Except a short period of time from 1920 to the early 1930’s, any regular practice of inviting leading foreign conductors to perform with the Soviet orchestra was out of the question in an isolated cultural space of the USSR, which made those rare collaborations with prominent western maestros to the musicians and listeners even more revealing.
After the end of WWII the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra (the first orchestra of the country by status) performed with a number of guest conductors such as George Enescu, Hermann Abendroth, Igor Markevitch and Igor Stravinsky. However, the performances of Charles Munch, who Muscovites remembered well by his previous concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1956, left a special trace in the hearts of the audience and orchestra members. Probably it was because of the fact that Munch’s coming coincided with a new period in the orchestra’s history – Evgeny Svetlanov had just become chief conductor of the orchestra (according to the musicians, Svetlanov did the French maestro a priceless favour by conducting an extra rehearsal of Debussy’s La mer, which was then unknown to the Soviet orchestra; this piece was a climax of Munch’s Moscow performances).
Charles Munch was born in 1891 in Strasbourg to a German family which was famous for its musical talents (his father was an organ professor at the conservatory, one of the older brothers was a composer, and the other was a conductor). Young Charles proved to be a gifted violinist and studied with Carl Flesch in Berlin and Lucien Capet in Paris. After the end of WWI, he was a concertmaster for the Strasbourg Symphony Orchestra. Munch was fortunate enough to work under some of the best German conductors of the first half of the 20th century – Hermann Abendroth in Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne, and Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. His own conducting debut successfully took place in 1932, in Paris.
Munch finally moved to the French capital a year later where his musical career saw a rapid development. He performed with some of the best orchestras of Paris. In 1935, he was invited to direct the Société Philharmonique de Paris, and from 1937 to 1946, he conducted the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Munch actively helped the French Resistance during the German occupation for what he received the Légion d'honneur in 1945.
In 1949, Charles Munch accepted the invitation from the Boston Symphony Orchestra where he took the post of music director after the resignation of Serge Koussevitzky. The years of work in the United States were the climax of his conducting career; he actively recorded, toured across the USA and Europe (in 1956, the BSO was the first American orchestra to visit the USSR). In 1963, the conductor returned to France where he revived the Orchestra de Paris four years later. Munch planned his third visit to Moscow with the orchestra, however his American tour of 1968 became the last one – he died of a heart attack in Richmond, Virginia.
Spontaneity of interpretations and inspired artistry equally felt on his concert and numerous studio recordings, and also combined with the conductor’s strong will were the main qualities of Munch’s conducting style which allowed him to become an heir to the German romantic tradition coming from Hans von Bülow, Gustav Mahler and their followers. At the same time, his feeling of the orchestral palette and ability to render the finest details of the orchestral score made Munch an outstanding interpreter of French music from Rameau and Berlioz to Honegger. Munch performed music by French composers in Moscow as well (apart from the compositions featured on the album, his tour programme also included Hector Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust and Symphonie Fantastique).
Debussy’s ‘postimpressionistic’ score performed in the whole variety of timbre and dynamic play of colours was effectively set off with elegant rococo of Rameau’s music interpreted so that the sense of style was not at all a barrier on the way of ingenuous lyrical expressiveness; the musical atmosphere of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes of the early 20th century was evident in the constrained neoclassical emotionality of Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane (the composer compiled the second suite from the ballet for Charles Munch, who conducted it for the first time in 1933, in Paris). Honegger’s symphony made an unconditionally bright impression as well – its tragic war spirit proved to be so close and understandable to the Soviet listeners.
Conductor Evgeny Ratser wrote in Soviet Music magazine, “What produced the greatest impression of Munch’s concerts was perhaps the personality of the artist himself. His strength is in his devoted service to art: when Munch conducts, he surrenders himself to music completely. He carries the orchestra and the audience with him primarily because he is carried away. Carried away in a sincere, joyful way… True heated emotionality, a deep intellect, great worldly wisdom and youthful ardour so peculiar to Munch’s artistic nature appear before us in each piece in more and more new shades and combinations.”
Boris Mukosey
