Eugen Szenkar: A Portrait

If you've become tired of listening to bloodless and effete performances of the Symphonie Fantastique that are lamentably rife in the catalog and on the concert stage, you owe it to yourself to hear this recording. I won't beat around the bush--this is the greatest recording ever of Berlioz's gothic masterpiece. I've heard masterly recordings from Monteux, Munch, Martinon, Paray, Cluytens, Fried, Rozhdestvensky, Beecham, Gaubert, Klemperer, and Walter. Needless to say, I've also had to swallow more than my fair share of Berlioz as milquetoast including a wretchedly emasculated concert performance under Salonen a few years ago. Eugen Szenkar leaves them all in the dust. But who was Eugen Szenkar?

Eugen Szenkar (1891-1977) was a Hungarian conductor who made his career largely in Germany during the mid 20th century. He began his musical studies under his father who was a well regarded organist, choral director, and composer in Budapest. At age 16, the young Eugen met Gustav Mahler--a formative experience that not only inspired him to take up the baton, but also fomented a life long love of Mahler's music. Like most German conductors of the era, he began his career as an opera house repetiteur--the Budapest Volksoper in Szenkar's case.

In 1918, Szenkar met Artur Nikisch in Dresden when the latter was engaged to conduct a series of concerts for the city's Staatskapelle Orchestra. Nikisch took the young man under his wing and recommended him for the position of music director of the Frankfurt Opera. After winning this important position, Szenkar began receiving national attention and was even mooted as an outside possibility to follow Nikisch at the Berlin Philharmonic when the great conductor had died. In 1927, he assumed the leadership of the Cologne Opera where he won wide acclaim as a champion of contemporary music. In Cologne Szenkar would conduct the German premieres of Bartok's Wooden Prince and Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Kodaly's Hary Janos and Prokofieff's Love for Three Oranges. A devout Mahlerian, he performed a cycle of the symphonies in Cologne and programmed them often ever after, winning the International Gustav Mahler Society's medal in 1957 for all his work.

After the Nazis were swept into rule in 1933, Szenkar fled to the USSR where he continued to promote modern music. While in the Soviet Union, he premiered Khachaturian's Symphony No.1, Miaskovsky's Symphony No.16, and Prokofieff's Peter and the Wolf. Unfortunately he arrived in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Lady Macbeth debacle, so he prudently decided to leave for calmer shores.

The late 1930's and early 1940's saw Szenkar eking out an itinerant existence guest conducting far and wide including the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, but finally found a permanent position with the Rio de Janeiro Symphony Orchestra. It was while in Rio that Szenkar befriended Toscanini while the latter was touring South America with his NBC Symphony Orchestra. Toscanini thought highly enough of Szenkar to invite him to guest conduct the NBC for some of that orchestra's concerts during their tour. In 1947, Toscanini again invited Szenkar to conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra, this time in New York. Szenkar conducted a pair of programs that included works by Schumann, Berlioz, and Wagner. Recordings were made of these broadcass and have fortunately been preserved. In 1950, Szenkar returned to Germany where he became the music director of the Dusseldorf Opera. He remained there until his retirement in 1961 and would die in Dusseldorf in 1977.

This Tahra CD alone stands as hard evidence that Szenkar was one of the very greatest conductors of the 20th century. The program begins with a weighty rendition of one of Handel's Concerto Grossos from the opus 6 set. This is rich, big boned Handel that will be sure to send the period performance people shivering into convulsions. Szenkar sits in on the continuo part. But the real revelation is the Berlioz--a white hot reading of the Fantastique. Hamburg's Orchestra play as if they're lives were depending on it. The idee fixe is played with great tenderness and ardor, but always remains taut. In fact, Szenkar keeps the arc of the first movement, and indeed of the whole symphony, in very firm grasp. Berlioz can sometimes sound episodic and meandering under less skilled hands, but Szenkar is able to brilliantly marry passion and logic. The ball glimmers but swirls with an undercurrent of the sinister. The Scene in the Country can often seem interminable, but it sounds spellbinding here. The March to the Scaffold is positively brutal and the Dream of a Sabbath Night cackles with Mahlerian grotesquerie. The Hamburg brass and winds are outstanding; the timpanist (a former Berlin Philharmonic principal during the war years) covers himself in glory. The closing pages wail and blaze away unlike anything I've ever heard. The sound, though in mono, is very clean and well focused.

Szenkar's style can be described as having the denseness and weight of early to mid 1950's Klemperer, the virility of Fricsay, and the frenetic intensity of de Sabata and Mitropoulos. But these comparisons aren't quite precise; he has a very personal sense of style. Szenkar was a giant and it is to our detriment that he apparently had a disdain for recordings. He cut a few records in Germany before the war and there are some air checks available from after the war. And somewhere out there those NBC broadcasts are floating around. I hope some enterprising label drops the non-stop onslaught of Toscanini and Furtwangler reissues (are you listening Music & Arts?) and takes up the cause of this unjustly neglected musician. A man of Szenkar's genius definitely deserves better than what he has received so far. I hope those Hamburgers sitting in the audience for this concert realized just how lucky they were.