“Arturo Toscanini was at the center of an American experiment in art and commerce that now scarcely seems credible,” writes David Denby in the July 10/17 double issue of The New Yorker. “Late in the Depression, in 1937, RCA, which owned two NBC radio networks, created a virtuoso orchestra especially for him, and kept it going until 1954…. His NBC years were probably the high-water mark of classical music’s popularity in America.… In celebration of Toscanini’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, the music historian Harvey Sachs has brought out an enormous new biography, ‘Toscanini: Musician of Conscience’ (Liveright). It’s a … gripping chronicle of music and society, all of it devoted to the unending drive and conscientiousness that made Toscanini’s performances so riveting…. A new twenty-CD set, ‘Toscanini: The Essential Recordings,’ issued by Sony Classical [includes] a 1944 performance of the final act of ‘Rigoletto,’ recorded at a Red Cross fund-raiser held at Madison Square Garden with the combined forces of the NBC Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and a star cast surrounded by eighteen thousand people.… The strictly disciplined but buoyant and expressive performance culminates in a ‘storm’ scene that must have torn through the roof.”
Posted July 7, 2017
