Preview: Georg Solti the Grammy Grifter--Just What Are His Best Recordings?
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2024
- Georg Solti holds the record for Grammy wins, at 31. Did he deserve them? Or more to the point, do they mean anything? In this preview to the ClassicsToday Insider feature on his 10 best recordings, we run down the list of his award-winners--the good, the bad and the ugly. Have a look, and then visit ClassicsToday.com (or sign up for your Insider subscription here: www.classicsto...) to find out which recordings really are the best.
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I really like Solti. I see him as an excellent “dramatist” who knew when to make something pop and when to ease off. I hear so much criticism that he was brutal or unrefined but that’s not what I hear when I put in his recordings - quite the opposite.
I was lucky enough to hear Solti live several times in the eighties.
I even got to hear him rehearse Mahler 5, and also met him after he had rehearsed a student orchestra at the Royal Academy of Music.
Coming face to face with him was pretty daunting, as for the poor students, they were like rabbits caught in the proverbial headlights.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think he was best appreciated live, as repeated listening to some of his recordings exposes his shortcomings, the worst of which was, IMO, a certain brutality and lack of sensitivity.
Just for fun: Some Solti Recorgings I Wouldn't Want To Be Without
Beethoven: Piano Concertos 2 & 5 (Ashkenazy)
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis (London Philharmonic. BBC Label)
Brahms: Symphony 3 (Chicago)
Mahler: Symphony 9 (London Symphony)
Mozart: Piano Quartets (Melos Quartet; Sir Georg Solti, piano)
Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro (Te Kanawa, Allen, Ramey, Popp, et al)
Schubert: Symphony 9 (Vienna Philharmonic)
Strauss: Salome (Nilsson, Vienna Philharmonic)
Verdi: Aida (Price, Vickers)
and, obviously
Wagner: The Ring"
The Meistersinger recording is fantastic, it was in conjunction with concert performances or taken live, and it surpasses his earlier performance.
Lohengrin and Marriage of Figaro are in contention for the best recordings of those operas. Same with Frau ohne schatten.
Did he deserve all the wins for the other stuff? Absolutely not. But the operas they got right. And I find that Bruckner 6 incredibly exciting.
Dave: Solti's 1977 Verdi Requiem with the Chicago Symphony was recorded for RCA (the soprano was Leontyne Price). Decca licensed it from Sony to include it in their big Chicago Symphony box. His earlier recording with the Vienna Philharmonic was for Decca (Joan Sutherland was the soprano).
Yes, I know. Janet Baker was on that one too.
i was there and for some reason i was not at all moved by what is a fine piece of music. it was not that the orchestra played badly, or the singing was not good. i am still not sure. it took another hearing of that requim, conducted by robert shaw at the u of missouri columbia with the univ band and chorus to make me appreciate that work. shaw came up from atlanta once a year and the univ. orchestra always played its best under his baton.
Phil Greenfield
There is a concert performance (1982) of the Missa Solemnis that Solti turned in with the London Phil at Royal Albert Hall that's available on the BBC label. Here, Solti's "pin your ears back" approach really works pretty well with the score. The sloists are all excellent--Donath, Soffel, Jerusalem, and Sotin-- and it actually sounds pretty good. The bridge between the Sanctus and Benedictus isn't the most spiritual version you could think of; in fact, the Benedictus itself (with the the exquisite violin obbligato) is punchier than ideal. But for an exciting and moving (in both senses) account of the Mass, you might consider it. If nothing else, it's much better than what came out of Chicago.
I never cared about the Grammies (or, in fact, any award), and I thought nobody ever cared. It seems I was wrong. A video on the history of the Cannes Classical Awards would be lots of fun, I think!
It's a PR tool. People care depending on what they can make of it. Artistically speaking, it's meaningless, but anything that helps to distinguish one recording from another, especially in classical music where everyone does the same stuff over and over, is helpful in generating sales. Or it was...
David, would be interesting for you to do this again, but compare his entry with who else was nominated and then explain why it should not have gone to Solti. That would make for a great video.
Happy new year Dave! Your videos make our planet 🌎 a better place to live
Same to you! Thank you.
I agree about Solti’s Mass in B minor being good and worthy. The heavy choral vibrato and staccato may take some getting used to, but it has become one of my all-time favorite recordings. It’s too bad it seems to be so overlooked.
❤️ Best wishes David Hurwitz ❤️
Your story about Solti listening to the Sawallisch recording of "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" while he was making his own recording of that work reminded me of another story. I heard that while Karajan was recording the Beethoven 9th in 1962, he listened to one of Toscanini's recordings of that work. I wish that ALL classical artists, before deciding to record a certain work, would listen to the best existing recordings of that work, and promise themselves if they can't do better than that they should not record it. It would certainly cut down on the number of redundant or bad classical recordings out there.
One of the best concerts I ever saw was Damnation of Faust at the Proms in the early 90s with Solti/CSO. And I prefer his recording of the work to all others - though credit to Colin Davis whose "great birds of the night" chirp more menacingly. I also was always a fan of his earlier Beethoven 9, though having Talvela as the bass didn't hurt.
Music reviews are far more significant than awards, which seem more of a popularity contest...and I think the entertainment industry is the most self-congratulatory of all.
Mr Hurwitz, what do you think about Solti's Symphonie Fantastique (Grammy-winning one)?
I was just wondering whether or not you intentionally did not share your thoughts about it in the video.
I think it's good but not great.
Don't know how the initial lists were created, but a set of NARAS members were brought to LA separately and given a player and discs to weed down the lists to what was voted on.
Very, very interesting David, on the block voting aspects to the prizes. Did anyone, genuinely, ever win on their merits alone over the time period you cover (the mid 60s to to the end of the 1990s)?
I don't see what "merit" has to do with it--or even how that could be measured.
@@DavesClassicalGuide measured in methods similar to your own KOLA awards?
@@folanpaul Those are completely objective and accurate.
I'm pretty sure I'm the only guy at my college back in the early '80s who had friends who had such esoteric arguments as, "who is better, Giulini or Solti?" One of my buds was a Giulini-ite and the other was from Chicago and, of course, was a Solti-ite. And, naturally, the Chicago friend would pull the the "Solti won more Grammys" card and think that was some kind of slam dunk. lol. Anyway, it was all silly parlor-game argumentation from the get-go.
Very interesting excursion into the history of classical Grammy Awards. As for Solti, I never cared much for his conducting back when he was winning all those awards. But latterly I've come to appreciate his artistry. Why? Quite simply, he was an exciting conductor of the standard repertoire and, occasionally, beyond that. I've been revisiting his London period via the recent "London Years" box, and finding myself thrilled by the brilliant orchestral playing and Toscanini-like intensity. Granted, not everything he recorded in Chicago was of that caliber, but there were more superb outings than critics often give him credit for. I could list them, but I will pick only one as my case in point: HIs tremendous Bruckner 9, weighty, brooding and intense. I believe i have found at least one Solti Chicago remake that is finer than an earlier, London effort. That's his Chicago Mahler 3. No, it's not a work for which he had a deep affinity, but the later version is much better played and shows considerable improvement over his shallow, square and un-atmospheric earlier recording.
Yes, his 3rd went from appalling to merely dreadful (and better played).
Agreed. I don’t know why Solti gets hammered so much. I don’t find him intense or brutal at all. I put his stuff on and most of the time I love it
@@CortJohnson Thanks for the feedback. I have admired Solti ever since I attended a BSO concert many years ago at which he conducted a thrilling account of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. I do think music critics sometimes indulge in stereotyping conductors and other musicians, and then they hear everything through the filter of their somewhat biased expectations.
Dave, just to let you know, Solti always pronounced his first name like George, even though the E was left off at the end.
Who cares?
@@DavesClassicalGuide Just saying! :P
@@MarauderOSU Interesting. I was at the unveiling of the Solti memorial at the Liszt Academy in Budapest with Lady Solti present and it was "Georg" with a hard "G" all the way.
Fabulous dress shirt at "the ninth!"
I so very rarely play a Solti recording. None of them are indispensable in my view, including the Ring. The fabulous cast in the latter can be heard elsewhere, as can the VPO in this music. The only record I listen to occasionally is an early curiosity: a non interventionist Tchaikovsky symphony 2 with the Paris Conservatory Orchestra on Decca, in which the latter shines.
Out of curiosity, where else can you find Windgassen and Nilsson together?
@@timcunningham722 Hi Tim. Bohm 1965 Bayreuth
@@grantparsons6205 Hi Grant, thanks.
Why didn't Midwest block voters vote for Cleveland Orchestra, for example, or some other non-Chicago Midwest orchestra?
Sometimes they did. Maazel/Cleveland got plenty of nominations and won for Porgy and Bess, but the rest is NARAS politics and for that you'll have to look elsewhere.
It's good to learn how corrupt the old NARAS process was but I have a question about your methodology. To determine whether Solti deserved those Grammys, you are comparing his recordings with the benchmark recordings of those works. But since the Grammys are an annual award, wouldn't a more accurate comparison be between Solti's winners and the other classical recordings released in the same year?
I don't think so. There are always better recordings of other works; the question is how good is his recording of the work in question. If the category is orchestral, how can you compare a recording of Solti doing, say, Shostakovich 8 to Hogwood doing early Mozart symphonies? Besides, I was just making a point, not offering any pretense of a "scientific" analysis.
I agree that the real question is how good Solti's recordings are compared to the benchmarks recordings of those same works, but the Grammys weren't designed to measure a record against its benchmarks, but against the other classical records produced that year. And yes, I know the argument that it's very difficult, if not impossible to make such comparisons. But I'm not convinced it's entirely valid: I think there is at least one way of making a valid comparison between different recordings. If we know the benchmarks for, say, Shostakovich 8 and the early Mozart symphonies, a musical ear could assess whether Solti or Hogwood has achieved a result closer to the appropriate benchmarks, no? )
@@timcunningham722 No.
I had no idea that the classical Grammy award process was such a sham. Is the non-classical Grammy award process also a sham?
I never paid it any attention. Probably.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra should be given the credit not Solti.Solti was just the lucky guy who happened to conduct this Incredible Orchestra
Presumably the London Symphony and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras needed a bit more help ;)
Speaking of Missa Solemnises, I think Bernstein's NYPhil on Sony surprisingly wonderful, since I don't think of him as an above-average Beethoven conductor.
Oh, he was far above average.
@@DavesClassicalGuide By your criterion of "will anybody talk about these recordings after they were made," the only Bernstein Beethoven recording I can think of that meets it is that Missa Solemnis. I'm not saying he's bad in Beethoven, but a lot of others crowd him out. Compare that to his Copland, Stravinsky, or Nielsen (excepting the 4th).
@@steveschwartz8944 Fidelio too, and at least the Eroica and 7th Symphonies.
I'd also add the orchestrations of the op. 131 and op. 135 string quartets with Vienna.
I think Symphonies 1,2,3,4 and 8 in the New York set are very good. The others, not so much.
Does anyone really care? Hit that gong behind you and we all win.
Solti, a very good managers, a solid musical knowledge, but a poor artist, with poor inspiration. Just ask musicians from the vienna phiharmonic and they will tell you how much his contract with decca obliged them to play under his baton.
When folk-prog-rock band, Jethro Tull, won the 1989 Grammy for "Best Heavy Metal Performance" (beating out Metallica's SAVAGE "In Justice for All," no less!), I knew that the Grammy Awards were a HUGE crock of sour owl guano!
Solti just lost his title to Beyonce last night!
Then there was a whole slew of MTT wins. The classical award is a joke but, the pop awards are vastly worse! No point in ever watching again. Also true of the Academy Awards. I miss Stereo Reviews early best of which I thought was great! All the wins are there online. Have a nice Xmas day!
Happy Hanakka!