Charles Munch: The Paris Years. Berlioz, Debussy, Aubert, Ravel, Honegger, Jolivet Pierre Bernac, baritone (A Classical Record)
Memories of the great Alsatian have been kept alive through reissues of RCA recordings made during his years as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1949-1962). But for almost 15 years before residency in the United States, the former violinist grew into a world-class conductor, first at the head of the Paris Philharmonic, then the Orchestra of the Paris Conservatory.
Few of his 78 rpm recordings reappeared on LP, and this enterprising two-disc set, which inaugurates a series long overdue, provides the first (beautifully realized) transfers of performances from the early and middle 1940s, well before he gave rein to interpretative hysteria.
Munch’s first recordings of the “Symphonie Fantastique,” “La Mer” and “La Valse” are viscerally exciting but more responsible to the scores than some of his later accounts, giving the lie to a common assessment that he was incapable of occupying any ground between disengagement and Dionysian frenzy.
Munch’s championship of modern music is honored by the premiere recordings of Arthur Honegger’s incisive Second Symphony and Andre Jolivet’s “Three Laments of the Defeated Soldier,” a wonderfully austere song cycle not otherwise represented in the domestic catalog.
The works by Louis Aubert (one a balletic pastiche of Chopin) are played with tremendous panache, and Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess” has a cool fleet elegance unusual for Munch, the most ruffled and highly strung of all the century’s giants in French music.
