Arturo Toscanini: the NBC Years.

by Mortimer H. Frank. Amadeus Press (133 S. W. 2nd Ave., Ste. 450, Portland, OR 97204-3527), 2002. 358 pp., $29.95.

Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years is the sort of book that can make for tedious reading. It is a largely documentary account of the conductor's seventeen-year association with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, from fall of 1937 through spring of 1954. Once beneath this surface, however, the reader quickly can be caught up in the narrative by Mortimer Frank and realize the potentially revelatory importance of a recorded archive that, along with independently cut discs and a number of video recordings, preserves an important part of the career of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated conductors.

Frank's organization serves his subject well. Chapter One covers the establishment of the NBC Symphony and the process by which Toscanini was persuaded to sign on as conductor. The second chapter presents a broadcast-by-broadcast listing of the music played and, for the most part, recorded, with introductory material and annotations within the programs.

Several interesting facts emerge from these listings. First, it is striking to see how many twentieth-century works Toscanini included in the programs, especially since he has acquired a reputation for disliking modern music. Granted, the composers he chose were not avant-garde, but works of Gershwin pop up occasionally alongside music by Barber, Creston, Loeffler, Copland and others.

Second, in early seasons with the NBC Orchestra, Toscanini rarely repeated any single work. When in later seasons one finds works that have been programmed before, the performance is likely to have taken on a different character, a fact borne out by the evidence of the recordings. The vast NBC archive cannot support claims of some critics that Toscanini repeated himself too much and performed particular works in the same ways.

Finally, we see Toscanini leading performances of complete operas, stretching them across pairs of broadcasts. One wonders how many listeners were introduced to La Boheme, Aida, Falstaff or La Traviata and to some of the leading singers of the time by means of NBC's broadcasts.

In Chapter Three, "The NBC Repertory," Frank breaks down the concert programs by composer, from Kurt Atterberg to Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. He categorizes each piece in terms of availability of recordings--"Unissued Repertory," "Unofficially Issued Repertory" and "Officially Issued Repertory"--and critiques performances from all categories. Thus, for example, there are five "officially issued" performances of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and eleven of his Symphony No. 3; of these, one Missa and four Eroica symphonies appear on the Toscanini Collection of eighty-two CDs issued by RCA in 1992. The importance of this information is clear: If recordings, whether official or not, are available for research, we no longer can accept judgments of adversarial critics based on just a few performances.

Though Frank tends to be biased in Toscanini's favor, he is not uncritical of either the conductor or the orchestra. Only in his fourth chapter, "Reconstructing Toscanini," is he somewhat defensive. He closes the book with a number of appendixes that tabulate such items as programs with the NBC Symphony that were not broadcast, the orchestra's personnel over the decades of its existence or the programs led by guest conductors. There is also an extended discography. Reviewed by Karin Pendle, Cincinnati, Ohio.