the desk to the piano, making connections between Haydn and Stravinsky. He knew more than the slightest corner of the score and had so much fun that his enthusiasm was contagious.
At the second experience, the formidable missa solemnis of Beethoven, two years later, he seemed to be fighting with himself and seemed more grumpy, creating this electricity which also made his legend. The anecdote is enlightening: when Solti could rally a group around his musical jubilation, that’s when we have unique recordings; when, to some degree, there was room for doubt or unresolved issues, the music could tense up.
Some legends
Unlike the well-known Chicago Legacy, released in 2017 in 108 CDs, the London Symphony Sound Legacy therefore spans from 1949 to 1991. The 36 CDs include 7 CDs of rare monophonic recordings, reissued only in Australia. This almost unpublished portrait of a determined and lapidary Solti gives us exceptional moments in four exalted Suppé overtures with the London Philharmonic in 1951 and in abrasive overtures by Rossini. The leader, in his maturity, will become less impatient than in the Scottish Symphony of 1950. At the top, on the other hand, a large 2and Concerto by Rachmaninov with Julius Katchen, in 1958, and in stereo.
The 1960s in London are a few legendary recordings, notably dedicated to Bartók with the London Symphony: concerto for orchestra, suite of dances, music for strings and continuation of wonderful mandarin. He will also record his first Mahler records there. Her Titan (1D Symphony) still remains today one of the best, the 2and is spectacular, 9and foreshadows the heartbreaks of the adagio of 10and : hell rather than heaven.
In London, Georg Solti, naturalized British and knighted by the Queen in 1972, was also musical director of the London Philharmonic between 1978 and 1983. His constant relationship with this orchestra resulted in numerous recordings, particularly of English music, a very important legacy. relevant, spectacular in Belshazzar’s Feastof Walton or The planets by Holst, formidably effective, but above all impeccable in Elgar, from which Solti removes the overflow of pomp.
With the Philharmonic, Solti has also accompanied great Decca soloists: Kyung-Wha Chung in Elgar and Bartók, Ashkenazy in Bartók, but also Alicia de Larrocha in the Concertos notbone 25 and 27 of Mozart. But the most interesting Mozart concertode is the 20andwhich he played himself in 1989. This is where we find Solti the big child, so happy to return to the piano that he seems to smile with each sentence, like the epicurean of music he was.