(2 of 2)
The rest of his performances had to be altered, either by making electronic changes in the sound or by splicing several tapes together. Walter Toscanini collected up to a dozen tapes of each Toscanini-conducted piece, some of them taken at rehearsal, some at the performance, some over the radio by fans. The Maestro listened to every taped version, gave qualified approval to the most acceptable, and indicated what passages from other versions he wanted substituted. In some cases he demanded only one or two inserts. But before he would approve a performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto in F, engineers had to make more than 100 splices in less than eight minutes of music. The recordings are therefore not so much historically accurate Toscanini performances as they are showpieces which indicate what kind of performance the Maestro would have liked to achieve if both he and the orchestra were infallible.
"Maybe." Victor will slowly add the "approved" recordings to its already bulging list of Toscanini disks. (In 17 years of recording for Victor, Toscanini sold better than any other classical artist in history—22 million record units, $40 million in retail sales.) The tapes his father definitely rejected, says Walter Toscanini, will never be released, although they will be preserved at Riverdale as historical documents. But of the 350 hours of Toscanini tapes to work from, roughly half are in a "maybe" category: papa liked them except for minor flaws. Record buyers may eventually hear some portions of them. "Sometimes," says Walter, "my father's standards may have been too high."