Stanislaw Skrowaczewski - The Complete Oehm Classics Recordings - Box Set 28CDs

Label : Oehms
Format : Flac (image + cue)
Cover : Yes

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski is one of those conductors who has been quietly making excellent recordings characterized by high seriousness and integrity, it seems, almost forever. He was one of the stalwarts of the old Mercury Living Presence catalog in the 1950s and 60s, and brought the Minnesota Orchestra into the international spotlight with his excellent series of recordings for Vox, featuring music by Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Prokofiev. His stint at the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester found him (on recorded evidence) less than inspired, but he has enjoyed a wonderful Indian Summer through his work with the German Radio Philharmonic at Saarbrücken and Kaiserslautern, amply documented here.

Skrowaczewski’s music making is all of a piece. He brings a modern composer’s care for rhythmic crispness and clarity of texture to everything he does. In this respect, he probably most closely resembles Pierre Boulez, only to be frank he is technically a much better conductor most of the time. His Bruckner cycle remains the modern reference recording for those works, and I have discussed the performances at length already. In Beethoven, there are some outstanding individual performance, notably Symphonies Nos. 1 and 4. Elsewhere, some listeners might feel that Skrowaczewski’s emphasis on transparency robs the music of some of its dynamism, as at the first movement recapitulation in the Ninth. However, there is no questioning Skrowaczewski’s ability to realize his conception of each work, and the middle symphonies, Nos. 5-7, certainly don’t lack for excitement or passion. The cycle overall is heard to best effect here, in the context of Skrowaczewski’s work more generally.

His Schumann symphonies are just plain excellent all around; here is music that really responds to the approach, and the conductor does not hesitate to make subtle adjustments to the scoring for the sake of textural clarity, as in the first movement of the “Rhenish” Symphony (sound clip). Skrowezcewski recorded the Brahms symphonies in Hallé, not too interestingly to be honest, but now he has added an extra jolt of energy to his already impressive grip on Brahms’ symphonic process. The results can be thrilling, as they are in the finales of both the First and Fourth symphonies (sound clip), while the two middle symphonies have a cogency that can’t be denied. Perhaps the Third is a bit on the slow side, but this is still some very solid, but never stolid, Brahms.

Skroweczewski has always been an outstanding Bartók conductor, a composer who exercised a huge influence on is own original music. These versions of the Concerto for Orchestra and Divertimento are excellent. The Berlioz belongs squarely to the “analytical” school of interpretations–think Markevitch–but as we all know that does not preclude a powerful listening experience, and it doesn’t here. The two Chopin piano concertos offer few opportunities for the conductor to characterize the music, but he manages to do it very tellingly, and no one has recorded them more often than Skrowaczewski. Remember, he already made them with Arthur Rubinstein and Alexis Weissenberg, and in Ewa Kupiec he has a very strong soloist. These are performance of great distinction, as CT.com’s Jed Distler pointed out in his review of the single-disc release: warm, intimate, and infinitely nuanced.

Finally, Oehms offers a disc of Skrowaczewski’s own music. As I mentioned, Bartók is a big influence, especially his “night” music mode, and all three works accordingly offer meditations on the idea of darkness or night. Aside from Bartók, the music seems to dwell squarely in the Polish modern school of, say, Lutoslawski. Music at Night (1949) has four brief movements and the title says it all. The Fantasie for Flute and Orchestra, beautifully played by soloist Roswitha Staege, is also subtitled “Il Piffero della Notte,” and provides the soloist with the opportunity to display an exceptional expressive range. Finally, the Symphony of 2003 is a memorial tribute to the composer’s friend Ken Dayton. It features a “presto tenebroso” central scherzo, and much of it, as you might expect, is elegiac in tone. The idiom can be difficult, but the scoring is consistently ear-catching, and the expressive point always clear.

The packaging of these 28 discs has a few uneconomical points. Beethoven’s Second Symphony gets a disc all to itself, as do the four Brahms symphonies, but the budget price offers significant compensation. The sonics are uniformly excellent, although the recording levels vary from cycle to cycle, not too surprisingly. The booklet offers a moving and celebratory series of tributes to Skrowaczewski. The man has always been a class act, and if any artist deserves this sort of a birthday party, then he does. A great set.

Bruckner: Sinfonien Nr. 1–9 · Sinfonie F-Dur | Sinfonie d-Moll
Beethoven: Sinfonien Nr. 1–9
Schumann: Sinfonien Nr. 1–4
Brahms: Sinfonien Nos. 1–4
Bartók: Konzert für Orchester · Divertimento für Streichorchester
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique Op. 14
Scène d’amour: Liebesszene aus „Roméo et Juliette“
Chopin: Klavierkonzerte Nr. 1 & 2 (Ewa Kupiec, Klavier)
Skrowaczewski the Composer: Music at Night · Fantasie per Flauto ed Orchestra „Il Piffero della Notte“ (Roswitha Staege, Flöte) · Symphony (2003) in memory of Ken Dayton

Complete tracklist : Skrowaczewski - The Complete Oehm Classics Recordings