Lorin Maazel in Cleveland

THE CENTERPIECE of this 15-CD set is an appealing Beethoven symphonies cycle spread across seven CDs to replicate the initial LP box-set release. (That actually was an eight-record set, but a judicious shift of some overtures reduced the count.) Mired as I was in vinyl during my formative years, I don’t mind this approach. I don’t need all 80 CD minutes filled, and I’m still spared the side-flip in the middle of a symphony.

Lorin Maazel led the Cleveland Orchestra in those Beethoven sessions beginning in October 1977, with the recording of Symphonies 3 and 5 and a trio of overtures; the following February they taped 6 and 7 and, on a single-day marathon, 1, 2, 4, and 8. (Donald Rosenberg’s biography of the orchestra disagrees and spreads out the sessions, but I prefer to believe the superhuman marathon approach.)

The ninth, saved for last, was recorded on October 13, 1978, and included the voices of Lucia Popp, Elena Obraztsova, Jon Vickers, and Martti Talvela, with Robert Page leading the Cleveland Orchestra chorus. Excellent vocal work in a thirlling finale. In an audacious move, the symphonies came out the following March as that eight-LP set. Although maybe it wasn’t so audacious: Had the symphonies hit the shops as individual items, buyers probably would play favorites, leaving poor 1 & 2 and 4 & 8 to languish.

I term them “poor” only in the being-neglected sense. The performances here are anything but. Maazel had an incredible mountain to scale, what with podium predecessor George Szell’s remarkable 1964 set still in people’s ears, a set reissued in 1970. But Maazel’s are magnificent performances, boasting thoughtful, typically subtle interpretive nuances, and an orchestral sheen equaled only by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Of course, by 1979 the market teemed with Beethoven sets from pretty much all the major conductors then at work, so it must have been a tough sell..

At the same time, and unlike the Szell approach, the orchestra’s sound reflects the individuality of the players (not unlike, on a much smaller scale, the style of the Guarneri Quartet, reviewed here). It’s a style that larded some of the critics’ pens with bile, but that’s a hobby of classical-music critics (as noted below). Listen to Riccado Chailly’s comparatively recent set and you’ll hear a similar approach, but this set was critically praised from the start. And Maazel’s interpretive idiosyncracies pale when compared with, say, Simon Rattle’s, but, again, the critics had learned to be more tolerant when that set came out.  

Maazel’s ten-year tenure helming the Cleveland Orchestra began in 1972 after a long and acrimonious search and ended as the city’s fortunes were plummeting. He had the thankless job of succeeding the autocratic but extremely popular Szell – possibly bringing to mind the fate of young John Barbirolli, who was appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1936, succeeding the nonpareil Arturo Toscanini. The New York critics, a savage bunch, more or less hounded Barbirolli out of the job. Cleveland’s critics weren’t much nicer, an occupational hazard of a now near-dead profession that gives self-appointed, typically unsocialized know-it-alls a forum to spout opinions about a rarefied subject.

Szell died in 1970 after a lengthy illness – lengthy enough that the Cleveland Orchestra’s management already had in place a roster of guest conductors to carry the 1970-71 season. Although his recordings with the orchestra have since become legendary, Columbia Records, with which he had recorded since 1947, dropped the association in 1970, citing sluggish sales. Angel Records, with which the orchestra had been recording for a couple of years, also pulled the plug. But as soon as Maazel’s appointment was announced, Decca Records got interested and kicked off a moderately fruitful association with a 1973 recording of the complete “Romeo and Juliet” by Prokofiev, which won high praise upon its release.

Columbia took its time getting re-interested, commencing the recordings in this box set at the beginning of 1977 with Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben,” played with the authority of one who championed the works of that composer. Strauss is also represented here by a disc of three shorter works: “Don Juan,” “Till Eulenspiegel,” and “Death and Transfiguration,” buoyed by the excellence of the Cleveland brass section.

There’s an anomaly at the start of the set: three short works recorded in 1971 and 72 at the Blossom Music Festival, the orchestra’s summer home, when Maazel theoretically was in his tryout phase (but he’d already secretly been appointed) and Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, recorded at the 1973 opening of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. It’s effective showcase repertory, effectively played. And comparing the Brahms Symphony to his later recording of it on the Decca label offers not a lot of interpretive difference. Timings are almost identical, except that the Decca recording honors the first-movement repeat. And the dynamics and phrasings are just the tiniest but looser. It seems that once Maazel arrived at an interpretation, he stayed with it.

Not surprising for a conductor who began his career at the age of eight and was 42 when he was signed to Cleveland. He conducted from memory, and boasted of having over a thousand scores in his repertory by that point. As his Columbia recordings commenced, he quickly got to one of his favorite works: the “Symphonie fantastique” by Berlioz. This is one that Szell never recorded – you have to go back to a 1941 Rodzinski version to hear the Clevelanders’ first version. That one had considerable drive; Maazel’s 1977 release is more nuanced but none the less exciting. And he and the orchestra would record it yet again, for Telarc, in 1982.

There’s no Mozart or Schubert in this collection, composers very much associated with Szell and possibly viewed as inviting comparisons that would be too troublesome. This is true of the Decca set as well, although that set (now out of print) boasts the groundbreaking “Porgy and Bess” that Maazel recorded in 1975. But the Columbia set is also richly anchored by those perennial favorites: Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies. Unlike myself, audiences seem never to tire of them – but I have no complaints about these performances, which not only are thoughtfully interpreted, plumbing those depths of despair Tchaikovsky so favored, but the recorded sound is also quite good, with an effective stereo spread and rich instrumental detail.

Maazel was also a virtuoso violinist, which may explain the care he took with his string players. Listen to the swoops of the violins in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony: there’s excitement in the energy, the risk the players are taking – but they’re taking it in unison, which is thrilling. I also hear a vocal approach in Maazel’s phrasing, which is the lesson you learn as an instrumentalist playing Mozart: What’s the song you’re singing here?

Speaking of songs, there’s also an outlier in this box. Maazel the violinist played some concerts with famous French singer-songwriter Serge Lama (best known for “Je suis malade”), and decided to bring his music to a wider public by orchestrating instrumental versions of a dozen of Lama’s songs. They’re a delight, invoking a smoky café feel and informing it with passion and humor.

You have any number of reasons to buy this box. As a Maazel fan, you can place it among the hundreds of other recordings he’s made. It’s a showcase for one of our “big five” orchestras. It has a solid basic-repertory place with its complete Beethoven symphonies alongside the only Tchaikovsky symphonies people care about. Maazel proved that Szell was not irreplaceable, and he also paved the way for a succession of similarly distinguished conductors at that helm. But Maazel’s was a magical decade in Cleveland.