Sunday Classics flashback: Catching up on our overtures (2)

Here's the original Capitol issue of the Leinsdorf "Opera Overtures" LP, nearly all of which has been reissued on a terrific Seraphim CD, with some almost equally good additional material.

by Ken

In last night's "overture flashback" post we heard wonderful performances of Verdi's Forza del destino Overture, Weber's Oberon Overture, and Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri Overture (incredibly, apparently a Sunday Classics debut) by Erich Leinsdorf and the Philharmonia Orchestra from a Capitol/EMI LP of opera overtures that, as I explained in my long-ago comfort-music post ("Just like there's comfort food, there's comfort music," November 2009), I dearly loved in its budget-price Capitol Paperback Classics reissue. I played that record over and over and over.

It's not that I'm such a Leinsdorf fan. I always had highly complex feelings about him, which we can talk about some other time. The point is that the six performances on that LP were simply wonderful, competitive with the best on records. I guess I could have made clearer last night, like maybe mentioning it, that the timing was owing mostly to my way-belated discovery that five of those six performances -- the three noted above plus Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and Beethoven's Leonore No. 3 -- in fact found their way onto CD, of which I was able to pick up a copy on Amazon.com for a song.

The budget-price Seraphim CD even adds four performances of generally comparable quality from the domestic Capitol catalog, with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony: Rossini's William Tell and Suppé's Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry conducted by Leonard Slatkin's conspicuously more talented father, Felix; and there's a biting performance of Smetana's scampering Bartered Bride Overture conducted by another top-notch musician, this one better-known as one of the really fine 20th-century film composers, Miklós Rózsa.

I'm not familiar with either the Slatkin or the Rózsa LPs from which these performances were taken, which would appear to be my loss. I'll have more to say about the Slatkin performances in the click-through. For now let me say that Rózsa's Bartered Bride is good enough to make me wish it segued into the often-concertized three dances from the opera, which I like better than the Bartered Bride Overture. (We heard them, conducted by Leonard Bernstein and others, in a November 2009 all-Smetana post.)

SMETANA: The Bartered Bride: Overture

Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, Miklós Rózsa, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded c1960


FOR MORE ABOUT (AND OF) THE SLATKIN
AND LEINSDORF OVERTURES, CLICK HERE

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