Getting that Toscanini Tone

[3rd&4thT]

Originally Posted by boojum

I am no Wagner fan but I do love this piece. The ambient noise is amazingly loud. I had the memory that NY audiences were politely quiet. Memories can be so self serving.

It is hard, almost harsh at first. But the pace is lovely. That little man driving that huge orchestra. A beautiful reading. Glorious. Hard to believe it is Wagner.

Thanks for posting it.

Cheers

Glad you enjoyed it. The concert was in early spring, which would explain the bronchial audience.

I also suspect there are omni mics involved in the experiment, which would account for much of the ambience. Putting out a dozen unidirectional mics for a live stereo pickup was still in the future.

When the NBC broadcasts originated in 8-H, the programs were printed on silk, to avoid the noise of rustling paper.

As to Wagner, the rap on Toscanini from unsympathetic Teutons was that he made it sound like Puccini. Considering that Wagner's favorite opera composer was Bellini, a little Italianate singing is not inappropriate in this music.

Cheers,
3rd&4thT

[npulsipher]

Nice! Thanks for posting the clip. I would be one happy man I my recordings sounded that good.

Trumpet splat at 7:05 made me smile (being a trumpet player myself). Glad to hear that nobody's perfect.

[klaukholm]

Originally Posted by 3rd&4thT

Fear yes, but wrong on the unions. The classical symphony and opera orchestras in New York were unionized back in the 1920's.
Cheers,
3rd&4thT

I disagree, he said lack of union regulations not lack of a union.
While NBC may have had more protection than their unionless colleagues in Boston, toscanini still had ultimate power over you as a member.

It may be hard for someone who has not spent a few years under an old school tyrannic conductor to realize how much power they have over you even with the presence of a union.

I myself have had to play alone in front of close to 100 colleagues for 10-15 minutes courtesy of a conductor with issues. If you do not have your shit together and balls of steel it WILL break you.
Now make that your daily grind, set the clock to 1930 and imagine going to your employer with a union rep by your side to get mr toscanini of your back.

I have seen players with 30 years on the job huddling in a corner in a back room after a dress, with a sub called to play the concert as they were taken to the hospital. Thankfully, those conductors are a dying breed.

I have had chats with players that played under toscanini for years, and they went through some rough treatment to make those legendary sounds.

[Frisbieinstein]

Originally Posted by bash

My employer is a classical concert pianist who records an album every year. I am not an audio engineer but I do project studio stuff and knowing this, he recently expressed disappointment with the sound of his recent recordings and asked my advice. Those were made variously with Neumanns and Schoeps condensers through John Hardys into PT using spaced pair mic placement a few feet out from the front edge of the stage, about 12 feet high, to record the orchestra. It sounds to me like he's been getting the best of accepted modern orchestral recording; clean, balanced and unprocessed.

But apparently he wants more tonal character.

When pressed as to what he doesn't like about his recent recordings, the best I can get out of him is he loves the tone of the old Toscanini recordings of the NBC Orchestra. What little information I could find through Google searches seems to indicate those recordings were done mostly with a single RCA ribbon mic located above Toscanini, 16 feet above the stage. If I were to try to replicate that sound, what modern ribbon mic would be a suitable substitute?

Thanks in advance for any insights into technique and gear required to reproduce that characteristic tone from that era.

That NBC studio they recorded in is famous in classical circles. I don't remember much about it, though.

[3rd&4thT]

Originally Posted by klaukholm

I disagree, he said lack of union regulations not lack of a union.
While NBC may have had more protection than their unionless colleagues in Boston, toscanini still had ultimate power over you as a member.

Part of the problem was that their broadcast employer, NBC, used them for all sorts of radio programming.

Toscanini was very near sighted, but he could still see players sneaking out in mid-rehearsal for a live broadcast of light music or a soap opera. It contributed to his frustration, and he would occasionally take it out on them.

Offhand, I can't think of many conductors with pleasant personalities who made music worth remembering. All the greats were monsters, one way or another.

Here's the end of the Triumphal Scene from Verdi's Aida, as telecast from Studio 8-H in 1949. Toscanini was 82. (Remember that he played cello in the premiere of Otello under Verdi's supervision sixty years earlier.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo--vvnKgQ4

There's nobody alive who can do that. Momentary tyranny that gives us timeless joy.

3rd&4thT

[kafka]

Originally Posted by 3rd&4thT

When Studio 8-H was constructed for him in the late 1930's with the then-trendy dry, airless sound (thanks to a fashion dictated by an influential moron at Bell Labs/Western Electric), Toscanini liked it. We generally don't.

When 8-H was converted to TV use in 1950, Toscanini's recordings were moved to Carnegie Hall. These had to be made close-in to eliminate traffic noise on Seventh Avenue and 57th Street. They also had to be made with rolled-off bass because of rumble from the subway station directly beneath the hall.

So, a sound that tilts bright, with little hall ambiance.

RCA did experiment recording in stereo a few times in Toscanini's last active year, when he was 87. No longer at his interpretive peak, he is revealed as having had a beautiful marble-like orchestral tone, a fact Victor had successfully hid from the world for over 30 years.

In fact, in Toscanini's younger years, his orchestral sound was routinely praised. It's only now, after this avalanche of claustrophobic, hurriedly transferred mono's, that we think of his sound as unpleasant.

I've attached a live stereo Toscanini performance from his very last concert at Carnegie Hall in 1954. It's from an OP Italian CD, and I've done absolutely nothing to help it. Decide for yourself.

Yup, that's the sound I remember from my childhood, when I had exactly three records; Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Johnny Horton's Greatest Hits, and Toscanini's Beethoven's 5th. Very very dry, very tight, no bass. If it wasn't actually a smaller orchestra than today's, it sure felt like it. Nothing like the lush orchestras we heard after Mehta. Charming in it's own way, but very dated sounding. People can say they admire Toscanini, but, like Fritz Kreisler, nobody has tried to sound like him in more than 50 years.

I remember the first time I heard another version of the 5th. It just seemed so slow compared to Toscanini's. His tempo on that piece was absolutely breakneck. But there was a power and an energy to it that the big, lush orchestras that came later never had. I think you could hear the personal frustration in the piece much more.

[boojum]

Originally Posted by 3rd&4thT

<snip>

There's nobody alive who can do that. Momentary tyranny that gives us timeless joy.

3rd&4thT

Kind of like Mussolini made the trains run on time?! LOL

I am not a musician but do appreciate somewhat the immense amount of work it takes to make a performance work the way these old conductors did. I am not sure it is the only way to succeed, though. Nevertheless, thanks for sharing such a lyrical Wagner. I do love the overtures to acts I and III in Lohengrin. And they are so un-Wagnerian. That's just my blind spot.

[3rd&4thT]

Originally Posted by boojum

Kind of like Mussolini made the trains run on time?! LOL

No, Toscanini never had anybody killed.

Actually, Toscanini was a vocal anti-fascist, and after he refused to play the fascist anthem at a concert, at age 70 was beaten by thugs sent by Longanesi, a publisher who was buddies with Mussolini.

This is what drove him out of Italy, and why NBC set up the orchestra for him.

Arturo Toscanini - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But I don't think that conductors get into the business because they want to harass players. They do it for the music. You don't hire them because they're nice guys, and interpersonal relationships are not the only measure of their worth.

Originally Posted by kafka

Very very dry, very tight, no bass. If it wasn't actually a smaller orchestra than today's, it sure felt like it. Nothing like the lush orchestras we heard after Mehta. Charming in it's own way, but very dated sounding. People can say they admire Toscanini, but, like Fritz Kreisler, nobody has tried to sound like him in more than 50 years.

Actually, his orchestral sound is not lean, it's the damn recordings. Listen to the Lohengrin example in an earlier post. The lush strings we expect today come from Stokowski and Karajan. Mehta was and is much sloppier than either of these gents.

Conductors who were majorly influenced by Toscanini included Szell, Reiner, Solti, Karajan, Leinsdorf, Muti and Maazel (when young). Other admirers included Monteux, who assembled the NBC orchestra for Toscanini, Richard Strauss, who said Toscanini's Beethoven was better than anyone else's, and the Wagner family, who were crushed when he left Bayreuth because of his hatred for Hitler.

Coming from a generation when conductors played fast and loose with musical texts, Toscanini was uniquely concerned for his time with fidelity to the score, and is the spiritual ancestor of the HIP movement today.

Cheers,
3rd&4thT

[Bob Olhsson]

The Steinway pianos they had at Radio City were extraordinary. There's a 1943 model B here in the original RCA Victor Nashville studio that was brought from there in 1957. Hearing it is a true "ahh Ha!" moment.

A great piano and a great "touch" make a lot bigger difference than gear in my experience.