Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski - Stokowski: Chicago Debut Concerts, January 1958 (2010)

Leopold Stokowski had for several decades been one of the world's most well-known and respected conductors when, on 2nd January 1958, he stepped onto the podium at Chicago's Orchestra Hall to conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time as its guest conductor. Between 1958 and 1968 he was to appear with the orchestra in six seasons of concerts; this release brings out for the first time what has been preserved from his debut concerts at the beginning of 1958.

The recordings presented here are not, it would appear, actual live broadcasts from Chicago, but were taken from rebroadcasts shortly later from a New York radio station - despite the announcer's assertions that they are live in Orchestra Hall, these were probably voice-overs from the New York radio studio. The rebroadcasts omitted music by Wagner which had formed the bulk of the second part of the first concert, following the Toccata of the little-known Polish composer, Boleslaw Szabelski.

The first half of that opening concert (which was repeated on 3rd January) consisted of traditional fare - Stokowski's orchestrations of Bach's Chorale Preludes and the Brahms symphony. The second programme, again repeated over two concerts, was an all-Russian affair, beginning with the Shostakovich and Glière and continuing after the interval with the Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky suites.

As usual, the orchestra and audience got full value for money from Stokowski. In addition to his own orchestrations of the Bach, he was also responsible for the orchestration of Shostakovich's Prelude in E flat minor very shortly after its composition. The composer himself later orchestrated the piece for a 1944 film entitled Zoya, a name which has stuck to a degree to the prelude - however it is, of course, the conductor's orchestration we hear in this concert.

The selections from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet are somewhat skirted over by the announcer, as in fact they derive not from a single suite but from both the first and second suites. Meanwhile Stokowski has again gone his own way with his Swan Lake Suite, which does not correspond to the published suite. Indeed it took a certain amount of musical detective work to identify precisely which parts of Tchaikovsky's music had been used for some of the sections presented here.

Finally, it has been suggested that without Stokowski's efforts, Glière's mighty 3rd Symphony may well have been entirely forgotten. The full work runs to a sprawling 75 minutes or longer - by skilful editing, Stokowski reduced it to something more manageable and digestible and was thus able to programme it on several occasions and thus keep it alive.

Technically the sound quality of the recordings here is generally quite good to excellent, although there are some uneven areas. I have had to play with the running orders in order to fit all of the surviving material onto two discs, and have corrected an error by the announcer, who mistakenly introduced Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet as Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake - he himself had corrected this in the back-announcement to the piece.