Download and her pupil Aïda Stucki Stefi Geyer, inspiration to Bartók

SUMMER 2010
THE WORLD’S LEADING REVIEW OF
VINTAGE CLASSICAL RECORDINGS
Stefi Geyer,
inspiration to Bartók
... and her pupil
Aïda Stucki
Jean Martinon – a centenary tribute
Mahler in Vienna
Paul Myers interview
Neglected singers on record
Wagner‘s Parsifal
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CRC Summer 2010
editorial
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© Classic Record Collector 2010
ISSN: 1472-5797
Number 61
Cover
Stefi Geyer (right),
Aïda Stucki (left)
www.classicrecordcollector.com
I
n 1995, when International Classical Record Collector was launched,
there was a flourishing collector trade in “audiophile” and rare LPs,
and the market for classical CDs of all kinds was also very healthy. Much
has changed since then. Owing to a downturn in economic conditions,
particularly in the Far East, markets for all kinds of classical records
have been reduced to a shadow of what they were.
News continues of internal convolutions in the major record
companies, as they struggle against the turn of events, and according
to a BBC Radio Four programme broadcast in June, EMI’s current
owners, Terra Firma, are finding that their 2007 takeover has brought
more problems than financial benefit.
A recent article in London’s Daily Telegraph by Rupert Christiansen
revealed that the market share for classical recordings has now dropped
to 3.2 per cent; and this sector has itself seen a decline of 17.6 per cent
in the last 12 months. In a thoughtful response, Andrew Rose has
considered the issues in his Pristine Audio newsletter, and reaches the
same conclusion as that of Christiansen: “It has to be said loud and
clear: the CD is about to go the same way as the word processor and
fax machine”.
What is also clear is that in due course challenges for this magazine
will become more apparent: we can either carry on as we are and
eventually face a decline in our fortunes, or we can take action now to
try and stave off future problems.
I gather from my colleague Tully Potter that the change in ICRC’s
title to Classic Record Collector in the year 2000 was dictated by design
issues. I have never been happy with the word “Classic”, since it is
inexplicit: you can have, so they tell me, classic rock or classic pop. I also
feel that the term “Collector” is becoming out of date and restrictive:
the collecting fraternity is becoming elderly and fewer in numbers.
I have therefore decided that as from the next issue this magazine
will become “Classical Recordings Quarterly”. To those for whom such
a change might indicate the kind of “re-launch” or “make-over” (always
for the worse) repeatedly attempted by another record magazine, I
offer reassurance. We might include reviews of some new recordings
as time goes on, of a kind that we think will appeal to established
readers. Otherwise I plan no changes to the established format of the
magazine.
The change in title will be accompanied by more vigorous publicity
exercises; and from the next issue the new CRQ will be available to
subscribers on-line. This will be of particular benefit to overseas readers,
who will no longer be penalised for having to pay a higher subscription
to cover extra postage costs.
We also have plans to make available limited editions of what we
feel to be interesting and hard to find older recordings; and we also
plan a special one-off publication in the autumn. More news of these
developments will be revealed in our next issue.
Alan Sanders
1
CRC Summer 2010
contents
12
24
1
Editorial
4
Rarissima
A Schubert survival
5
Letters
Undervalued recordings; Paderewski on
record; Michel Schwalbé
10 Collector News
EMI artist interviews; News from
Beulah; A Parlophone puzzle; Stucki on
Doremi
28
24 Wyn Morris – Mahler disciple and conductor of rare distinction
Lyndon Jenkins pays tribute to “the
Celtic Furtwängler”
28 They came, they sang, they went
John T. Hughes looks at cases of singers
who made fleeting appearances in the
recording studios
34 Interview with Paul Myers
David Patmore has been in conversation
with the distinguished record producer
10 Obituaries
Annaliese Rothenberger; Giuletta
Simionato; Giuseppe Taddei
40 Jean Martinon (1910-76)
Jon Tolansky pays a centenary tribute to
the eminent French conductor
12 What Bartók’s youthful muse did next
Tully Potter considers the life and
recordings of Stefi Geyer and her pupil
Aïda Stucki
46 The Download Revolution
Nick Morgan presents the first of three
articles on recent developments
20 Mahler in Vienna
Stanley Henig finds links between
Viennese performances of the 1920s and
early recordings
2
50 Audio and the Record Collector
David Patmore re-examines cases of
“accidental stereo”
53 Surface noise
More recording disasters are recalled by
Leslie Gerber
CRC Summer 2010
contents
34
40
54 Continental Report
Norbert Hornig considers new releases
devoted to Friedrich Gulda, the
Amadeus Quartet and Dietrich FischerDieskau
55 Far-Eastern viewpoint
Shuichiro Kawai discusses Tower
Records’s own specialised catalogue
56 Reviews
56 Book reviews
58 DVD reviews
60 78rpm review
61 LP reviews
63 CD reviews – an early Bruckner symphony cycle; Horowitz at Carnegie Hall; Lisitsian in concert; Korngold’s Violanta
92 CDs - Collections
94 Compact Disc Round-Up
97 Downloads
99 Voice Box
John T. Hughes makes his selection
104How live is ‘live’?
Christopher Breunig
50
KEY TO SYMBOLS
C
Compact Disc
L
Long Playing Record
m
78rpm Record
Ⓓ
Download
V
VHS
l
DVD
F
Full Price £11 & over
M
Medium Price £7-£10.99
B
Budget Price £6.99 & under
Classic Record Collector is published in the
spring, summer, autumn and winter
While every effort has been made to ensure
the accuracy of statements in this magazine,
we cannot accept responsibility for any
errors or omissions, or for matters arising
from clerical or printers’ errors, or for an
advertiser not completing his contract.
www.classicrecordcollector.com
3
CRC Summer 2010
rarissima
Max Pauer
L
ast month an American review caught my
eye. It was of a two-CD set of mostly recent
performances by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Quartet
(New Classical Adventure C 60193). But the set
also includes most of their 1928 recording of
Schubert’s Trout Quintet. What drew my eye
was the name of the pianist: Max Pauer (18661945). The review made no special mention of
him. Nor, astonishingly, did the extensive notes
accompanying the discs when they arrived. Yet
Max Pauer enjoyed perhaps the closest personal
links back to Schubert himself of any musician on
records.
The connection is a double one, coming
through Max’s father Ernst Pauer (1826-1905)
and the Lachner brothers: Franz (1803-90),
Ignaz (1807-95), and Vincenz (1811-93). Franz
Lachner, from his arrival in Vienna in 1822, had
been one of Schubert’s most intimate friends
(see Otto Erich Deutsch, compiler, Schubert:
Memories by his Friends, A. & C. Black, London,
1958). Franz’s brothers joined him there from
time to time until he left Vienna in 1834, six years
after Schubert’s death.
One of Franz Lachner’s later composition
pupils was Ernst Pauer, born in Vienna during
Schubert’s lifetime. Pauer’s parents were
distinguished. His father, a Lutheran minister
4
in charge of all the Lutheran churches in
Vienna, later became Superintendent General
of Lutheran Churches throughout the Austrian
Empire. His mother was the daughter of Johann
Andreas Streicher (1761-1833), professor of
music in Vienna and a friend of the poet Schiller.
But Streicher’s career had been diverted by his
marriage to the daughter of J. A. Stein (172892) of Augsberg, who had gained Mozart’s
admiration as the founder of German pianofortemaking. Maria Stein (called Nanette) had written
a pamphlet about piano construction. Ultimately
she took her husband Streicher into becoming the
first piano-maker in Vienna. Streicher & Sohn
achieved a lightness of touch to be celebrated
throughout the nineteenth century.
Through his mother, Ernst Pauer was a
grandson of Streicher and great-grandson of
Stein. His attraction to the piano came virtually
with his mother’s milk. His most important
piano teacher was Mozart’s younger son Franz
Xaver (also known as Wolfgang Amadeus) from
1839 to Mozart’s death in 1844. Pauer studied
harmony and counterpoint with Simon Sechter
(1788-1867) – with whom Schubert himself had
begun to study these matters just before he was
overtaken by his final illness in 1828. (Sechter’s
other pupils included Schubert’s friend the poet
Grillparzer, Thalberg, Vieuxtemps and Bruckner.)
After Sechter, Pauer studied composition with
Franz Lachner.
Ernst Pauer began to compose with some
success. But his reputation was made with a series
of London recitals illustrating the development
of keyboard composition and playing from 1600
onwards. He and his wife settled in London.
There he succeeded Cipriani Potter (17921871) on the latter’s retirement from the Royal
Academy of Music. His colleague A. J. Hipkins,
a member of Broadwood’s firm who had become
Chopin’s favourite tuner in England, and who
shared an interest in earlier instruments, wrote of
Pauer’s playing: “His style was distinguished by
breadth and nobility of tone, and by a sentiment
in which seriousness of thought was blended
with profound respect for the intention of the
composer” (Grove’s Dictionary, fourth edition,
Macmillan, London, 1940).
CRC Summer 2010
a Schubert survival
letters to the editor
Ernst Pauer’s son Max was born in
London in 1866. He studied with his
father until 1881. (Eugene d’Albert was
a fellow pupil.) Then Max was sent by his
father to study theory with the youngest
of the Lachner brothers, Vincenz, still
active in Carlsruhe. Max remained
with Vincenz Lachner for four years. In
1885 Max Pauer began his own career
as pianist. It took him across England,
Holland and Germany. In 1887 however
he moved to Germany to concentrate on
teaching: first at Cologne Conservatory
(1887-97), then at Stuttgart (18971924). In 1924 he became director of
the Leipzig Conservatory, where he
continued to teach piano and ensemble
playing until his retirement in 1932.
And so it was that at the centenary
of Schubert’s death in 1928, Max Pauer
took the piano part with the Leipzig
Gewandhaus Quartet of that day in an
electrical recording for Grammophon/
Polydor of the Trout Quintet (m
95066/70).
The recording balance was not ideal,
overemphasising both violin and double
bass. At least it was complete. The NCA
transfer to CD has unaccountably
missed out the central Scherzo (though
calling for it in the booklet’s tracking
list). So it will have to be transferred
again – by NCA or someone else.
Meanwhile, in the original recording’s
slightly backward piano sound, we can
hear the elegantly animated playing of a
man who had Schubert in his veins from
the time he could understand anything.
You will not learn anything of his
history from the NCA notes. When
I pointed out this extraordinary state
of affairs to the Editor, he instantly
asked me to write this note about
Max Pauer and his heritage – so that
readers may order the NCA set (until
something better is offered) and listen
for themselves.
Jerrold Northrop Moore
Undervalued recordings
I enjoyed reading Richard Gate’s article about how critical
judgements of the past don’t always stand the test of time.
I would cut to the chase and just question the importance
of a critic’s opinion over my own. One thing we know now,
thanks to brain science and the work of Daniel Levitin
(among others), is the importance of exposure to music
in the first five years, and how that affects one’s musical
expectations after the age of five. Biologically, by five years
of age, we are all hearing things differently because of
being exposed to different kinds and amounts of music.
There are times when we disagree with what a music
critic has said, and it doesn’t matter if we have just started
collecting music, have done it for years, or listen to or
perform music as part of our job. Why is it that people care
so much about what one person thinks? I think because it’s
easy; it requires the least amount of effort for someone to
read a review and just take the side of the reviewer. It’s much
more difficult to try out all the recordings of Beethoven’s
Fifth, only to find that you prefer a version that none of
your friends picked when they did the same thing. Without
that experience though, music listening would be so much
less rewarding.
I’d like to add that there are collectors out there with
extremely eclectic tastes (I know someone obsessed with
recordings on eight-track tapes), but I have the utmost
respect for people who know what they like. It’s important
to know what you like and what makes you happy. I just
have little patience for people who impose their musical
tastes on others when it’s a negative view. The classical
music field could use more concert-goers, and the recording
industry could use more collectors; no one should be
turned away. If a reviewer cannot connect with what they
are hearing, I think it’s like a classical critic reviewing a hiphop concert; it’s the wrong person for the job. One thing I
like about CRC is that all the articles are written to prompt
exploration – it’s very positive that way.
There is negative press out there for living conductors
too. Christoph Eschenbach and Daniel Harding have
had their fair share. Is it a sin for these conductors to
be liked? If someone likes a conductor, what harm is
being done? If Eschenbach or Harding get people to
like Beethoven, that’s more people liking Beethoven.
If this is what sets the seed for exploring names
of the past and vintage recordings
(and subscriptions to CRC!),
then nothing could be better.
Jonathan Horrocks, Virginia, USA
5
CRC Summer 2010
letters to the editor
Paderewski’s European Recording Sessions
I am delighted to read Bryan Crimp’s fascinating
and splendidly researched article. And it is
particularly fitting that it appears in the one
hundred and fiftieth anniversary year of the
pianist’s birth. I do hope that the Chopin
celebrations will not completely obscure this
great man’s memory.
In his article, Bryan Crimp states that
Paderewski’s recording of the Strauss/Tausig
Man lebt nur einmal is unpublished. There are
two takes of this work, the first recorded on 14
October 1930 and the second on 23 December
of the same year, the latter at the end of one of
Paderewski’s American tours. The first version
was issued on Pearl L GEMM196 and C
GEMMCD9109, and the second on an RCA
CD (C GD60923).
Regrettably, I do not think that either the
Pearl or RCA CDs are still available, but a good
selection of Paderewski’s Victor discs is currently
in the catalogue on a Naxos CD (C 8.112011).
Denis Hall, Hayes, Kent
Sibelius and Koussevitzky
In his review of the Schmidt-Isserstedt recording
of Sibelius’s Second Symphony (CRC Spring
issue, page 76), Antony Hodgson reiterates
an assertion he has made on a number of
occasions concerning the timpani part at the
end of the finale. He states that several decades
ago, a conductor “confidently” told him that
Koussevitzky, who had re-written the part,
drew his alteration to Sibelius’s attention, that it
gained his approval, and that the composer had
asked his publishers to include it in the score
“but in the end they never did so”.
Mr Hodgson seems never to have attempted
to verify this story. I emailed Breitkopf & Härtel,
Sibelius’s publisher, and this resulted in a very
helpful reply from Dr Frank Reinisch of their
Public Relations Department. He immediately
put me on to Dr Timo Virtanen, Editor-in-Chief
of the Complete Sibelius Works at the National
Library of Finland, and his colleague Dr Kari
Kilpelainen, editor of the Second Symphony. As
a result of my request for the facts of the matter,
6
I was directed to the work’s “Addenda and
Corrigenda” on the publisher’s website. It reads
as follows:
“In the records conducted by Serge
Koussevitzky (1935 and 1950) there are audible
additional Timp. tones ... However, Sibelius
did not accept Koussevitzky’s additions, as can
be deduced from conductor Eric Woodward’s
answer to the composer’s letter (Woodward’s
letter dated 20 December 1946: National
Archives of Finland) and Woodward’s letter to
Koussevitzky (dated 16 June 1950: Library of
Congress). No Finnish conductor contemporary
to Sibelius adopted these additions”.
Eric Woodward was conductor of the
Cheltenham Philharmonic from 1939 to
1955, when he emigrated to Canada, and a few
moments of Googling and e-mailing resulted in
my obtaining copies of the letters referred to (my
thanks to Marja Pohjola of the National Archives
of Finland for her help). In 1946, Woodward
was preparing the Second Symphony and wrote
to Sibelius about Koussevitzky’s alteration
to the timpani part, saying he thought it was
an improvement but wanting the composer’s
assurance that it had his sanction and approval.
On receiving Sibelius’s reply, Woodward sent
his thanks and added, “I note your remarks with
great interest and I shall of course respect your
feelings and not in any way alter the score at the
performance which I conduct”.
As noted in the Breitkopf addenda,
Koussevitzky re-recorded the work in 1950 and
that same year Woodward fired off a letter which
left the conductor in no doubt as to Sibelius’s
views: “With reference to the alteration you
make in the coda of the Second Symphony of
Sibelius, you may be interested to know what the
great composer thinks of the liberty you take!
The following is an extract from a letter I was
privileged to have from the great man: ‘Regarding
my Second Symphony, I beg to inform you that
the alteration in question has been made by Dr
Koussevitzky without my consent. Such things,
of course, are matters of taste. Personally I think
it a pleonasm. It may be effectful but it is alien
to my feeling’” .Woodward signed off by telling
Koussevitzky, “I wonder, great as you are, why
CRC Summer 2010
letters to the editor
you think you can improve on the score of Jean
Sibelius?”.
Elsewhere, Mr Hodgson has revealed that he
interviewed Antal Doráti prior to the conductor
performing the work with the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra. Doráti assured him that he would be
playing the text as printed, but at the concert the
timpanist played the Koussevitzky alterations.
Enquiries to the RPO on this point resulted
in an interesting email from Patrick Williams,
their Orchestral Librarian, who stated that the
published timpani part had indeed been altered
by Norman Del Mar (“post-Beecham”, adds
Mr Williams). It must be assumed that Doráti,
somewhat incredibly, was unaware of what the
player was doing.
Pristine Audio have now amended the
notes on their website to take into account the
addenda on Breitkopf ’s web-page for the Second
Symphony. Mr Hodgson mentions a few other
conductors who adopted the Koussevitzky
changes, or variants thereof, but as Sibelius
himself made clear, he did not accept them
and neither have any Finnish conductors. Of
course, many great conductors in the past, from
Toscanini downwards, often made alterations
to scores. However, in this case we have the
composer’s own comments and now know that
Koussevitzky’s tamperings, effective though they
may be, were nevertheless “alien” to Sibelius’s
feeling.
Edward Johnson, London
Antony Hodgson writes:
I have never had any reason to doubt the account
of the discussion between Koussevitzky and
Sibelius in the mid-1930s and I merely mentioned
it as a suggestion why the timpani part under
discussion never appeared in the score. I see no
reason why I should need to challenge Breitkopf
& Härtel on the subject – they can hardly be
expected to say, “we ignored it”. We know this
part was in the scores used by Koussevitzky in
1935 and 1950 and it interests me but does not
surprise me to hear that the corrections were also
made to the RPO score by Norman Del Mar. For
whatever reason Doráti was clearly content with
this version of the score and must surely have
heard it in rehearsal. Mr Johnson is certainly
entitled to suggest that “Doráti, somewhat
incredibly, was unaware of what the player was
doing”, and it could possibly be the explanation
– stranger things have happened – but this does
not sound like the Antal Doráti who was known
to prepare works with thoroughness.
The account of Woodward writing to
Koussevitzky and asserting that Sibelius
disapproved of this timpani part a decade after the
subject first arose proves nothing. It is difficult to
take seriously the opinion of a man who chose to
write very rudely to so distinguished a musician
as Koussevitzky ending: “I wonder, great as you
are, why you think you can improve on the score
of Jean Sibelius?”. In any case, Sibelius’s letter to
which Woodward purports to be referring now
appears to have been (conveniently) lost and
Woodward’s quotation from it is most peculiar.
Sibelius was a something of a linguist we know –
brought up in a Swedish speaking family he learnt
Finnish and was also familiar with German, but
when it comes to English, was he really responsible
for such clumsy use of the language as is to be
found in the statement: “Personally I think it a
pleonasm. It may be effectful but it is alien to my
feeling”? Few if any English people would toy
with the words “pleonasm” or “effectful”, so how
did Sibelius come to add them to his vocabulary?
With only Woodward’s own letters to go on I
am unconvinced by all he says and clearly so was
Koussevitzky who subsequently recorded the
symphony again using the timpani part under
discussion. If Sibelius were really concerned
about the matter he would surely have written
to Koussevitzky rather than to an inhabitant of
Cheltenham.
I have long respected Mr Johnson’s knowledge
on musical matters and it is good that he has
been given space to air his contrary opinion but I
cannot accept his final sentence because nothing
he has put forward justifies the words “we now
know” and certainly the word “tamperings”
is not acceptable (this is getting down to Mr
Woodward’s level).
We may never know the truth about this matter
but how about listening to the passage under
7
CRC Summer 2010
letters to the editor
discussion rather than just talking about it?
Having done so I “now know” that the disputed
part is immensely more exciting than that found
in the published score and for me it successfully
imparts the essence of Sibelius’s character when
writing dramatically for full orchestra.
Paderewski, neglected recordings and early
stereo
My thanks to Bryan Crimp for finally sorting out
the chronology of Paderewski’s first recordings
(CRC Spring issue, page 12). When I published
a Paderewski discography in the 1970s as part of
one of my Immortal Performance record auction
catalogues I relied on the earlier British Institute
of Recorded Sound Paderewski discography for
information on the European recordings and my
own research at RCA for detailed information
on Paderewski’s American recordings. The
BIRS Paderewski discography was incomplete,
for the most part listing only published titles.
The discography of Paderewski’s European
recordings on CRC’s website coupled with my
own research in the RCA files finally gives me
much appreciated complete information on the
great artist’s records.
Mr Crimp, like so many writers on Paderewski,
discusses the technical limitations of his later
years and attributes much of the adulation he
received throughout his career to charisma.
There are of course no recordings of Paderewski’s
playing in the early 1890s (before he severely
injured a finger and then continued to perform
out of economic necessity), but reviews of the
period indicate that his technique at that time
must have been stupendous. But the reason
for his lasting success throughout his career is
clearly revealed in most of his recordings: his
was a superb musicality that shaped almost ideal
performances within the prevailing Romantic
style. Naturally, this style of playing began to be
dismissed as “antique” in the later years of his
50-year plus career (as well as by many of today’s
critics) but we should cherish Paderewski’s
recordings as preserving vividly a type of playing
from a distant musical age, beautifully thought
out and expressed. The Paderewski “magic”
8
derives from his unique musical conception
as well as from his execution. And this style of
playing with its broken chords, etc., is what
Romantic era composers were used to and
expected to hear from a performer, paralleling in
some respects the string portamento often heard
in orchestral recordings by conductors trained in
the nineteenth century.
Regarding the many takes of the Victor
recording of Paderewski’s Minuet in G, these
were not required to obtain a single published
performance. As many readers will know, the
Victor Talking Machine Company assigned one
serial number to each title recorded, the 12-inch
series being preceded by a “C” and the ten-inch
by a “B” during the acoustic era and by a “CVE”
or for ten-inch “BVE” during the Orthophonic
era, followed by a “take” number. Paderewski’s
first published US recording of his Minuet was
Take 3 (C-19783-3) recorded on 23 May 1917
and first issued as Victor m 74533. During the
acoustic recording era, Victor either thought
or imagined that their recording process was
continually improving, or to replace worn out
stampers they frequently had artists make new
recordings of pieces already issued, these remakes
being released under the old record number. On
5 May 1923 Paderewski made a new recording
of his Minuet (C-19783-10), issued as a singlesided record under the old number and on a
double-sided issue (m 6232-A). When electrical
recording arrived many artists remade earlier
titles by the new process and both of Paderewski’s
early electrical versions (CVE-19783-11 & 12)
were eventually published as one side of m 6690A. Out of 12 takes, four were issued and yet
another came out on LP.
To put Paderewski’s several Victor “takes” of
his Minuet in perspective, the matrix number of
Rachmaninov’s acoustic Victor recording of his
Prelude in C sharp minor, Op. 3 No. 2, issued
on a ten-inch single-sided record was B-256503 whereas the matrix number of his electrical
remake was BVE-25650-23 – so there were 23
takes to obtain two issued sides! The acoustic
recording of soprano Maria Jeritza’s celebrated
“Vissi d’arte” from Tosca was B-26171-10, while
that of its electrically recorded remake (for
CRC Summer 2010
letters to the editor
some reason assigned a different serial number)
was BVE-40618-10. Here were 20 “takes” in all
to produce two issued sides! So Paderewski’s
multiple takes of his Minuet in G were not at all
unusual.
Richard Gate’s “Some unjustly despised
recordings” (CRC Spring issue, page 42) was
fascinating to read and I find myself much in
agreement with his choices. I have always felt
that Stokowski’s recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony (otherwise excellent) are flawed by the
slower pace of the choral “Ode to Joy” after the
orchestral lead-in. This sudden decrease in tempo
is more pronounced in the 1934 Philadelphia
recording but also appears in the Decca version
where a noticeable tape splice at the entry of
the chorus probably indicates material from a
separate “take”. I twice heard Stokowski conduct
the Ninth with the American Symphony
Orchestra and recall no tempo disjunction at this
point.
I would suggest another Stokowski recording
as being especially “despised” – the Sibelius
Second Symphony, recorded for RCA in 1954
with “Members of the NBC Symphony Orchestra”.
Tautly expressed and with lean textures, as in
Stokowski’s other large-scale Sibelius recordings,
this is forward-looking, worlds away from the
backward-looking Tchaikovsky-ised Sibelius of
other conductors favoured by many critics.
Finally, regarding the 1940s CBS dualchannel recordings (CRC Spring issue, page 57),
I would advocate the Stravinsky/PhilharmonicSymphony Orchestra of New York performances
as being important documents of the composer
conducting a major symphony orchestra and not
a “pick-up” group of talented musicians; they
were made before Robert Craft conducted the
rehearsals for Stravinsky’s recordings, with the
aged composer only stepping in for the actual
recorded “takes”. Mono CBS recordings of
this vintage have been a sonic revelation when
reissued on LP or CD, so hearing them in genuine
stereo should be even better! A few others that
deserve stereo issue would be the glowingly
performed Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra by
Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony;
Stokowski’s Beethoven Fifth Symphony with
the All-American Youth Orchestra, which is
tremendously exciting (probably a response to
the world situation at the time) and preserves
authentic nineteenth-century performing
traditions, unlike his bland and conventional
Decca version; the Mitropoulos/Minneapolis
Mahler First Symphony, Strauss’s Don Quixote
with Gregor Piatigorsky and the Pittsburgh
Symphony conducted by Fritz Reiner, and
vocal recordings by Metropolitan Opera stars
such as Helen Traubel, Lauritz Melchior, Ezio
Pinza, Lily Pons and Risë Stevens. Genuine
stereo would give these recordings a new
lease of life and would probably be justifiable
economically.
Jim Cartwright, Austin, Texas, USA
Michel Schwalbé and The Wasps
I had the great pleasure of meeting Michel
Schwalbé at a reception for Maxim Vengerov,
at the Biddulph shop 20 years ago – a cultured
and erudite man, with an eye for the ladies!
Having been warned that he was tired of being
asked about Karajan, I wondered how he’d got
on with Barbirolli: “Oh, I loved him, we all did”.
He told me about the derivation of the family
name; they were minor nobility in Spain, hence
“Caballero”: following the Jews’ expulsion they
moved to France as “Chevalier”, later shortened
to Schwalbé (CRC Spring issue, page 19).
Regarding David Greening’s query about the
location of Silvestri’s Vaughan Williams Wasps
Overture (CRC Spring issue, page 6), my copy
of the original issue on HMV L ASD2370
notes that this and the Tallis Fantasia were both
recorded in Winchester Cathedral.
R. Mark Hodgson, London
LETTERS SHOULD BE SENT TO:
The Editor, CRC, 8 Locksmeade Road,
Richmond, Surrey, TW10 7YT, UK
E: [email protected]
The Editor does not necessarily agree with
any views expressed in letters printed, and
reserves the right to edit correspondence
where necessary.
9
CRC Summer 2010
collector news
Classical legends in their own words
A four-CD set of artist interviews and musical
clips revealing unique insights into music, in the
words of 13 of the most highly lauded performers
of the last several decades, is being issued by
EMI Classics (C 5099960897220). Roberto
Alagna, Grace Bumbry, Nicolai Gedda, Angela
Gheorghiu, Mirella Freni, Jon Vickers, Giuseppe
di Stefano, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Evgeny
Kissin, Antonio Pappano, Ruggero Raimondi,
Mstislav Rostropovich, Giuseppe di Stefano, Sir
John Tomlinson and Jon Vickers speak about
the music they have interpreted, accompanied
by extracts from some of their most acclaimed
EMI recordings. Rostropovich recalls that
“Shostakovich told me something I never forgot.
He said ‘Slava, when I want to insult a musician I
would like to say to this person: my dear, you are
not a real musician, you are a mezzo-fortist’. He
hated it when a performance had neither very loud
nor very quiet moments”. The artists’ insights have
come not only from years of study and thought but
also from the context of performing the music they
speak about – the dimension of living and “being”
the composers’ creations.
News from Beulah
Some of Beulah’s CD issues originally released
between 1993 and 2001 are now being reissued.
Part of Beulah’s back catalogue and all new issues
can also be downloaded on iTunes. Many shorter
recordings not previously issued can now be
downloaded on Beulah Extra. For more details
go to www.earb.co.uk. New Beulah releases will be
reviewed in the Autumn issue.
More Schreker on Parlophone?
Mr Alan Sheppard of Alfriston, Sussex has
drawn our attention to the fact that Parlophone
recordings of Thomas’s Raymond Overture (m
P10599) and Suppé’s Leichte Cavallerie Overture
(m P10589) are listed in different sources as
being conducted by Franz Schreker, Hermann
Abendroth and Fritz Zweig. We’re placing our
bets on Herr Zweig, but any further information
would be welcome.
10
St Laurent Studio
Yves St Laurent’s Canadian download website
specialises in 78rpm transfers relayed in the best
natural sound possible without intervention. Yves
is offering a free sampler disc, and free postage
on purchases made by the first 50 CRC readers
to apply: go to www.78experience.com for further
details. One or two St Laurent Studio downloads
will be reviewed in the Autumn issue.
Celeste Aïda
The box of Mozart recordings by Swiss violinist
Aïda Stucki (Doremi C DHR7964/9) was
honoured with a German Record Critics’ Award
for the first quarter of 2010, as “a recording
of exceptional artistry”. Its two-disc successor
is already taking shape and should include
Schumann’s C major Fantasy with Rolf Reinhardt
conducting; all three Brahms Sonatas with Walter
Frey at the piano; the FAE Sonata by Schumann,
Dietrich and Brahms, with pianist Pina Pozzi; and
Brahms’s A minor Quartet, played by the StuckiPiraccini ensemble (see article on page 12).
Errata
The recording by Sir Adrian Boult of Walton’s
First Symphony on US Westminster stereo L
WST14012 was first issued in 1958, and not in the
mid-1960s as stated (CRC Spring issue, page 78).
In DG’s collection “11 Great Videos”, the 1954
Salzburg production of Don Giovanni does have a
subtitle option (CRC Spring issue, page 66).
obituaries
Addio, Giulietta Simionato
The great Italian mezzo-soprano Giulietta
Simionato, who died on 5 May, missed her
hundredth birthday by just a week. Born at
Forli, in the Emilia-Romagna region, she spent
her first eight years in Sardinia. Then the
family moved to Rovigo, near Venice, where her
schoolteachers and choirmaster immediately
saw her artistic and dramatic potential. But her
mother was set against a singing career and not
until Giulietta was 17 and her mother had been
dead for two years did she make a modest local
debut in Rossato’s Nina. She studied with Ettore
Lucatello and Guido Palumbo and in 1933 was
a prizewinner in the competition at the first
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. She sang her first
Azucena at Trieste in 1934.
Her career was mainly nurtured at La Scala
from 1935 but her ascent was gradual and was not
helped by the war. Her breakthrough came with
Dorabella at Geneva in 1945 and from then on
she hardly looked back. She sang Dorabella again
in Paris in 1946 and her portrayal of Mignon
at La Scala on 2 October 1947 sealed her fame
with her home audience. She had made her
British debut only weeks earlier, as Cherubino
with the Glyndebourne company in Edinburgh.
Her Covent Garden debut was made as Amneris
in 1953, with Callas as Aida and Barbirolli
conducting; and that year she first travelled to
America, for Werther in San Francisco. In 1954
she and Callas both made their first Chicago
appearances, in Norma.
Simionato had barely two decades at the
top, retiring in 1966. Though best-known for
Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, she sang
a host of roles by other composers. She was a
famous Santuzza and having avoided Carmen
for many years, she eventually sang it more than
200 times. She first recorded minor roles in two
Gigli sets for HMV in 1940 and 1941; and she
made a handful of individual 78rpm discs. As
a leading singer, from 1950 to 1964 she took
part in recordings of 15 operas – five of them
twice – for Cetra, Decca, RCA and EMI. A
beautiful woman who always looked elegant and
glamorous offstage, she had a difficult private
life but found happiness in her second marriage
to a much older man; and after his death she was
again happily married.
Simionato’s well focused, rounded timbre,
dramatic sense and vocal artistry can be heard
at their peak in her much reissued 1954 account
of “O don fatale”, first heard on a ten-inch LP
(Decca L LW5139). Among her many live
recordings are two of Carmen with Karajan, from
1954 and 1955; a 1958 Salzburg Don Carlo with
Karajan; a famous 1959 Adriana Lecouvreur with
Olivero and Mario Rossi; and a number with
Callas which are regularly recycled. A biography
by Jean-Jacques Hanine Roussel was published in
Italian (1987) and English (1997, with a CD of
live opera excerpts). La Scala published a book,
Omaggio a Giulietta Simionato, in connection
with a 2000 tribute event.
T.P.
The greatest Sophie?
The German soprano Anneliese Rothenberger,
who died in Switzerland on 24 May aged 83, was
hailed by Lotte
Lehmann as “the
best Sophie in the
world” when she
sang Rosenkavalier
in New York. Along
with Sena Jurinac as
Octavian, she scored
a signal success in
Paul Czinner’s 1961
film of the Salzburg
production conducted by Karajan.
On record, Mannheim-born Rothenberger
shone in a range of opera sets, including Die
Entführung conducted by Krips, Figaros Hochzeit
conducted by Suitner and Arabella conducted by
Keilberth. She was also heard in various operettas
and on recital LPs. An accomplished painter, she
enjoyed a second career as a TV host on German
television and published an autobiography, Melodie
meines Lebens, in 1972.
T.P.
Baritone for all seasons
Readers will also be sad to hear that the Italian
baritone Giuseppe Taddei died on 2 June aged
93. Despite giving every appearance of being
as jolly offstage as his ever-increasing girth
suggested, Taddei was surprisingly dangerous
onstage as Gérard in Andrea Chénier or Iago
in Otello. His career covered all the great opera
houses; and among his many recordings were
Rigoletto, Ernani and Falstaff (Cetra); Figaro
and Don Giovanni under Giulini, Così fan tutte
under Böhm and L’elisir d’amore under Serafin
(EMI); Macbeth under Schippers and Tosca
under Karajan (Decca); and Pagliacci under
Karajan (DG). He was Schaunard in Karajan’s
1963 Vienna Bohème (RCA). He made recital
discs of arias and songs.
T.P.
11
What Bartók’s
youthful muse
did next
Tully Potter tells the story of the
Hungarian violinist Stefi Geyer
and her Swiss pupil and successor
Aïda Stucki, distinctive artists who
for different reasons are largely
unknown to collectors
L
ittle Switzerland is hardly noted for violinists.
Of the two eminent ladies featured in this
article, one – Stefi Geyer – was an import and the
other, Aïda Stucki, was her pupil. A century ago, a
foreigner would be brought in for any important
post. The Belgian Fernand Closset led the Suisse
Romande Orchestra. The Dutchman Willem
de Boer was leader in Zürich. Things looked up
when Geyer settled in Zürich in 1920 and got
even better when Adolf Busch, alarmed at the
rise of Nazism in his native Germany, moved to
Basel in 1927. Even so, when Busch assembled
local string stars in 1938 for the elite orchestra at
the inaugural Lucerne Festival, of the first violins
only Anna Hegner, Alphonse Brun and Fritz Hirt
were Swiss: Geyer, De Boer, François Capoulade
and Joachim Röntgen were foreigners. In 1939
Jenny Deuber and Blanche Honegger swelled the
Swiss contingent but there was a new outsider,
Peter Rybar. Carl Flesch and Georg Kulenkampff
arrived as refugees during the war but died before
making an impact. The long-serving De Boer’s
Zürich successor in 1949 was the Viennese Anton
12
Fietz; and the sole significant male Swiss violinist
since the war has been Hansheinz Schneeberger.
Undoubtedly our two ladies made a difference but
Stucki was one of few notable Geyer disciples and
her own best-known pupil is the German AnneSophie Mutter. It takes time to build a national
string school.
Stefi Geyer is known chiefly as the object of
Béla Bartók’s youthful passion, although she was
an expressive, temperamental artist in her own
right. Born in Budapest on 23 June 1888, she was
started on the violin at three by her father, studied
with Jenö Hubay at the Academy and appeared as
a prodigy in Austria, Germany, Italy and Romania.
Bartók, who used to write her long, philosophical
letters, composed his First Concerto for her in
1907-08; but she never played it in public – and
he did not consider it finished. “It is not truly a
concerto,” said Geyer, “but more a Fantasy for
violin and orchestra. Each of the two movements
Stefi Geyer, daughter Rosmarin Schulthess, Ditta & Béla Bartók
forms a portrait, the first of a young girl whom he
loved, the second of a violinist whom he admired.”
In other words, two sides of Geyer herself. Bartók
saw the Andante sostenuto as a “musical portrait
of the idealised Stefi Geyer, transcendant and
intimate” and the Allegro giocoso as portraying the
“lively Stefi Geyer, gay, witty and entertaining”. He
planned a third portrait of the “cool, indifferent,
silent Stefi Geyer” but admitted that it “would be
hateful music”. In the end he realised that “your
piece can be composed only in two sections. Two
contrasting portraits, that is all”.
Schoeck and awe
The next composer to fall for her charms was the
Swiss Othmar Schoeck: his D major Sonata of
1908-09 and Concerto quasi una fantasia of 191112 were dedicated to her (although the 1912
premiere of the latter went to Willem de Boer) and
she happily played both of them. Hubay dedicated
his Concerto all’antica to her and in September 1908
Geyer played it for the master’s fiftieth birthday
concert. A month earlier she had made her Berlin
Philharmonic debut during the orchestra’s summer
season in Scheveningen. On 7 February 1910 she
played Jacques-Dalcroze’s First Concerto at the
Berlin Philharmonie itself, with Arthur Nikisch
conducting, and that year she toured Scandinavia,
returning in 1912.
From 1911 to 1919 she was based in Vienna,
as the wife of the lawyer Erwin Jung. On 26
November 1913 she and Hubay each played one
of his concertos at the new Konzerthaus, with
Ferdinand Hellmesberger conducting for him in
the Concert dramatique and Hubay directing her
in the Concerto all’antica: in between, the violinists
joined in Bach’s Double Concerto. The following
Othmar Schoeck & Stefi Geyer
month, Geyer played the Mendelssohn Concerto
under Oskar Nedbal’s baton; and in January 1914
she gave a joint recital with the pianist Alfred
Blumen, her contributions including Bach’s
E major solo Partita and pieces by Mozart, Handel,
Godard, Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps.
The war, which curtailed Geyer’s career, seems
to have prompted her to rethink her artistic aims.
She visited her family in Budapest from time to
time and in 1917, while she was there, Adolf Busch
gave a successful concert series in the Hungarian
capital. He stayed with the Geyers and Stefi took
the opportunity to study with him, even though
he was three years younger than she. These studies
– centred on repertoire – continued in Vienna
through 1917 and were an indicator of the way
Geyer’s musical priorities were shifting, from
virtuosity to a more Classical approach. On 30
October that year she gave a joint recital in Vienna
with Swiss friends, Othmar Schoeck and the young
pianist Walter Frey, she and Schoeck playing his
D major Sonata; and in December she toured
neutral Holland with the pianist Josef Pembauer.
A major move
In 1920, her husband having died in the influenza
pandemic at the end of the war, she married
the pianist, composer and concert agent Walter
Schulthess and settled with him in Zürich,
taking Swiss nationality. He toured with her as
her accompanist and during the 1920s she was
Stefi Geyer & Walter Schulthess
13
highly visible on the European mainland. Her
recitals might include a Handel sonata, Nardini’s
“E minor Concerto” or Sammartini’s Passacaglia;
a Bach solo work; perhaps Spohr’s Gesangsszene;
a couple of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances; perhaps
Schulthess’s Concertino, Op. 7; Hubay’s Zephir or
Hejre Kati; and other short pieces. Reger’s Aria was
a favourite from her studies with Busch; and she
had a ready fund of morsels by Debussy, Dvořák,
Haydn, Kreisler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Paganini,
Schubert, Tartini, Veracini and Wieniawski. She
gave more than 100 Scandinavian concerts in 192223 and travelled to America late in 1924, but does
not appear to have returned there. She was popular
in Holland up to about 1933, playing concertos
by Bruch (G minor), Goldmark, Mendelssohn,
Mozart (G major) and Spohr (Gesangsszene)
with such conductors as Pierre Monteux, Georg
Schnéevoigt and Peter van Anrooy.
At home Geyer appeared with the orchestras
in the major Swiss centres: Basel, Bern, Geneva,
Winterthur, Zürich and so on. She and Schoeck
collaborated in his Concerto and Beethoven’s F
major Romance for the Bernische Musikgesellschaft
on 26 February 1924; and with the regular
Bern conductor, the composer Fritz Brun, she
performed the Beethoven Concerto (1926) and
Spohr’s Gesangsszene (1933). She and her husband
kept up the friendship with Bartók – letters from
him to the Schulthesses, dating from 1928-40, are
preserved. They played his Romanian Folk Dances,
arranged by Zoltán Székely, in recital; and in Basel
on 30 January 1929 Geyer took part in an allBartók programme with the composer and the
singer Ilona Durigo. In the audience was 22-yearold Paul Sacher. The next year she played Bach’s
A minor Concerto with Sacher’s Basel Chamber
Paul Sacher
14
Orchestra – this interpretation was taken to
Strasbourg too.
In the 1930s Geyer scaled down her career.
Since 1923 she had been teaching at the Zürich
Conservatoire and from 1934 she intensified her
schedule there. Although she still toured a certain
amount – in September 1931 she participated in
a festival of Swiss music at Wiesbaden, playing
Karl Heinrich David’s Andante and Rondo, and a
year later she broadcast her favourite Spohr and
the Busoni Concerto from Budapest, with Ernö
Dohnányi conducting – she was little known
in Anglophone lands. When she appeared with
Gerald Moore at the Aeolian Hall, London, on
30 March 1935, aged 46, The Times described her
as “a young Hungarian violinist”. Her programme
included Sammartini’s Passacaglia, Bach’s D minor
solo Partita, and Mozart’s Adagio, K261, and
Rondo, K373.
In 1940 she helped Béla and Ditta Bartók to
emigrate to America; and the next year she took on
two projects. “Walter Schulthess wrote to me one
day,” Paul Sacher recalled, “saying that there were
a number of excellent young musicians in Zürich,
including some of his wife’s students, who would
be delighted to play in a high-calibre chamber
orchestra, and that his wife would even be prepared
to play herself, as first violinist. He asked if I would
be prepared to take over as director.” So began
the Collegium Musicum orchestra. Geyer’s solo
outings with the little band indicate her sympathies
at this stage: Vivaldi and Bach concertos, works by
Telemann and Handel, Haydn’s Evening Symphony
No. 8, two of J.C. Bach’s Sinfonie concertante (in
one her co-soloist was Enrico Mainardi), Mozart’s
Haffner Serenade, a modern concerto grosso by
H.G. Früh and Boris Blacher’s Dialog. “She was a
superb violinist, a major soloist and an excellent
musician,” said Sacher, “and she brought the fame
of her name to the ensemble.”
From 1941 she also headed an excellent quartet:
her protégé Rudolf Baumgartner was second violin;
another pupil, Ottavio Corti, was persuaded to
play the viola, starting him on a distinguished new
career; and Eric Guignard was the cellist. Neutral
Switzerland was on permanent alert through
the war and the quartet played in uniform for
the troops. In 1943 Willy Burkhard wrote them
a quartet and dedicated his Concerto, Op. 69,
jointly to Geyer and Sacher, who gave the premiere
on 26 January 1945, repeating it in Basel three
weeks later. At the 1950 Casals Festival in Prades
Geyer performed Bach’s E major Sonata with Clara
Haskil. In 1953 she played in Sacher’s cycle of the
Brandenburg Concertos and she last appeared as
soloist with the Collegium Musicum in Mozart’s
D major Serenade, K204, on 3 February 1956. She
died in Zürich on 11 December that year, having let
Sacher have Bartók’s Concerto and letters during
her last illness. The Concerto was premiered in
Basel by Schneeberger and Sacher on 30 May 1958
and they repeated it in Zürich in 1960.
The pupil
Aïda Stucki, who often played Bach’s Double
Concerto with Geyer, was born in Cairo of a Swiss
father and Italian mother on 19 February 1921.
When she was seven her father Heinrich, who had
an import-export business, decided to returned
to Switzerland and – after a journey by Zeppelin
which thrilled the little girl – the family settled in
Winterthur. Her mother Clothilde Lazzaro, a singer,
suffered from fragile health and died young. At ten
Aïda started learning the violin with Ernst Wolters,
who had himself studied in Cologne with Bram
Eldering (mentor of Busch, Willem de Boer, Max
Strub, Wilhelm Stross, Riele Queling and Siegfried
Borries). Wolters was central to Winterthur music
as violinist, teacher and occasional conductor
of the City Orchestra; and in 1934 Stucki made
her concert debut with that ensemble, playing
Mozart’s G major Concerto. Through Stefi Geyer
she met Bartók, “a very impressive, fine personality
and noble artist”. From 1941 to 1943 she studied
with Geyer in Zürich. “Professor Geyer was an
inspiring artist,” she recalls, “full of temperament,
with fascinating vitality, a superior technique and
Aïda Stucki
Piraccini-Stucki Quartet
virtuosity and a wonderfully elegiac sound.” Then
Stucki went to work with Carl Flesch in Lucerne,
taking part in his master-class – he called her “the
best Swiss violinist” – until his death in 1945.
That year she married the Florentine violinist
Giuseppe Piraccini (1908-91), who had studied
at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini with Giulio
Pasquali and then alongside Gioconda De Vito in
Remy Principe’s masterclass at the Accademia di
Santa Cecilia, Rome. Piraccini led the orchestras
of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Winterthur,
Zürich Radio and finally the Zürich Tonhalle and
Opera House.
Having won a prize at the international
competition in Geneva, Stucki began her career
after the war, although by 1948 she was already
teaching at the Winterthur/Zürich Hochschule für
Musik and this avocation was to bring her the most
fame, especially as the mentor of Anne-Sophie
Mutter. She and her husband played the usual twoviolin repertoire – Willy Burkhard once conducted
for them in the Bach Double – and toured Europe
with the Piraccini-Stucki Quartet, which she usually
led, although she ceded her place to him for some
works. The viola player was Hermann Friedrich
(later Gerhard Wieser), the cellist Walter Haefeli.
They often played on four Strads lent by Otto
von Habisreuter and their repertoire extended to
Skalkottas, Egk, Malipiero, Armin Schibler, Frank
Bridge and Peter Racine Fricker. Professor Stucki
also fondly recalls her Winterthur Trio with Pina
Pozzi and Esther Nyffenegger and her sonata duos
with Pozzi, Clara Haskil, Elly Ney, Walter Frey
(Flesch’s last piano partner) and Christoph Lieske.
15
Clara Haskil
One would like to have been at the recital she and
Haskil gave in Zürich on 27 April 1945 – Mozart’s
K376, Beethoven’s Op. 30 No. 3 and Brahms’s Op.
108 – or their concert at Sion on 11 December
that year, when they played the same Mozart and
Brahms either side of Haskil’s interpretation of
Beethoven’s Op. 111. At Winterthur on 4 October
1950 Piraccini joined them in Handel’s Op. 2
No. 2, Haskil played Beethoven’s Op. 31 No. 3
and they finished with their Brahms warhorse.
During those five years Stucki and Haskil gave
numerous concerts, especially in French-speaking
Switzerland but also in Zürich, Winterthur and
Lucerne. They performed all the Mozart sonatas,
nearly all of the Beethovens, Schubert, Schumann,
Bach and Handel trio sonatas with Piraccini and
the Sonatina by Dinu Lipatti, a work Haskil loved.
Taking up the torch
Among Stucki’s career highlights were Beethoven’s
Concerto with Hermann Scherchen at virtually
every Swiss centre in 1949; Bruch’s G minor with
the Stuttgart Philharmonic under Willem van
Hoogstraten in Stuttgart, Konstanz and major
German cities in 1951-52; Mozart’s K271 and
K218 with Hans Rosbaud and the Zürich Tonhalle
Orchestra in 1952; the Mendelssohn with the
Tonhalle and the Winterthur City Orchestra
under Mario Rossi in 1962; Mozart’s A major with
16
Joseph Keilberth at Winterthur in 1965; and the
Bach E major under Eliahu Inbal at Zürich in 1972.
Almost every season she performed Schoeck’s
Concerto, the last time at Winterthur with Armin
Jordan in 1973, an acclaimed performance. “My
mother knew Othmar Schoeck very well,” her
son Sandro Piraccini says. “She met him first in
the house of Professor Stefi Geyer, where she
studied his Violin Concerto, Op. 21. As you know,
this concerto was dedicated to Professor Geyer.
Both Stefi Geyer and Mr Schoeck authorised my
mother to carry on their original interpretation
of the Violin Concerto in the future. After the
death of Professor Geyer, Mr Schoeck repeatedly
proposed only my mother as an interpreter of his
Violin Concerto. I myself remember Mr Schoeck
saying to me (as a then seven-year-old child) on the
occasion of a celebration on his honour in 1953
in the Mainau Castle of Count Bernadotte near
Konstanz (when my mother played, together with
Mrs Pina Pozzi at the piano, the Duo Sonatas Op.
16 and Op. 46 of Schoeck) that my mother played
his works best.”
Stucki’s career as a violinist was ended in 1983
when she injured both wrists in a bad fall at home.
“All her pupils after 1983 did not hear Aïda as a
violinist in the flesh,” says the physician Christof
Honecker, who studied in her class alongside his
wife, the professional musician Christa Gölz. “In
contrast my wife and I heard with Aïda nearly
all the violin literature. Every one of us studied
for ten years with her. She taught with a lot of
demonstrating and so we heard not only the
repertoire for which she is known, but the concerti
by Mendelssohn, Bruch, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns
and Tchaikovsky, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, all
the Bach solo sonatas, nearly all of the Paganini
Pina Pozzi, Othmar Schoeck & Aida Stucki in 1956
Caprices, Wieniawski’s Scherzo-Tarantelle and
Concerto No. 2, the Beethoven Romances, the Four
Seasons, all the Beethoven and Brahms Sonatas,
much Schubert, Franck, Martinů, Schumann and
so on.”
Aïda Stucki used a violin by Jakob Horil
(Vienna, Rome, 1720-60) in her early career, and
then an instrument by Giuseppe Guadagnini II,
nicknamed “Il soldato” (Paris, 1735-1805). Retired
from teaching her master-class since 1995, she
keeps in touch with her myriad pupils who, apart
from Mutter (who always speaks very highly of
her), include the young star Manrico Padovani.
Their recordings
Stefi Geyer may have made records in Budapest
as early as 1906. Raymond Glaspole has a disc of
Sarasate’s Playera and a Hubay Mazurka (Odéon
m 24001/2) which is unlikely to be later than
1907. It is very well played. Geyer next recorded
in the late 1920s, twice setting down a coupling of
the Air from Goldmark’s A minor Concerto and
the Dvořák/Kreisler Slavonic Dance in E minor,
with Schulthess at the piano: I have not heard
one version (Odéon m O68043) but I know the
other quite well (Odéon m D3558, Parlophone
m P9130 or 64542). Like most Hubay students,
Geyer could be accused of having too slow a
vibrato, but it does not affect the Goldmark too
much. She plays the Dvořák transcription with
great sensitivity – it is almost as if her violin were
speaking the slower sections. From the same session
as the scarcer Goldmark/Dvořák disc come Reger’s
Aria and the Tartini/Kreisler Fugue, also with
Schulthess (Odéon m 9205 or O6573; Decca m
25763). From the mid-1930s we have three discs,
with Schulthess accompanying where necessary: a
lovely wistful reading of the “Loure” from Bach’s
E major solo Partita coupled with the Adagio
from Haydn’s C major Concerto (Columbia m
DCX10 or LZX1); Beethoven’s G major Romance
(m DCX11 or LZX2); and two Kreisler pieces,
Schön Rosmarin and the Andantino which Geyer
probably still thought was by Padre Martini (m
DC61 or LZ1). Incidentally the Schulthesses’
daughter was named Rosmarin.
After the war, a few more substantial things
were recorded. In September 1946, with Sacher
and the Collegium Musicum, Geyer recorded two
Mozart discs, the Adagio in E, K261 (m LZX7)
and the Divertimento in D, K136 (m LZX6). On
3 February 1947 she and Sacher made the whole
Haydn Concerto, with Paul Klengel’s cadenzas
(m LZX238/9); and two days later, with Volkmar
Andreae conducting the Tonhalle Orchestra, Geyer
recorded the Schoeck Concerto (m LZX242/5).
The Mozart Adagio is serene and the Haydn is very
stylish: Geyer relishes details such as the doublestopping in the first movement. The Schoeck,
obviously her major legacy, has twice been on CD:
coupled with Dennis Brain in the Horn Concerto
( Jecklin Edition C JD715-2); and grouped
with the Haydn and five shorter pieces (Dante
C LYS398). Despite its beauties, the work will
never thrive, as it almost entirely lacks the conflict
essential to a concerto. The violin enters virtually at
once and spins a beguiling line in a medium tempo
(Allegretto); after an equally lyrical Grave, non
troppo lento, at last the finale brings faster music.
Geyer’s other treasure is Willy Burkhard’s excellent
Second Quartet, in one movement perforce split
into four, with her own ensemble (m LZX11/12).
The only other Geyer recording I know is a 1955
Swiss Radio tape of the Aria and Praeludium from
Reger’s Suite. By now her vibrato had loosened ever
so slightly but she still plays beautifully. In all, the
records confirm her as a first-rate classical player
and a fine musician.
If Geyer has left us a small harvest, Stucki’s
list of commercial records is even shorter. It boils
down to Schumann’s C major Fantasy, with the
Stuttgart Pro Musica under Rolf Reinhardt (Vox
L PL7680), and three Mozart concertos, with the
Stuttgart Tonstudio Orchestra under Gustav Lund:
the B flat, K207, with Hans Sitt’s cadenzas, and
the D major, K211, with Auer’s cadenzas (Period/
Nixa L PLP549; Classic L CL6131); and the
“Concerto No. 7” in D, K271 (Period L PLP548).
It is likely K207 and K211 were record premières –
Dévy Erlih’s versions were virtually contemporary.
Stucki recalls that Lund was a Swedish violinist
and the orchestra was assembled from the various
Stuttgart ensembles by the Tonstudio owner,
former fiddler Heinz Jansen, who was responsible
for both the overall production – although Herman
Adler was the actual producer – and the recording.
“Mr Jansen had heard a live broadcast of my
interpretation of the Concerto quasi una fantasia of
Othmar Schoeck.” All three Mozart performances
are spirited and stylish, as is the Schumann. “We
17
also recorded the String Quartet in D, Op. 23, of
Othmar Schoeck,” she recalls. “Unlike with the
Violin Concerto and the duo sonatas, we did not
study the quartet with Schoeck himself, as the
record was done after his death.” This first quartet is
perhaps Schoeck’s sunniest work and is beautifully
played by the Piraccini-Stucki group; but it is
Stucki’s only commercial chamber recording. After
a promising start, her studio career was stifled by
an ill-timed bout of illness: she had such severe
anaemia in 1953-58 that she did not feel able to
play many concertos and thus concentrated on
chamber music.
Mainly Mozart
“Apart from that, I made hundreds of broadcast
recordings in many countries of Europe,” Stucki
points out; and certainly there is a wealth of
radio material. A six-disc Mozart box has come
out (Doremi C DHR7964/9), including the
Stuttgart Tonstudio K207 and K211. For K271,
producer Jacob Harnoy has rightly gone for a 1952
performance with the superb Lausanne Chamber
Orchestra under its founder, former quartet leader
Victor Desarzens. This is a delightful concerto,
which unlike “No. 6” may actually be partly by
Mozart, and Stucki gives it a delightful reading,
using Enescu’s cadenzas. The three major concertos
and the Sinfonia concertante are with the Zürich
Radio Orchestra. For the excellent performance
of K216 in G, with Geyer’s cadenza in the Allegro
and an amended Ysaÿe cadenza in the Adagio,
Erich Schmid conducts. The way Stucki moves
through the various episodes of the Rondo shows
her as a born Mozartian. Schmid also presides
over a slightly disappointing K219 in A, where the
violin is tremulously recorded and the finale lacks
appoggiaturas. For K218 in D, where (as in K219)
Stucki is faithful to Joachim’s cadenzas, there
is a fair performance with Schmid but Doremi
understandably prefer one directed by the composer
Wolfgang Fortner. Here Stucki’s tone is beautifully
caught and she revels in the interplay with
conductor and orchestra, especially in the finale.
I enjoy both extant performances of the Sinfonia
concertante – in which Stucki is partnered by
ZRO principal viola Hermann Friedrich, for many
years her quartet colleague – but I agree with her
and Doremi in the choice of a version conducted
by Pierre Colombo over that with the routinier
18
Schmid. The box is made up with a cycle of the
violin sonatas, taped in the Stadthaus Winterthur
in 1977 with Christoph Lieske as pianist. The
interpretations are enjoyable although Lieske’s
playing is a trifle stodgy in comparison with that of
Stucki, who with her poise and distinctive tone is a
Mozartian well worth hearing.
More is expected from Doremi; and we
already have the 1949 Beethoven Concerto with
Scherchen (Tahra C 663, reviewed in CRC’s
Summer 2009 issue, page 82). At least two versions
of the Schoeck Concerto exist – I have heard one
from 1964 with Schmid. Stucki’s view is even
more lyrical than that of her teacher, with less
portamento in the Grave and without the dash
of paprika that Geyer brought to the finale but
with a compensating tinge of nostalgia. It would
be nice to have Spohr’s D minor Duo, Op. 39 No.
1, in which Stucki’s tone contrasts nicely with her
husband’s Italianate sound. There are lovely Brahms
sonatas, a D minor with the wonderful Pina Pozzi
and all three with Walter Frey; other sonatas with
Pozzi including a delectable Mozart K376, stylish
versions of Beethoven’s Op. 30 No. 2 and Op. 96
and works by Jarnach, Schumann and Martinů;
performances of Martinů’s Chamber Concerto
for violin and piano with Pozzi and two different
conductors; a Haydn Double Concerto with Hans
Andreae at the harpsichord; and a heap of quartet
and quintet material, including a Schoeck Notturno
with the bass-baritone Arthur Loosli. Meanwhile
Aïda Stucki is delighted that she has suddenly been
“rediscovered” as a violinist in her late eighties.
Thanks to Christof Honecker, Raymond Glaspole
and Julian Futter.
CRC
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19
Mahler in
Vienna during
the 1920s
Stanley Henig finds that
performances of the composer’s
music after his death were more
frequent in his adopted home city
than has previously been thought;
and that there are significant links
between these events and some
early recordings.
T
here is a long-standing myth to the effect that
for some 50 years after his death Mahler’s
music was broadly neglected: the revival very
much a phenomenon of the subsequent 50 years.
The major Amsterdam Mahlerfest of 1920, when
all nine completed symphonies as well as Das Lied
von der Erde were performed over a period of just
15 days, is often seen as the one glorious exception
during the period of neglect. Such a picture is by no
means accurate.
Some years back, rummaging through
bookshops in Hay-on-Wye, I came across an
unprepossessing and untitled volume: bound
inside there was a large collection of Vienna
concert programmes running from 24 September
1922 to 7 May 1924. Amongst them there
is a veritable cornucopia of programmes for
performances of Mahler’s works. During his
lifetime and indeed up to the end of the first
world war Vienna had been capital of a polyglot
empire. The cultural wars of old Vienna have
been the subject for many books: Mahler had
been championed by avant-garde cultural groups
which in political terms could be characterised
as “left of centre”. Vienna was home to a large
20
Jewish community and also to some of the world’s
first modern anti-semitic political parties. Antisemitism was never far from the nationalist press
when reviewing Mahler’s own performances.
After 1919 the Empire was no more, replaced
by a small republic with Vienna as a very overlarge capital. In her edited book Mahler and his
World (Princeton University Press, USA, 2002),
Karen Painter has explored in her chapter on
“The Aesthetics of Mass Culture” the extent to
which Socialist groups “adopted” Mahler and his
music, above all the Eighth Symphony.
The programmes in my collection cover a
period of around 19 months. Many other musical
events took place in Vienna during that time, but
it does look as if the person who compiled the
collection was a Mahler fan and probably attended
all concerts containing some of his music. We can
probably conclude that during those 19 months,
Mahler’s music was played at 25 concerts: and
on almost all those occasions he was the main
composer featured. Six of the symphonies were
performed – Nos. 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 9. The Fourth
was most popular with four performances; indeed
until the Mahler “revival” from 1960 onwards it
Oskar Fried
Bruno Walter
was the most frequently performed. There were
three performances of the Third Symphony and
two each of the Second and Eighth. There were
actually seven performances of Das Lied von der
Erde – surely some kind of record!
In most cases the orchestral forces are simply
described as Symphony Orchestra – I suspect
this was part of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra,
which is specifically credited on seven occasions.
The Vienna Philharmonic is only specifically
credited once – Furtwängler conducting the
Third Symphony – but it seems more than likely
that the orchestra for the two performances of
the Eighth Symphony was drawn from both the
VPO and the VSO. The earliest recording of
any of Mahler’s symphonies features Oscar Fried
conducting the Second (Deutche Grammophon/
Polydor m 69685/91; Naxos C 8.11052/3). This
recording was made two years after Fried’s 25
September performance in Vienna; interestingly
he had actually conducted the Third Symphony
on the previous day. A much more frequent
conductor in Vienna was Bruno Walter – a protégé
of Mahler himself, he took charge for nine of the
24 concerts.
Walter the pioneer
Walter would be the first great conductor to make
extensive recordings of Mahler’s music. Although
many of these recordings were made much later,
there is a significant correlation between works
conducted in Vienna and those he recorded later.
In Vienna he conducted the Second, Third, Fourth
and Eighth symphonies as well as Kindertotenlieder,
Das Lied von der Erde and Lieder eines fahrenden
Gesellen. He would be the first to record Das Lied
von der Erde in 1936 (Columbia m ROX165/171;
Naxos C 8.110850), with the Vienna Philharmonic
and Charles Kullman and Kerstin Thorborg as
soloists. Much later, in May 1952, he repeated the
work with the Vienna Philharmonic and Kathleen
Ferrier and Julius Patzak (Decca L LXT272122, C 466 576-2); and he made a third recording
in 1960 with the New York Philharmonic and
soloists Mildred Miller and Ernst Haefliger
(CBS L MS6426 and various other LP and CD
editions). He also recorded Kindertotenlieder in
1949 with Ferrier (Columbia m LX8939-41; L
33C1009 and various CD editions) and in 1960
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with Mildred
Miller (CBS L 72142 and CD reissues). There are
21
Hermann Scherchen
Erwin Stein
three recordings of Walter conducting the Second
Symphony: particular interest attaches to the
live 1948 version with the Vienna Philharmonic
Orchestra (Discocorp L BWS367 and CD
reissues), since one of the soloists, Rosette Anday
was also in the Furtwängler performance of the
Third Symphony noted in my programme book.
She is in fact the only one of those soloists who
would feature in Mahler recordings and she would
also participate in a version of the Eighth, recorded
live in 1951, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Hermann Scherchen (US Columbia
L Set SL164).
Apart from Walter, two other great
conductors – Furtwängler and Knappertsbusch
– each conducted one symphony in these Vienna
concerts. Neither became Mahler specialists but
there is a 1952 recording of Furtwängler and the
Philharmonia Orchestra with Fischer-Dieskau
in Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (HMV L
ALP1270; EMI C CDM5 67556-2); and in 1956
Knappertsbusch and the Berlin Philharmonic
performed the Kindertotenlieder with Lucretia
West (Hunt C CD710).
There is one interesting addendum to the listing
of the conductors who performed in Vienna. On
24 February 1924 Erwin Stein conducted the
Ninth Symphony. A scholarly musician, Stein
had two years previously transcribed Mahler’s
Fourth Symphony for chamber orchestra: some
70 years later this was recorded by the Manchester
Camerata under Douglas Boyd, with Kate Royal as
soloist (Avie C AV2069). As far as the orchestras
are concerned there is now a huge list of recordings
by the Vienna Philharmonic, but at the outset of
the LP era there were other early versions of several
of the symphonies by the Vienna Symphony
Orchestra, apart from Scherchen’s Eighth. These
include the Second under Otto Klemperer (Vox L
PL7080), the Third (SPA L 20/22), Sixth (SPA L
59/60) and the unfinished Tenth Symphony (SPA
L 31), all under F. Charles Adler (for contractual
reasons the orchestra was not originally listed as
such) and the Ninth under Jascha Horenstein
(Vox L PL7602). Horenstein also recorded the
First Symphony, with the VSO listed as “Vienna
Pro Musica Symphony” (Vox L PL8050). In those
early LP days Klemperer also recorded Das Lied
22
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Rosette Anday
von der Erde, with the VSO joined by Elsa Cavelti
and Anton Dermota (Vox L PL7000. In addition
to Walter, three of the conductors who made early
Mahler recordings – Fried, Klemperer and Adler
– all had had some personal connection with the
composer.
Finally, and sadly, almost none of the vocalists
performing in Vienna on these programmes
recorded any Mahler – at least as far as is known.
The one exception would seem to be the contralto
Rosette Anday, as mentioned above.
Does any of this actually matter? Are these
programmes of any significance for other than
a passionate collector of ephemera? Well, for
both the players and the listeners Mahler was a
living memory. The flame burned more brightly
in Vienna and Amsterdam than elsewhere, where
occasional performances of the great Mahler works
were far more dependent on the commitment of
single individuals. There are clear links between
those performances and what we now think of as
the Mahler revival of the 1950s and 1960s and the
subsequent enormous explosion in both concert
and recorded performances.
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23
Wyn Morris (1929-2010) – Mahler disciple
and conductor of rare distinction
Lyndon Jenkins
M
uch was made in the obituaries that
appeared after Wyn Morris’s death on 23
February this year of the more negative sides of this
Welsh conductor’s life and career. It was quite true
that he could be difficult: he was single-minded,
over-confident of his own abilities and powers, and
often responded to situations with an impatience
that caused people to view him as arrogant. When
I first knew him in the 1950s there was hardly
anything of this, only a burning desire to succeed
as a conductor. He knew he had the technical skills
and – much more important for a conductor – the
ability to inspire the respect and cooperation of
orchestral players. This was noticeable right from
the start when he founded the Welsh Symphony
Orchestra in the mid-1950s: two of my music
teachers played in it, and I was able to sit in on his
rehearsals. He was kindness itself and, young as I
was, I was able to recognise him as being extremely
demanding, but only ever in the cause of music.
24
He had a showman’s instinct, which
occasionally got out of hand. At a concert in
Swansea’s Brangwyn Hall, having just waved
Eileen Joyce off after Rachmaninov’s second
concerto, he set about adjusting the height of
his rostrum by removing one of the platforms;
the players, uncertain as to his intentions and so
unable to offer practical assistance, simply looked
on in helpless perplexity; conductors were not
expected to do that sort of thing. But despite the
occasional such aberration his ability was not to be
denied, and in 1957 he was the first Briton to win
the Koussevitzky Memorial Prize, leading to three
years at Cleveland as an assistant to George Szell.
I always felt in later years that he was mystified
as to why that period had not catapulted him
irrevocably into the big-time conducting league.
He viewed it with great nostalgia and, at a lunch
decades later seemed absolutely amazed when I
mentioned the name of Louis Lane, Szell’s long-
time assistant, who was in Cleveland at the same
time. “How the devil do you know that name?”,
he quizzed me suspiciously, and I had a feeling
almost as if I had intruded on some kind of private
grief. It crossed my mind afterwards that possibly,
with hindsight, he had regretted not staying on in
the USA and making a career there as Lane had
done.
When he returned to the UK from the USA he
had a great success with a performance of Mahler’s
Ninth Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra at the Festival Hall, receiving glowing
reviews: “Not since the late Bruno Walter have
we heard such a persuasive and thoroughly
idiomatic rendering of this mammoth score”,
said the Times. Things began to look up. When
Sir Malcolm Sargent died in 1967 Morris took
over a performance of Elgar’s The Kingdom with
the Royal Choral Society, and within a short time
had landed not only that conductorship but that
of Sargent’s other choir, the Huddersfield Choral
Society. These associations were destined not to
last, but the Mahler performance had introduced
him to Isabella Wallich, niece of the legendary
Fred Gaisberg of EMI, who was running her own
record label, Delysé. Impressed by his performance
of the Mahler symphony, a work she knew well
from her uncle’s famous first-ever recording of it
with Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic
in 1938, she decided to offer him the chance to
work with her in the recording studio.
Isabella Wallich & Wyn Morris
The first recordings
The recordings began (1966) in that occasionally
haphazard way that used to be rather typical of
the record industry. Mendelssohn’s Elijah with
Geraint Evans was chosen for Delysé’s first outing,
until it was discovered quite by chance that EMI
was well advanced with planning its own version
(to be conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos).
There could be no contest: as Wallich remembered
it, Morris’s response was, “When you’re handed a
lemon, make lemonade out of it”, and he proposed
re-routing himself, Evans and the already-booked
London Philharmonic Orchestra to Mahler’s
Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Then, when the disc
appeared (L DS6077) a similar situation arose,
though in reverse: after hearing an advance
pressing EMI delayed recording its own version
(with Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau and Szell) for
18 months. EMI’s Walter Legge must have been
furious that such a fledgling outfit could disrupt
his plans, but at the same time he must also have
been impressed because he tried (unsuccessfully) to
poach Delysé’s Allen Stagg to engineer his version.
Delysé’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn had one
other remarkable feature: in what was her first
recording with orchestra the young Janet Baker
made a distinct mark. Overall, such was the disc’s
success with both critics and public that plans were
immediately laid for a follow-up, and Das klagende
Lied with Teresa Zylis-Gara, Anna Reynolds and
Andor Kaposy, the Ambrosian Singers and the New
Philharmonia Orchestra was judged to be even
better, notably for the conductor (L DS6087).
By now Wyn Morris had caught the Mahler bug
in no uncertain terms and was declaring his aim
to perform and record all the symphonies. When
a second opportunity to record with the NPO
(for Pye) gave him the chance to make a start he
chose No.1, interestingly using the 1893 score with
its extra Blumine movement (L TPLS13037).
This too was well received, especially when EMI
subsequently acquired the Pye catalogue and issued
it on CD (C CDM7 64137-2). Another Pye
venture from that time produced a highly desirable
coupling of Arthur Bliss’s Pastoral and A Knot of
Riddles with Sybil Michelow, John Shirley-Quirk
and Morris conducting the London Chamber
Orchestra (L TPLS13036): this marked the
composer’s eightieth birthday and Bliss, who was
at the sessions, declared himself entirely satisfied
25
with the resulting performances, which later came
up much enhanced in EMI’s British Composers
series (C CDM5 67117-2).
By this time Wyn Morris and Isabella Wallich
had decided that, for their Mahler recordings,
instead of engaging a “name” orchestra they would
assemble ad hoc groups of players, drawing upon
London’s finest. The Eighth Symphony was in
their sights for November 1972, though just before
it Morris again conducted the New Philharmonia
in both the first performance and recording of
Deryck Cooke’s revised performing edition of the
Tenth Symphony (Philips L 6700 067): this came
widely to be regarded as probably the best of all the
conductor’s Mahler discs. But then, in the course
of the 1970s, Morris recorded Mahler’s Second,
Fifth, Eighth and Ninth symphonies, all played by
the specially-formed Symphonica of London and
issued on the Symphonica label (L SYM7/8, 3/4,
1/2, 14/15 respectively). These received varying
degrees of critical acclaim, which might be thought
remarkable in the face of the opposition that existed
from Georg Solti and Bernard Haitink with their
complete sets begun in the 1960s. As a fill-up to the
Fifth Symphony Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden
gesellen was sung by a new young German baritone,
Roland Hermann, who had made a successful
recording debut for EMI shortly before in Mahler’s
Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit and some of
the Knaben Wunderhorn songs accompanied by
Geoffrey Parsons (L HQS1346).
In addition to Mahler
Alongside the Mahler came some unusual offshoots,
none more so than a coupling of Bruckner’s
Helgoland with Wagner’s Das Liebesmahl
der Apostal (L SYM11) for male chorus and
orchestra, and Rachmaninov’s Vespers (Philips L
6747 246). In these Morris conducted his own
Bruckner-Mahler Choir, formed out of his brief
association with the Royal Choral Society, which
served him well throughout the 1970s. But while
the Bruckner-Wagner disc was judged a success
the Rachmaninov was unlucky enough to run up
against an utterly authoritative version by a Russian
choir with whose authentic sound and approach it
simply could not compete. Another enterprising
issue paired Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la
mer with Debussy’s La damoiselle élue though here
the two starry soloists, Montserrat Caballé and
26
Roland Hermann
Janet Coster, were miscast and only the playing and
conducting passed muster (L SYM6).
All these and other recordings that appeared on
the Symphonica label had been heavily dependent
on sponsorship, but a sudden end to all activity
came in 1979 when the label’s principal backer
went bankrupt: that was bad enough, but among
the assets seized by the Treasury were all the tapes
comprising the Symphonica catalogue. Up to this
point these consisted of 15 LPs (four doublealbums and seven single discs): they disappeared
overnight, and most would not re-surface until
their release was finally negotiated a full decade
later.
Des knaben Wunderhorn and Das Klagende Lied
dated from the pre-Symphonica period, and had
already been reissued by Decca on Ace of Diamonds
LPs (L SDD-R26; L SDD-R27, respectively); in
1987 they were published on CD for the first time
by Nimbus (C NI5084, C NI5085). The rest is
more recent history. Although the record industry
had moved on in the interim and Mahler’s music
(in particular) was flooding the market, Morris’s
Symphonica performances were taken up under
licence after 1989 by a variety of other companies
and most achieved CD release at various times
Charles Rosen
on labels including Collins and Pickwick, though
only two of the Mahler symphony performances:
No. 5 (Collins C 1037-2) and No. 9 (Pickwick C
DPCD1025).
Wyn Morris, however, made a comeback of his
own in the recording studio in the mid-1980s via
a well-received disc of Wagner orchestral excerpts
with the LSO (Cirrus C CICD1005). He had
not been seen on a rostrum for almost a decade,
but was soon to embark on a recorded cycle of the
Beethoven symphonies with the same orchestra.
He had tackled the Eroica and three of the piano
concertos (with Charles Rosen) during the
Symphonica period, but it was nevertheless quite a
feat now to emerge from relative obscurity in such
repertory and make an impact. His Beethoven
cycle on the Pickwick label, produced by John
Boyden and engineered by Trygg Tryggvason,
proved to be remarkably successful with the
critics, who unhesitatingly drew attention to the
performances’ individual structural qualities, their
spontaneity and the outstanding orchestral playing
Morris obtained; most remarked on the unforced
naturalness of his approach to Beethoven. The
coupling of Nos. 4 and 5 (C PCD869) was
especially admired, that of Nos. 7 and 8 scarcely
less so (C PCD918), while The Penguin Guide
for one thought that Morris’s Eroica “matched
and even outshone most full-price rivals” (C
PCD900). The cycle was capped by the premiere
recording of Barry Cooper’s realisation of the first
movement of the composer’s “Symphony No. 10”
(C PCD911). Also from this LSO period came a
Mahler Fourth Symphony (with Patricia Rozario:
Collins C 1044-2), a coupling of Rachmaninov’s
Piano Concerto No. 2 and his Paganini Rhapsody
(David Golub the pianist: C PCD903) and Aaron
Copland’s Lincoln Portrait with Margaret Thatcher
as speaker: “A grreat woman”, he said to me, in a
voice of conviction filled with Welsh fervour (EMI
C CDC7 54539-2 or 8 80208-2).
The 1990s were notable for a brief flirtation
with the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra, but some
concerts at London’s Barbican came to nothing
despite a very fine Mahler Sixth Symphony in which
the orchestra’s specialist period timbres recreated
something of how the music might have sounded
at its birth. Certainly there were no more records,
whether of Mahler or anybody else. Nowadays
Wyn Morris’s disc legacy, founded principally on
those Mahler performances that marked him out as
a conductor of unusual ability and distinction and
earned him the Bruckner-Mahler Society medal
in 1968, seems largely relegated to secondhand
dealers’ lists and the internet where, ironically,
the sometimes astonishing prices asked would
seem to indicate an almost cult-like interest in the
music-making of the man once dubbed the “Celtic
Furtwängler”.
CRC
27
They
came,
they
sang,
they
went
John T. Hughes
looks at cases
of singers who
made fleeting
appearances in the
recording studios.
Roger Rico, Algerian bass-baritone
I
t is well known that Sergiu Celibidache did
not enjoy recording and that many artists
in the early years of the twentieth century were
apprehensive about the new-fangled device that
reproduced what they had sung and played.
On looking back at what has been recorded,
one wonders why some performers appeared
infrequently in the studio. Take whichever
category of artist one wishes and one will find
them, examples of pianists, for instance, being
Kurt Appelbaum, France Ellegaard and Adolph
Hallis. The first gained from The Record Guide
(Collins, London, 1955) the words “ill-controlled
and technically fallible” for two Beethoven
sonatas on Westminster. Hallis’s contribution was
more significant, the first ever complete recording
of Debussy’s 12 Etudes, for Decca. Different fields
will reveal their own nominations. When a boy,
beginning the journey into expensive recorded
hedonism, I bought a Decca 78 of Mendelssohn’s
Hebrides Overture conducted by Heinz Unger
28
(1895-1965), who had two further Mendelssohn
78s, a Schubert overture and Beethoven’s Eroica
Symphony to his name but who made no LP
recordings.
My concern, of course, is singers. I should
point out here that in unwritten parenthesis after
the heading come the words “as far as I know”. I
have heard many people state with certainty that
so-and-so made no recordings, except that soand-so did. Thoughts of writing an article like this
came when I was reviewing the Bluebell CD of
Gunilla af Malmborg for “Voice Box”. Her lack
of commercial records led me to consider some
more singers in a similar situation. I am not going
to penetrate the cobwebs that enclose pre-1910
recordings listed in Bauer’s Historical Records
(Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1947), like Carl
Holy’s aria from Die Walküre, or Hildegard
Börner in Weber’s Preciosa on a 1900 Polyphon.
Let me begin, however, with somebody who had
just one HMV 78 to her name.
Sara Menkes (1910-80) recorded Aida’s
“Ritorna vincitor” on m C4078. The aria took
two sides and received from Alec Robertson in The
Gramophone (April 1951) one of the most damning
reviews that I have ever read. He wrote of “some
of the most ill-disciplined and over-emotional
singing”, of Menkes attacking her notes explosively,
that she “works her voice (a good one in itself )
like an incompetent organist his swell-pedal” and
that “the scoops and exaggerated portamenti are
lamentable”. If HMV’s directors read that, and
I’m sure they did, it is unsurprising that they and
Menkes parted company, leaving one to consider
why the record was issued.
Theo Herrmann
Why, though, did the worthy German bass
Theo Herrmann (1902-77) record only two sides,
for Columbia (m LX1358)? Each side bore a
Schubert song, one of which, Fahrt zum Hades,
was reissued in EMI’s “The Record Of Singing”,
Vol. 4. Herrmann had an operatic career of over
40 years, most of it at Hamburg, so he was no
backwoodsman. I do not know a CD transfer of
Der Zwerg, the second song.
Cetra issues
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cetra issued some
78s of singers represented nowhere else, except
maybe on broadcasts or in live performances. A
valuable collection of Cetra tenors was issued by
Pearl (C GEMS0120), but that label seems to
have fallen by the wayside. In spite of six tracks
being devoted to frequently reissued Ferruccio
Tagliavini material, that double-album brought
back such tenors as Leonida Bellon, Costanzo
Gero, Luigi Rumbo, Augusto Ferrauto and
Aurelio Marcato: hardly well represented on LP
or CD transfers. Rumbo sang a small role in the
live Anna Bolena with Callas, which EMI brought
out on CD, and Gero appeared in excerpts from
La bohème with Jolanda Meneguzzer (Allegro L
ALL760), but all five are neglected.
Some further Cetra tenors were not included.
Licinio Francardi (1922-94), a lyric tenor,
coupled “Pur dolente son io” from Cilea’s Gloria,
an attractive piece of singing, with an aria from
Mascagni’s Lodoletta, which I have not heard.
I very much like his “Pria che spunti in ciel” (Il
matrimonio segreto), nicely caressed. He sang the
small part of Abdallo in Cetra’s Nabucco with
Mancini and Silveri, then nothing. The more
dramatic Salvatore Puma (1920-2007) made a 78
of two of Otello’s arias and on another partnered
“Vesti la giubba” with a rarity: “Mio bianco
amore” from Catalani’s Dejanice. His big tones
can be heard on Cetra C CDAR2023 in a RAI
broadcast of Iris with Magda Olivero and Giulio
Neri and in Il tabarro on Myto C MCD992.207
with a soprano who fits this article. Nora De Rosa
was a spinto who has impressed me from that
performance and the couple of 78s that I have
come across.
Passing over even more tenors, I name such
sopranos as Giuseppina Arnaldi, Lidia Cremona,
Ines Fratiza Gasperoni or one who sang secondary
roles in some complete operas but on Cetra L
AT0296 gave creditable renderings of Liù’s arias
from Turandot. She was Loretto Di Lelio, wife of
Franco Corelli.
The many recordings emanating from German
radio stations have brought to the collector a
number of singers who rarely, if ever, made their
way to a recording studio. In past issues, “Voice Box”
has contained positive comments from me about
the tenor Heinrich Bensing, of whom I know no
commercial release. Werner Liebing, who sings in
the Dresden set to which I refer in “Voice Box” (see
page 99), was in Kempe’s Urania/Nixa Rosenkavalier
as the Italian Singer (L ULP9201-1/4), but
29
are there any other studio undertakings? His
equivalent in the Schech/Seefried/Streich DG
version was Rudolf Francl from Slovenia. Until 19
years ago I had encountered no more recordings
by him, then a Slovenian LP came into my ken,
with Francl singing eight operatic arias (all but
one Italian), while on the reverse came six from
soprano Ksenija (Xenia) Vidali (RTV Ljubljana
L KD0738). The latter is a case in point: before
seeing that LP I should have said that there were
no recordings of her, “as far as I know”. Born in
1913, she sang Antonia in Hoffmann (Arnaldi
was Olympia) and was in Respighi’s Belfagor on
RAI Turin in 1948. I have no intention, however,
of turning to Siberia to find further recordings
of Damdin-Surun Danshitsyrenova to add to the
one aria in my collection. Sorry!
Some participants in LP sets are worth noting.
João Gibin is a ringing yet sensitive Dick Johnson
in La fanciulla del west with Birgit Nilsson
(Columbia L SAX2286/8; EMI C 3 81862-2).
It seems that nobody at EMI noticed that, for he
was not called upon again. The Jack Rance in that
set was Andrea Mongelli, who had recorded the
title role in Don Pasquale on Plymouth (L P1245). He was not even first choice for Fanciulla, for
he replaced an indisposed Gobbi.
Aurelio Oppicelli
Another Italian who left little was Aurelio
Oppicelli. He had been one of three, not stopped
by an ancient mariner but signed by the Met as a
possible successor to Leonard Warren. He came,
sang and left the Met and was no more frequent
in the recording studio. Schaunard was his role
in La bohème, with Aureliana Beltrami and Doro
Antonioli, a good tenor who recorded little. It
seems to have been complete, but I have seen
only the Heliodor LP of excerpts (L 478049).
The obscure figure of Nino Scattolini, on whom
I have no information, recorded Cavaradossi for
Westminster with Simona Dall’Argine, a strongvoiced Tosca (Preiser C 20024) who undertook
Margherita in Mefistofele on Urania/Nixa (L
ULP9230-1/3). That role in the Cetra LP set
was taken by Disma Di Cecco, and I can name no
other part that she sang on disc. (She should have
been my first Italian soprano, in Verdi’s Requiem,
but cancelled.) If we stay with sopranos we note, in
no particular order, Anita Corridori as Gioconda,
30
another Urania/Nixa publication (L ULP9229),
who has not crossed my path elsewhere, even
in broadcasts; Grete Menzel as Idamante in
the Haydn Society Idomeneo (HLP2020-1/4);
Claudia Parada from Chile, deserving more
than just a Saga LP of excerpts from Aida with
Achille Braschi, Cetra’s Turiddu; Margaret Mas
in Il tabarro on HMV, and most inexplicably
Gabriella Tucci, a lovely soprano who performs
so well as Leonora in Il trovatore for EMI and
who sings Nedda on Decca. Further examples
could include Teresa Apolei (Remington), Lucy
Kelston (Cetra), José Soler (Cetra) and Licinio
Montefusco (Concert Hall). Who was Fanny
Colorni, who is Serpina in an RCA La serva
padrona (L LM2321)? Or Aldo Bacci, who sings
Uberto in the same opera on Vox L PLP6600?
It has long surprised me that only one complete
opera set has in its cast the admirable Greek
baritone Kostas Paskalis. The opera is Carmen and
Escamillo is not the best baritone role (Classics
for Pleasure C CFPD414454). There are one or
two live performances of him, including various
Verdi arias compiled on a Greek LP (AE L 004).
I remember being impressed by his Rigoletto at
Covent Garden a few years ago (39, actually).
The American tenor George Vincent replaced
August Seider as Lohengrin on another Urania/
Nixa set, in which Andreas Boehm made his one
recording, as Telamund, not long before his death
(L ULP9225-1/5). Géori Boué, Georges Noré
and Roger Rico sing in the postwar Faust under
Beecham (HMV m DB9422/37). Noré made
some 78s, but Faust seems to have been his only
complete role in a studio recording. How did the
virtually unknown Rico (1910-64) land the role
of Méphistophélès and having done so why did he
not appear in French issues of the 1950s? He did
not win plaudits from the authors of The Record
Guide (Collins, London, 1951), but nor did some
who went on to make more records. Another
opera with a singer unrepresented elsewhere to
my knowledge is the Philips Louise (C 442 0822). It was made at a time when French operas were
cast with French singers. Fine contributions came
from Berthe Monmart, Solange Michel and Louis
Musy, all of whom had further entries in their
discography, but also from André Laroze. He
is not on any non-commercial issue that I have
discovered either.
Excerpts on French LPs
Besides complete recordings, some French labels
issued LPs of operatic excerpts. Maurice Blondel,
another tenor who seemed to have disappeared
from record-company radar, sings the Duke of
Mantua in a selection from Rigoletto, joined by
the Gilda of Mado Robin and Michel Dens’s
jester (Pathé L DTX30173). In the 1950s quite
a few French or Francophone singers appeared on
disc, some famous, like Suzanne Danco, Léopold
Simoneau and Gérard Souzay; some perhaps
national rather than international, such as Henri
Legay, Jean Giraudeau and Xavier Depraz; and
others of lesser renown. Information on French
singers is not as readily available as it should be, and
record labels that were delving into radio archives
(INA; Cascavelle) have fallen asleep. Nowhere
have I found biographical details on Blondel, Guy
Fouché or, say, Robert Gouttebroze.
Over the years, record magazines have
published rather chauvinistic letters in which the
writer asked why certain British singers were not
recorded. Collectors in France, Germany, Italy
or wherever could have penned similar letters
about singers from their country. One reason,
presumably, was that not enough records of vocal
music could be made to provide opportunities
for more than a relative few. That situation would
have been strengthened, or worsened, by the fact
that singers on contract to a record company had
to be catered for, even if the assignment was not
wholly appropriate. Thus Decca, with Tebaldi
and Del Monaco under their wing, would not
have had roles for others in the same fach. For a
few operas someone else popped up. Giuseppe
Campora joined Tebaldi in Madama Butterfly
and Tosca. Giacinto Prandelli was recruited for
La bohème and would have been preferable to
Gianni Poggi in La traviata. Tebaldi stood aside
for Hilde Güden in Rigoletto, for Clara Petrella
in Pagliacci and for the Bulgarian mezzo Elena
Nicolai in Cavalleria rusticana. Nevertheless, it
was Tebaldi who held sway over most Verdi and
Puccini ventures.
Some British singers were being recorded,
although not generally in juicy roles in nonBritish operas. Again, one can look back at
old catalogues and reference books and spot
somebody who fits my title. What was the
background of Mary Hamlin, who sang Belinda
in Decca’s Dido and Aeneas? I have not seen her
name anywhere else. That set (m X101/7) has
not, I think, been transferred to LP or CD. I
should like to hear it if only for Mary Jarred as
the Sorceress. She did make other records but not
many. A later recording of Purcell’s opera (Period/
Nixa L PLP546) found Eleanor Houston as
Dido, seemingly her sole entry into the field. Her
Aeneas was Henry Cummings, who made a Decca
78 of two songs from Elgar’s The Starlight Express
(m K1995), and it was that label which placed
Ena Mitchell alongside Kathleen Ferrier in Bach’s
Cantata No. 11, which appears to be the solitary
title in her discography (Decca m AX399/401;
L LX3006). Recently, a live performance of
Mitchell in Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music
has come to light (Albion C ALBCD009).
Dorothy Bond
Apart from being in that less-than-wonderful
Les contes d’Hoffman under Beecham (Decca L
LXT2582/4, the bass-baritone Bruce Dargavel
(1905-85) recorded little, but a Welsh Qualiton
EP of five songs (BEP8004) may be worth reissuing
by someone. In one of the better contributions to
that set, Olympia is sung by Dorothy Bond, born
in 1921 and tragically killed in a car accident at
the age of 31. Apart from that inserted note for
Margherita Grandi’s Lady Macbeth, Bond went
into the studios for two or three other recordings,
including HMV’s A Village Romeo and Juliet of
Delius (m DB6751/62; EMI C CMS7 64386-2),
Bloch’s Sacred Service, conducted by the composer
(Decca m AX377/82; L LXT2516) and Bach’s
Cantata No. 152 with Robert Irwin, conducted
by Karl Haas (Westminster L WL5067; L
XWN18391). Another single-appearance singer
on Decca was Zoe Vlachopoulos, Amor in the
abridged Orfeo ed Euridice, also with Ferrier (Decca
m AX1656/62; L LXT2893). She may have
made some Greek songs back in her homeland,
but I have never seen such discs. Victoria Sladen
(1910-99), of Sadler’s Wells, made two Puccini
arias for HMV (m B9755), then a few years later
took the title role-in Sullivan’s Princess Ida, for
Decca (L LK4092/3). At least, she did better
than her fellow Sadler’s Wells artist Ruth Packer,
whose baritone colleague Alfred Orda considered
her a better singer than the more well-known Joan
Hammond.
31
Victoria Sladen
Leonora Lafayette
The USA had its own singers who made few
records. In the early days of LPs, many labels
arrived and left, such as Music Library, for which
two rare visitors to a recording studio made
recitals. The bass Desiré Ligeti coupled Brahms’s
Vier ernste Gesänge with some Hungarian songs
(L MLR7025) and tenor Carl Hague set down
an unhackneyed selection of Norwegian songs
(L MLR7034). Those records have eluded me;
the only Music Library LP that I possess is a song
recital by Donald Gramm (L LMR7033), but
that fine singer made a number of recordings and
does not qualify for this article. The black singers
Inez Matthews, Lucretia West, Camilla Williams
and McHenry Boatwright turned up occasionally,
but Lenora Lafayette (1926-75) had to come to
Britain, to join Richard Lewis in a disc of Puccini
arias and duets conducted by Sir John Barbirolli
(Pye L GSGC14039). I know that she can be
heard in a complete Aida, but that is a Bavarian
Radio broadcast (Walhall C WLCD0007).
Ernest McChesney performed at the New
York City Opera from 1954 to 1960, making his
debut there as Herod to Phyllis Curtin’s Salome
and Walter Cassel’s Jokanaan. He sang in the
LP set of Blitzstein’s Regina but earlier recorded
Ives songs (Concert Hall L C7). Better known
was Robert Weede, who sang ten seasons at the
Met, sporadically, and was frequently at the
San Francisco Opera. One looks in vain for a
complete studio opera with him, but he did
record a commendable Verdi recital on Capitol
L CTL7080, which has been reissued on Preiser
C 89657. He also recorded excerpts from The
Most Happy Fella. Another Capitol, and capital,
artist was Dorothy Warenskjold, highly pleasing
on two LPs of songs: L P8247 and L P8333.
She also recorded selections from musicals but
no operas. I think it is understandable that it was
more unusual for a singer to be offered an operatic
recital, especially by a small company, but Dorothy
Coulter, a notable soprano, recorded Verdi,
Puccini, Gounod, Korngold et al on Phoenix
Records L 435. A further American soprano,
Nancy Tatum, was allowed both an operatic LP
(L SXL6221) and one devoted to American
songs (L SXL6336) by Decca. Then she virtually
joined the category of “Whatever happened to?”.
Why, however, did Decca grant an opera/
operetta LP to Ursula Farr (L SXL6537)? Who
thought she deserved one for a major company?
Who was Eleanor Lutton, who committed Verdi
and Puccini arias to a ten-inch Véga LP with
Manuel Rosenthal conducting (L C35 S 268)?
For decades I have looked for further references
to her. The sleeve tells us nothing, anymore than
32
another Véga disc does for Colomba Mazzoni (L
13.000). That for the coloratura soprano Thérèse
Schmidt (Véga L LT13.021) does give some
information. She also features in excerpts from Il
barbiere di Siviglia with Gabriel Bacquier (Figaro)
and Roger Gardes (Almaviva), the latter another
French tenor who did not have a season ticket to
the recording studio (Opérama L OPE1002).
Gardes did sing Rodolfo to the Mimì of the
splendid Martha Angelici in selections from La
bohème (Pathé L DTX30174; EMI CZS7
67866-2 – this CD being in a box with extracts
from other operas).
Olivero neglected
Magda Olivero made a number of 78s for Cetra
but was all but ignored on LP sets. Decca used
her in Fedora (L SET435/6) and in excerpts
from Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini (L
SET422), but she was undervalued and underused. Fortunately off-the-air and live recordings
served her, and us, more handsomely, and she
became “Queen of the Pirates”. Or did that title
go to Leyla Gencer, who suffered greater neglect
by the “official” companies? Three or so LPs came
from Cetra, but nobody cast her in a complete
opera.
This article is a brief reflection on singers in this
situation: many more could have been included.
We also have the question of unpublished
records, which takes me in a circle back to 78s.
Nobody knows all the items incarcerated in
company archives. Occasionally something
“Previously unissued” emerges on CD, but many
remain hidden. When the San Carlo Opera of
Naples visited London in 1946, Decca recorded
Lina Aimaro and Carlo Tagliabue, neither a
Decca artist, in Rigoletto and La traviata pieces.
Raphael Arié provided two Tosti songs for that
company, and Ada Alsop sang Warlock’s Corpus
Christi Carol. None has been issued. There may
be unpublished 78s of Menkes, Herrmann et al.
As an obsessive collector I am pleased
that recordings have been made of the singers
mentioned above. Tenor-fanciers may like to
know that “The Record Collector” is planning
to issue two double-CD sets of mainly neglected
tenors who performed in Italy from about 1940
to 1955, some of whom are included in this
article.
CRC
Nancy Tatum
Dorothy Warenskjold
Leyla Gencer
33
An interview
with Paul Myers
David Patmore
I
recently met the veteran record producer Paul
Myers, who now lives in Brighton. Paul reminisced
eloquently about his varied experiences in recording.
I started our conversation by asking him how he first
became involved in the record business:
I initially worked for David Kapp of Kapp
Records, whose brother founded American Decca,
and whose other brother founded a publishing
company. They were all three from Chicago where
their father owned a record shop. Dave was an
extraordinary man: he was a producer, but he didn’t
read music. He “discovered” an extraordinary
number of people, including the Andrews Sisters,
Woody Hermann, Harry Belafonte and Eartha
Kitt. He was wonderful man and he was very nice
to me. He was looking for someone who could
write notes on albums. He called me and asked
me if I was interested. I said that I had never done
this sort of thing, but he said he didn’t care about
that, and told me to write some material and he
would tell me if I was hired or not. And that’s
how it started. Then he sent me on the road with
salesmen, and he had me do advertising, and I got
him an article in Esquire magazine.
Eventually he said to me, “Well, you’ve done
everything, it’s time you produced a record”.
He had previously used another company for
the supply of his classical recordings, and he
thought that by using me he could dispense with
their services, which included the work of a fine
producer called Alan Silver. I was sharing an office
with a wonderful man named Emanuel Vardi,
a great viola player, and he said to me, “There’s
nothing to it, as long as you read music”. So we
made Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat with Melvyn
Douglas! (Kapp L S-6004). And I also recorded
another artist who has been heard of again quite
recently, the French-born pianist Daniel Ericourt.
He grew up with the Debussy family, and used to
take Debussy’s daughter Chou-chou for walks in
the Tuilleries Gardens in Paris (L S-9061 etc.,
UK Decca L ACL-R252/59). It was Alan Silver
34
Paul Myers
who found him. He would have had a much
bigger career had he not been married to a very
wealthy lady. He was a fine pianist and I admired
him greatly. Another of Alan’s discoveries was the
pianist Ann Schein who also recorded for Kapp,
notably in the music of Chopin (L 6001-S, etc).
Alan also brought in records that had been made
in Boston for a small company called Unicorn with
the trumpeter Roger Voisin which we also reissued
– these were among the first trumpet recordings
to sell widely (L 9017-S etc; L ACL-R56, 190/1,
230). And I recorded with Emanuel Vardi as well,
so we had a lot of fun.
After Kapp, Paul moved to Columbia Records
during the 1960s – a golden era of activity:
In the meantime I was also broadcasting for Kapp
because he knew that I had been a broadcaster – I
had “The Kapp Hour” on a Sunday afternoon at
3 o’clock on WQXR, a New York radio station.
Schuyler Chapin at that time was head of the
Masterworks label at Columbia Records and
he was looking for a replacement for one of his
producers who was leaving. He later admitted to
me that as an ardent Anglophile he had enjoyed
listening to me frequently on the radio, and so
he approached me and asked me to work for
Columbia. I went to see Dave Kapp and told him
about this, and he said, “That’s absolutely fine,
it’s what you should be doing. If you had told me
it was RCA I would have talked you out of it!”.
Columbia under Goddard Lieberson and RCA
were then great rivals. When I got to Columbia,
John McClure, one of Bernstein’s producers, asked
me if I’d like to look after the Epic label. Epic then
had a different sales force and was effectively a
separate company. It created a useful place for
George Szell who at Epic did not need to clash
with Bruno Walter on Columbia. Also on Epic we
had the Juilliard String Quartet, while Columbia
had the Budapest Quartet. And to make up the
roster of artists I imported recordings from labels
which were not then represented in America, such
as Harmonia Mundi and several others, including
the Spanish label Hispavox which had Alicia de
Larrocha on its books. So I released her records in
the USA. In fact it was I who introduced her on
record to Herbert Breslin, who made his fortune
managing Luciano Pavarotti, and who was then in
public relations. He was very enthusiastic about
Alicia’s playing. So I suggested that as she had
not played in the USA for several years he might
persuade her agent, Columbia Artists, to fix some
dates for her in the USA, and for him to represent
her personally. This in fact all happened, and so
Alicia was Herbert’s first major classical music
client, and then Pavarotti followed her to him
soon after!
Alicia de Larrocha
Goddard Lieberson
One of the artists Paul worked most closely with was
the conductor George Szell, and I asked him how he
fared with this legendary character:
Szell I found very open and easy, although of
course you could not make too many mistakes!
Once he trusted you, things were OK, and
fortunately he trusted me, and we got along very,
very well. The catalogue of Szell recordings with
the Cleveland Orchestra is one of the finest in the
world, especially as it was made in an era when
certain other conductors held sway in Europe. Szell
perhaps did not help himself as much as others
as he was always somewhat aloof in his relations
with the press. There’s a delightful story about
one of my colleagues who had been working with
Szell for some time and suggested that he should
therefore call him George. Szell looked at him for
a few minutes and replied, “Most of my friends
call me Mr Szell”, and that was that. Toscanini
was Szell’s idol. My first recording in Cleveland
was Debussy’s La mer and music by Ravel (Epic
35
L BC1263, UK Columbia L SAX2532). After
a complete play-through of the Debussy he did a
first take of the last movement. He came back to
listen afterwards and I said, “That was wonderful”,
to which he replied, “Have you heard the Toscanini
version?”, and that’s all he wanted to say. I made a
short record with him in which he talked about
his recordings, together with excerpts from them,
and when he heard it he wouldn’t let me release
it because he felt his English wasn’t good enough.
He commented, “I sound like a refugee from Swiss
Cottage!”.
I was in Carnegie Hall the night that Szell
conducted Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with Judith
Raskin, and I swore then and there that I was going
to record it. John McClure was responsible for the
Bernstein Mahler series that was then in full flow
for the Columbia label, so I went to him and said
that Szell would not renegotiate his contract unless
he could record the Mahler Fourth, after which I
went to Szell and said that John McClure had told
me that he would only agree to re-sign Szell if he
recorded the same Mahler, and that’s how we got
it! It was a great performance (US Columbia L
MS6833; L SAX5283). Szell hated recording
generally unless he could give a performance. Every
now and then he would do some things in Europe
which were often patched together from a number
of takes, whereas with many of his Cleveland
recordings he really was giving a performance.
Altogether I made 40 records with him, and for me
he was really a great conductor, of that old school.
The reason that the Mahler Fourth is so good is
because you get what is exactly on the can. Mahler
was a conductor, he knew what he wanted to the
last detail and Szell conducted that way too. He
was also a great friend of the Korngold family and
he conducted some of the very early recordings of
arias by Korngold during the 1920s.
We moved on to life at Columbia:
Goddard Lieberson was the head of the classical
division at Columbia Records when I started
there and was also very keen on original cast
show albums. He was the one who insisted that
Columbia take My Fair Lady, which initially
had to run 88 backers’ auditions. The deal that
Lieberson did was that eventually Columbia
would become the owners of My Fair Lady.
36
This type of work helped him to move up the
corporate ladder and he finally became President
at Columbia. But nonetheless he was very
involved in what happened and used to attend
an Artists and Repertoire meeting every month.
At one point we were preparing our summer
convention, with hundreds of representatives,
and he listened to all the records that we had on
the classical side and said that there was nothing
there good enough and that we were going to
have to find something better. So he certainly was
very influential. He said that you have to have a
classical department, “we owe it, and we make
enough money from pop records to finance it”.
He was very enlightened and George Marek who
was running classical music at RCA said more
or less the same thing. At the same time I think
that as matters progressed, Lieberson realised
that the original cast albums, which came out
on the Masterworks label, helped the classical
department, which never made that much of a
profit. One of the first things that Clive Davis did
when he took over at Columbia was to take these
original cast issues off the Masterworks budget.
One of the many fascinating people I also worked
with at Columbia was Peter Munves, who was an
extraordinary marketing man. He had a pretty
good idea of what was going to happen to the
classical recording market in the future, long
before others got to it. He was even then putting
out records like “Bach’s Greatest Hits”. He also
had a phenomenal memory – he seemed to know
the number of every Columbia record!
Following his years in New York, and as he initially
hailed from England, Paul was then asked to head a
newly opened classical division of Columbia, called
CBS, in London:
Because recording was cheaper during the 1960s in
England than in the USA, I was eventually drafted
over to head up Columbia’s UK label, CBS, in
London. Well, it was certainly different from the
USA. Most of the material, of course, came from
America. But there were some odd occurrences.
For instance, Isaac Stern told the people in New
York, Tom Shepherd and Tom Frost, that he wasn’t
going to resign his contract unless they signed his
protégé Pinchas Zukerman. So when Raymond
Lewenthal, whom I was recording in London,
Pinchas Zukerman
suddenly fell ill, at short notice they flew over
Pinky Zukerman whom they didn’t really know.
I called them the day after the recording sessions
of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Doráti
conducting (US Columbia L MS7313; UK CBS
L 72768), and asked them, “Have you actually
listened to Pinky?”, and one of them admitted
“No”. So I replied, “I suggest that you do, he is very
good!”. The English market of course was different
from that of America. Initially magazines such as
The Gramophone were very influential. If they said
a record was good, people would go about and buy
it. But gradually that has changed, especially as the
classical catalogue has grown. So now it’s quite
impossible to recommend one particular version,
and in the end you go by the price or the picture!
I was reasonably autonomous when I was
heading up Columbia in the United Kingdom.
But the truth came home to me when Dick Ascher,
who ran the company, started manufacturing our
pressings in Holland. I naively asked if this was
because they were of a higher quality, but the
actual answer was that this way he was left the
pressing machines in the UK entirely free to work
on pop records, and that although we were losing
money on classical music sales it wasn’t enough to
really matter. One of the key figures in England
was Kenneth Glancy, the first managing director
of CBS. He loved classical music and wasn’t going
to let it down. It was he who brought on board
his close friend Pierre Boulez. With Boulez
conducting, I produced the complete Webern
(UK CBS L 79402; Sony C SM3K45845), and
Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (US Columbia
L M2 33594; L 79201) as well as some French
repertoire, including the Covent Garden
production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande
which had no native French speaker in the cast!
(L M3-30119; L 77324.) In fact George Shirley,
who sang Pelléas in this production, learnt the part
phonetically. When I first came to London to make
records it was so cheap compared with the USA.
I remember attending one of the meetings of the
record industry committee that agreed the level
of recording fees for orchestras and they were all
arguing about whether a rank and file player should
get an extra 1s 8d a session and I’d been working in
America where the figures were in thousands. The
difference was quite a shock! Shortly afterwards
the fees for orchestral musicians were raised by 12
per cent which made a big difference to classical
music recording budgets. Nowadays of course the
figures don’t add up at all – it costs about £60,000
to record a major symphony orchestra for a CD
requiring four sessions, at a time when CDs are
not selling that well.
I was lucky in some ways when I was at
Columbia and CBS, in that Goddard Lieberson
did not like opera. He said opera-lovers don’t like
music, they like singers, and so during the 1950s
and 1960s Columbia recorded very few operas. But
when I was in London and relatively independent
I was able to make something like 25 operas in
quite a short space of time. It was a golden era
during the 1970s in London, working with singers
such as Frederica von Stade, Kiri Te Kanawa, and
Plácido Domingo. One of my favourites among
our recordings was Charpentier’s Louise (L M334207; L 79302). We expanded the catalogue
with titles such as this and Massenet’s Cendrillon
(L M3-35194; L 79323), because EMI and Decca
had already recorded most of the core repertoire.
One of the conductors I enjoyed working with
the most was John Pritchard – he was so musical
and understanding, and always achieved great
results. I was also a great fan of Menotti. I think
The Consul is a wonderful opera, which works very
well indeed on stage.
37
But all good things come to an end, and in this case,
Paul was drafted back to New York, albeit for a short
while only:
After several enjoyable years in London, I was
suddenly relocated back to Columbia in New
York, where I found the most ghastly politics
going on, during the reign of Walter Yetnikoff,
who was pretty unapproachable. Fortunately
Ray Minshull at Decca was an old friend, and he
knew the situation, so as soon as the sale of Decca
to Polygram went through I left Columbia for
Decca. Decca had this great cadre of producers
which had been built up by John Culshaw. And
they had expert engineers in good quantity. They
obtained a wonderful sound and that’s one of
the reasons why so many Decca recordings have
lasted so long in the catalogue. The engineers were
supreme, to the point that if they felt the hall did
not have the right acoustics, they would not make
the record. At CBS by contrast we had to make do
with whatever we had.
After I left Decca I did a lot of sessions for
Naxos, some in Leeds with the Orchestra of
Opera North, then called the English Northern
Philharmonia, and with David Lloyd-Jones and
Paul Daniel conducting. I remember we did
Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending when it
was so windy outside that the roof of Leeds Town
Hall made a whirring sound! (C 8.553955).
Another Naxos production of which I’m very fond
is Offenbach’s Gaîté Parisienne with its arranger
Manuel Rosenthal conducting (C 8.554005). We
did this in Monte-Carlo when he was 94 years old.
He was amazingly spry for his age. Evidently after
he had completed the score, the dancer Leonide
Massine, who had originally commissioned it,
turned it down. Rosenthal suggested that they
seek the opinion of Stravinsky, who unexpectedly
announced, “I adore Offenbach!”, after which
Massine changed his mind.
While I was active as a producer I also
moonlighted by writing mystery novels set in
the worlds of classical music and recording. I
developed a stock of characters that reappear
throughout my novels from time to time, just as
they do in real life. And there’s a funny story about
one of these, a violinist who is rather a bullying
type, and always trying to run people’s lives for
them. Well, one day I received a phone call from
38
Manuel Rosenthal
a famous orchestra manager working across the
Atlantic, who remarked to me, “You know that
violinist in your books, the one who is always
trying to run everyone’s life – well he played here
last night!”.
We concluded by my asking Paul for one of his
favourite stories about the many great artists with
whom he has worked:
In one of the Beethoven piano sonatas there is an
ink blot on one of the pages of the last movement
and you can play either an A natural or an A flat.
Well, the first time that I met Rudolf Serkin I was
sitting with Szell in his study, and Serkin came in,
we shook hands and Szell looked up and just said,
“A flat”. Serkin replied softly, “No, George, A”. Of
course I had no idea what was going on, and so
later Szell explained it all to me. Well, about two
weeks after Szell had died, I bumped into Serkin
in a London hotel where I was meeting another
musician. Serkin said to me, “I must tell you
something. I was in Zürich two nights ago, and I
was thinking about George. I was just checking my
score of that Beethoven sonata before I went on to
play it, and I suddenly noticed that scrawled on the
page by this disputed note, was the comment, ‘It’s
A flat, you idiot!’ in George’s handwriting, and so
that night I played A flat, and it worked!” CRC
George Szell
39
Jean Martinon
(10 January 1910 – 1 March 1976)
Jon Tolansky celebrates Martinon’s
birth centenary with a tribute to
the eminent French conductor’s
art and a commentary on his
legacy of recordings
I
t was a cold and bleak early Sunday morning in
a deserted road just behind the Royal Festival
Hall in London. A taxi drew up and a slim, elderly
man with grey hair got out and paid the driver. He
then walked with his briefcase to the hall’s artists’
entrance – as it was then in February 1973. I too
was heading to the artists’ entrance, for the same
reason. I was going to take part in a rehearsal of
Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (the two orchestral suites)
with the distinguished Jean Martinon conducting
the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. But how was
it that such a renowned artist was making and
paying his own way to the hall? I had played for
conductors of considerably less repute who would
arrive in saloon cars provided for them.
That image of Martinon arriving in a London
cab has stayed in my mind all these years, because
it contrasted notably with the strong authority
that he had exerted in rehearsals during the two
previous days. Not that he was at all authoritarian
as some conductors of his generation famously
were. He just automatically expressed authority
through his complete knowledge of all the score’s
details, his meticulous musical demands, and
outstanding technical control – as well as on this
occasion, it must be said, a somewhat trenchant
40
insistence on obtaining what he wanted. That
was solely in pursuit of realising the composer’s
intentions. As a composer himself, Jean Martinon
had a special ear and comprehension of the
relationship between intricate detail and overall
structure, and I remember well how intensively he
worked to achieve that balance and how vividly it
was imparted by his flawless conducting technique.
He was especially fussy about dynamic contrasts,
clarity of parts, subtle shades of changing colours,
and rhythmic refinement: the very essence of the
wonderful score he was conducting, and which he
famously recorded: the complete ballet with the
Orchestre de Paris (HMV L SLS5016 ; EMI C
5 75526-2), and the second suite with the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra (RCA L SB6627; C 09026
63683).
It was as a violinist and a composer that Jean
Martinon’s reputation as an outstandingly gifted
artist first burgeoned. He was just 18 years old
when in 1928 he won the premier prix for violin
at the Paris Conservatoire, where his violin teacher
was Jules Boucherit and his composition teachers
were Vincent d’Indy and Albert Roussel. Roussel
in particular became a mentor to Martinon until
his death in 1937. A life as a concert violinist was
Martinon’s principal direction at this time, but he
became increasingly preoccupied with composition
too, and it was with the intention of directing
his own music that he first took up conducting,
studying with two luminaries of the time: Roger
Désormière and Charles Munch. This was in the
mid-1930s, and he did then appear as a conductor
of some of his works. His real conducting career
had to wait until 1943, after he was released from
a German prison camp, having been captured a
few years before and subsequently recaptured after
escaping. In prison he wrote several works and,
importantly, one of these, Chants des captifs (Psalm
36) was conducted by Munch in the very year that
Martinon was released (it later earned him a special
prize from the city of Paris).
An appointment at Bordeaux
With his freedom regained he now began to devote
himself more regularly to conducting, principally as
conductor of the Bordeaux Symphony Orchestra,
and in Paris, where in 1944 Munch appointed him
to be his assistant with the Paris Conservatoire
Orchestra. When this orchestra organised a tour of
Europe not long after the end of the war, Munch
persuaded Martinon to be its guest concertmaster
for this auspicious event. But fate intervened on the
younger conductor’s side. It transpired that Munch
could not be available for the tour, and Martinon
stood in for him, scoring a level of success that fast
established him as one of the most brilliant new
figures on the podium. The London Philharmonic
Orchestra was quick to pick up on this, and he
moulded his early international career especially
with it as a regular guest between 1947 and 1950.
He also made his first recordings for Decca with the
LPO – Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin (m K183839), and “Adieux, forêts” from Tchaikovsky’s Maid
of Orleans with the mezzo Eugenia Zareska, both
in May 1947 (m K2087), and Chabrier’s Suite
pastorale in December 1948 (m AK2239-40; m
AX390-91).
When LP arrived Decca engaged Martinon
in more sessions with the LPO in overtures by
Offenbach (L LXT2590) and Hérold, Boïeldieu
and Adam (L LXT2606), both reissued as part
of a nine-CD set of all the conductor’s Decca LP
recordings – C 475 720-9). They created a stir
Albert Roussel
Charles Munch
41
Fritz Reiner
Jean Martinon
for their stylistic character and brilliant quality
of playing: textures were immaculately refined,
there were wide-ranging and sparkling colours,
and a vivacious rhythmic abandon in the faster
passages with some strikingly bravura accelerandi
that were brought off with knife-edged precision –
the sign of a virtuoso technician with outstanding
control. These were qualities that were to permeate
much of Martinon’s conducting until his final
years, when it did seem that there was less of the
effervescent zest and super-tight neatness that
were so impressive in the overtures discs, and quite
extraordinarily so in, for instance, the recordings
of the ballet music from Massenet’s opera Le cid
with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (Decca L
SXL2021) and the overture to Lalo’s opera Le roi
d’Ys with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (RCA
L VICS1358). The latter two orchestras were
among several major international ensembles that
Martinon headed as music director.
The period of Martinon’s Decca LP recordings,
from 1951 to 1960, consolidated his reputation
as an internationally revered conductor of artistic
refinement and technical virtuosity. During this
time he had posts with the Lamoureux Orchestra
and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra while
continuing his close associations with the LPO and
Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. Between 1953 and
1955 Martinon made some recordings with the
Lamoureux Orchestra for Philips, including works
by Debussy, Falla, Fauré, Prokofiev and, notably,
his first version of Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane ballet
suites (L NBR6031). His recorded legacy of this
period includes some items that are special gems: in
addition to those already mentioned I would single
out the two suites from the little performed ballet
Namouna of Lalo (Decca L LXT5114) – surely
a magnificent achievement of rhythmic brilliance,
evocative magic and pointed characterisation,
and with impeccable balances of parts. Made
in 1955, this was when Sir Thomas Beecham’s
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Walter Legge’s
Philharmonia Orchestra were Britain’s premier
ensembles, and it is notable that under Martinon
the LPO’s sonority, intonation and ensemble were
so outstanding. I think it is fair to say that in those
days, less than now, conductors influenced these
technical elements more directly for better or
worse – and here very much to the good.
There was also a performance of Tchaikovsky’s
Sixth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic
(Decca L SXL2004) – highly regarded by some,
and not so liked by others – and a large number of
works by varied composers such as Berlioz, Dvořák,
Ibert, Rossini, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Later
on RCA and then Erato, EMI and DG made a large
42
Rafael Kubelík
number of discs with Martinon and, especially, the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris
and Orchestre National de France.
The Chicago years
During his tenure in Chicago, from 1963 to 1968,
some of his RCA discs attained a very high status,
notwithstanding the drastic treatment he received
from the press, notably from the influential
Claudia Cassidy of the Chicago Daily Tribune,
who had been largely responsible for the demise
of Rafael Kubelík in Chicago in 1953. Some of
the reason in both cases was to do with repertoire.
Martinon was adventurous and certainly seen by
reactionaries as unsuitable following the famously
high reputation Fritz Reiner had brought to
the orchestra, particularly in the German and
Austrian classics with just occasional excursions
into more adventurous contemporary repertoire.
Martinon too was by most accounts a fine,
tasteful and stylish interpreter of Beethoven,
Brahms, Schubert and Schumann, but the focus
of the assaults particularly dwelt on some of the,
ironically, magnificently played performances he
and the Chicago Symphony gave of works such
as Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony (L SB6720; C
82876-76237-2), and Varèse’s Arcana, coupled
with Martin’s Concerto for seven winds,
percussion and strings (L SB6710 –Varèse on C
09026 63315-2).
The most representative selection of Martinon’s
repertoire in Chicago can be found in a series of
unofficial releases of live performances on the
Disco Archivia label. This series has, for instance:
Schumann’s Fourth Symphony and Prokofiev’s
Fifth Symphony (C 1062); Enesco’s Suite No. 1
for orchestra and Franck’s Variations symphonique
with the pianist Robert Casadesus (C 1063);
a concert performance of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s
Castle with Thomas Stewart and Evelyn Lear (C
1064); Ravel’s La valse, Roussel’s Symphony No.
4 and an astonishing performance of Debussy’s
La mer (C 1065); Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for
Orchestra, Stravinsky’s Variations, Messiaen’s
Oiseaux exotiques and Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony
(C 1067); and Martinon’s own Symphony No.
2 and Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto
with Mstislav Rostropovich (C 1112). Further
Disco Archivia issues of Martinon conducting
other orchestras include symphonies by another
composer with whom he felt a great affinity –
Gustav Mahler. His Eighth Symphony and the
Deryck Cooke performing version of the Tenth,
both given at the 1975 Hague Holland Festival are
on C 1066.
Chicago too benefited significantly from
Martinon’s Mahler. This was one of the issues
discussed in a conversation I had very recently with
one of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s most
admired musicians, former Principal Trumpet
Adolf (Bud) Herseth.
I was very surprised to discover when we performed
Mahler’s Third Symphony with him that this was in
fact the very first time the orchestra had ever played
the work. He did a wonderful job with it, he absolutely
grasped the unique Mahlerian style and sound world,
which he worked very hard with us to attain, and we
felt he was one of the finest Mahler interpreters in our
experience. Of course he was particularly famous for
his echt performances of French and Russian music,
but he also impressed us very much in the German
and Austrian classics. In fact he was a truly excellent
and highly stylish conductor of a very wide range
of repertoire, which extended to quite a number of
important new contemporary works. In all the music
he conducted he was so precise without ever overdoing
anything, he balanced the parts meticulously, and he
43
had a marvellous talent for indicating just the right
emotions to various players for different passages in
different repertoire. He was a very special guy!
For which Jean Martinon was thanked by scathing
reviews from Claudia Cassidy in The Tribune. She
was not the only influential force in Chicago with
a compulsion to compare Martinon unfavourably
with Fritz Reiner. Bud Herseth continues:
When he came here following Reiner he was
immediately in a difficult position because Reiner
was so very special in his own way and his reputation
in Chicago, as well as in the world of course, was
tremendous. After all we made so many outstanding
records with Reiner that are still some of the bestselling award winners in recorded classical music
history. The fact is that Martinon came in right after
this and was magnificent in his own right.
Certainly Martinon did inherit from Reiner one
of the greatest virtuoso bodies of players in the
world, but it is most interesting to hear how in his
hands it certainly did not sound identical at all to
how it had been with his predecessor. I think an
ideal example of this is a comparison between
both conductors’ recordings of Ravel’s Alborada
del gracioso – by Reiner on RCA L SB2044, C
GD6017; Martinon on RCA L VICS1619 – and
I feel it is in the style of woodwind playing that the
difference is most noticeable. Reiner’s intensely
tight control and very taut rhythmic style produces
exceptional razor-sharp articulation at the expense,
I suggest, of expressive warmth: the clown’s
staccatissimo tension is almost psychotic, as it were.
Martinon is also highly controlled rhythmically,
but in a more gently elastic way with a slight but
effective extra spaciousness in his phrasing that
produces a rounder tonal balance and a more
personal expressiveness: here the clown is not
quite so spiky and agitated and somehow more
ruminative, more melancholy. This is not the place
to start making a list of comparisons of Martinon
with other conductors, but in passing I would like
very briefly to extend the line of Alborada examples
to recordings both Jean Martinon and Herbert von
Karajan subsequently made of this work with the
Orchestre de Paris for EMI (Martinon HMV L
SLS5016, EMI C CZS5 68610-2; Karajan HMV
L ASD2766, EMI C CDM7 64357-2). Regardless
44
of any personal preferences one may have about
their individual interpretations, when we hear the
striking differences in Karajan’s textures, often so
much more intangible in impression, and dynamics
so vastly greater, especially the pianissimi, maybe we
have a clue why it was that Karajan and Reiner were
more celebrated than Martinon. I emphatically
do not mean this as a value judgement on any of
these three artists. It is solely an observation that
Reiner’s and Karajan’s styles are very noticeably
their own in both cases, reflecting characteristics
that were recognisable in so much of the music
they conducted.
Back to Europe
After leaving Chicago, Martinon made a large
number of recordings for Erato and then EMI,
mostly with the Orchestre National de France, of
which he became music director. His Alborada
del gracioso recording with the Orchestre de
Paris was part of an ambitious comprehensive
undertaking of Ravel’s orchestral works for EMI
in 1974 (L SLS5016; C CZS5 68610-2). The
previous year he and EMI performed a similar
service for Debussy, recording all the orchestral
works including the rarely heard Musiques pour
le roi Lear, La plus que lente and Khamma with
the Orchestre National (L SLS893; C 65235-2
& 65240-2) and with it he also notably recorded
for EMI the complete symphonies of Saint-Saëns
(HMV L SLS5035), and, in spectacularly brilliant
performances, Schmitt’s Psalm 47 and La tragédie
de Salomé (HMV L ASD2892). Among Erato
recordings with the Orchestre National were
works by Franck, Saint-Saëns – another version of
the Third Symphony plus Danse macabre and Le
rouet d’Omphale (L STU70631), Poulenc, Martin
himself and several works by Roussel. He also
recorded the complete symphonies of Prokofiev
for Vox (L TV35050/5S). It was during the
period of his tenure with the Orchestre National
that Jean Martinon became a particularly valued
guest of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, when
my former colleagues violinist Haim Lazarov and
percussionist Rodney Newton played for him.
Haim Lazarov recalls:
I played on his tour of Germany – I think it was the
last time he conducted. He was an outstandingly
nimble accompanist to Justus Franz in the Schumann
Piano Concerto and to Moura Lympany in Ravel’s
Left Hand Piano Concerto. We also performed
Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony, Brahms’s
Symphony No 4 and Bliss’s Music for Strings. He
was very demanding but never unpleasant. His
conducting technique was outstanding – it reminded
me of André Cluytens and Paul Paray: very elegant,
with a very wide range of different gestures. It
was light in its way, but there was stainless steel
underneath.
And the steel could often be felt in the dynamics, as
Rodney Newton remembers:
The climaxes had to be tremendous for him. I was
playing the tam-tam in Ravel’s La valse, and at
its first entrance near the end he wanted a colossal
impact. But it wasn’t enough just to play louder – he
was very fussy about the character too. In Prokofiev’s
Third Symphony I was also playing the tam-tam and
on the last chord he said, “Monsieur, could you roll
the tam-tam?”. Now how many conductors would
know that this is a way of making a forte tam-tam
note sound sustained? He had remarkable hearing
and knowledge.
Which brings me back full circle to where
I began this centenary tribute to Jean Martinon.
I particularly remember in the rehearsals for
that 1973 Daphnis et Chloé performance how
he several times asked for a bright and brilliant
sound from the trumpets, and how extremely
meticulous he was in balancing the chorus’s inner
parts. It was all part of his pursuit to realise the
truth of the composer’s vision, with an objective
integrity and fastidious stylishness that surely
made him one of the finest practitioners of his
art and craft.
CRC
45
The Download Revolution
In the first of three articles Nick Morgan shares the fruits of hours – nay,
years – misspent on the internet
T
hey really are that much-overused word:
a revolution. I used to agree with fellowcollectors who prefer real discs; but suddenly, after
25 years of compulsively hoarding records (mainly
CDs), I’m a convert. Collecting originals is still
vital; but if, like me, you’ve limited funds and space,
downloads have a lot to offer. I’m dividing this
survey into three parts: the market for commercial
downloads is changing so quickly that the Editor
has given me more time to explore it. But you can
build up a very rich collection without spending
anything (on downloads, that is – obviously, you’ll
need a computer and broadband internet access).
This is thanks to the generosity and foresight of
public institutions and private individuals, who
have grasped – far better, it seems, than many
record companies, retailers or broadcasters – how
perfectly the internet serves specialist interests. So
it’s with non-commercial, institutional downloads
that I shall start.
State and academic sound archives have been
rather slow to embrace the internet, despite their
public service remits; even now, efforts range
from the disappointing to the spectacular. The
Library of Congress was an early starter, with the
paradoxical result that its “American Memory” site
is now outdated; and classical music recordings
are only a small part of its offerings. Much newer
is the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings
site, which ranges extraordinarily widely across
different fields and sources. It would take the rest
of this issue to go through them all – the scans of
early record catalogues, spoken-word recordings,
oral histories of the record industry, all the ethnic,
natural history, popular and literary material – so
I’ll concentrate on the “classical music” section.
This makes available the complete orchestral
works and concertos, more or less, of Bach, Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, Beethoven’s string
quartets and the piano music of Chopin, in transfers
from commercial 78s and LPs issued before 1958. I
believe it includes every relevant, complete recording
in the BL’s collection, resulting in a survey of great
46
richness as well as scope. Perhaps, like me, you read
David Patmore’s “Rarissima” column in the Spring
2006 CRC (page 9) with a pang of regret that you
would never hear Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos
played by Anthony Bernard’s London Chamber
Orchestra, with Walter Gieseking in No. 5. This,
the first electrically recorded cycle, was pressed and
advertised by Brunswick in 1929 but cancelled and
so thoroughly destroyed that no complete set is
known to survive. On the ASR site you can, at last,
hear all of Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 and parts
of Nos. 3 to 6, including an athletic final Allegro of
No. 5 in which Gieseking does not disappoint.
Archival Sound Recordings
Sound files on the Archival Sound Recordings
website can be listened by anyone in the
United Kingdom as “streams” but they can’t be
downloaded and saved; that facility is reserved for
members of accredited educational institutions.
(Unfortunately, variations in copyright law mean
that residents of some other countries will not
be able to receive even the streamed files.) There
are, inevitably, mistakes, which the BL is only
too happy to be informed of and will correct. I
regret its decision to split 78 sides where these
contain more than one item, such as Chopin’s
Etudes and Preludes. For years I had been chasing,
unsuccessfully, the short-lived CD reissues of
Robert Lortat’s Chopin recordings, made between
1928 and 1930. Lortat’s Sonata in B flat minor is
one of the most impassioned performances I know;
thanks to ASR, I have now listened to it many
times and gratefully renounce chasing the CD. The
Sonata, like all multi-movement works on ASR,
has been uploaded as a single sound-file (which isn’t
ideal, from an academic point of view); yet each of
Lortat’s Etudes and Preludes has been uploaded
separately. Not only has this left some abrupt starts
and stops, but because ASR doesn’t allow users to
compile playlists, listening to these short pieces
is a chore. Despite these minor reservations, I
cannot recommend ASR too highly; and a mouth-
Irene Scharrer
Walter Gieseking
watering addition is in the pipeline, the almost
complete published recordings of HMV’s first
“house” string quartet, the Philharmonic Quartet,
made between 1915 and 1920.
Already “live” but officially launched in July
is the online sound archive at King’s College,
London. As this is primarily an academic resource,
78 sides have not been joined together (there are
no LPs – yet) but anyone, not only academics, can
download the files. I must declare a (non-financial)
interest here: I was one of the main choosers for
this project, born under the Centre for the History
and Analysis of Recorded Music and extended,
after CHARM ended, as “Musicians of Britain
and Ireland 1900-1950”. It has been ably written
up in CRC by David Patmore (Winter 2008, page
58 and Winter 2009, page 48) though he modestly
underplays his own role in inspiring the selection.
David’s work on the birth of EMI in 1931 charted
the emergence of a new recording policy which
favoured international stars at the expense of the
parent companies’ local artists, who have been
under-represented in academic studies and CD
reissues ever since: MBI aimed to begin redressing
that neglect.
The BL kindly gave advance notice of its plans, so
KCL’s cornucopia mostly complements ASR: there
are symphonies, concertos, quartets and sonatas
but also vocal music (some chosen by the doyen of
vocal critics, John Steane), from folk songs, ballads,
madrigals and a vast corpus of Schubert Lieder to
sacred polyphony, oratorios, operettas and operas,
including not just the first complete recording of
Charles Panzéra
Dido and Aeneas but the second too. Chamber
music is a special focus, recorded by British
ensembles and less well-known international
ensembles, such as the Concertgebouw Trio of
Amsterdam and Quartetto Poltronieri of Milan.
Female pianists are well represented, among them
Una Bourne, Harriet Cohen, Ethel Hobday, Eileen
Joyce, Kathleen Long (my favourite) and Irene
Scharrer. You may be puzzled to find some rather
workaday items: restaurant music, folk and country
dances, hymns sung by the congregation at St
Martin-in-the-Fields or the Wembley crowd at the
1927 Cup Final. As the late Cyril Ehrlich, father of
modern British music history, rightly said, we must
study not just the exceptional but the typical, the
ordinary. The archive also includes spoken word
recordings: Conan Doyle impatiently answering
popular questions about Sherlock Holmes before
moving on to his real topic, spiritualism; a 1930
BBC radio drama set on the Western Front –
but in the German trenches; lectures on music
appreciation; a musico-dramatic portrait of Bach’s
visit to Frederick the Great’s court.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Between them, the BL’s and KCL’s collections
should keep you busy for some time. I was almost
dismayed when a fellow-addict recently tipped
me off about another online archive: Gallica, the
“digital library” of the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France. I had visited this before and was a little
underwhelmed, but the staff of the Département
de l’Audiovisuel have been busy: there are now over
47
Kathleen Parlow
Fritz Heitmann
1,000 entries in the “Paroles et Musiques” section.
Many are actually “Paroles”, dialect recordings of
great age and interest, including, unbelievably, one
in Alsatian by a young Charles Munch, set down
in 1914 when he was dividing his studies between
medicine and music. But there’s also a huge
amount of music: until I found Gallica, I thought
I’d never hear Charles Panzéra singing Monteverdi
in 1924, let alone an anonymous string quartet
playing Schmelzer’s Polnische Sackpfeifer in 1913!
Elsewhere on the BNF’s website, you will find a
virtual exhibition entitled “Les Voix Ensevelies”
(Buried Voices), which recounts in great detail the
unsealing of the Urnes de l’Opéra, the time-capsule
buried under the Palais Garnier in 1903, with
samples of the well-preserved discs themselves,
since reissued on CD by EMI (reviewed in CRC’s
Autumn 2009 edition, page 89).
BL, BNF and KCL together are a hard act to
follow – so all credit to “The Virtual Gramophone”,
part of Library and Archives Canada, which can
rightly claim to furnish “researchers and enthusiasts
with a comprehensive look at the 78rpm era in
Canada”. This too makes hundreds of out-ofcopyright records freely available to download
or stream, on well laid-out pages containing
useful links. Not all of the material is Canadian
in origin; soprano Sarah Fischer’s records include
Canadian Pathé, British Gramophone Company
and Filmophone records, adding up to a valuable
conspectus of her work; more treasurable still is the
trove of recordings by violinist Kathleen Parlow,
who to my knowledge has never had a CD devoted
48
Jeanne Demessieux
to her. My only criticism is that The Virtual
Gramophone’s transfers can be over-filtered and
yet harsh.
Somewhat at a tangent to CRC readers’
tastes, I imagine, is the music enshrined in the
“Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project”
of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Thousands of digitised cylinders can be downloaded
or streamed, offering an unrivalled and sometimes
startlingly vivid picture of the earliest years of
recording. Most of the music is popular, some very
evocative, but there are, for instance, selections
from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, played by “The
London Regimental band, augmented by members
of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra”, surely one of the
orchestra’s earliest recordings, dated at the latest
to 1902. There can’t be many places where you can
hear so many performances by the violinist Charles
d’Almaine; or, delving into the very beginnings of
a career that would later shape the gramophone
as we know it, a 20-year-old “Professor” Fred
Gaisberg accompanying the whistler John Yorke
Atlee in 1893.
Beeld en Geluid
Closer to our world, the European Archive’s “Beeld
en Geluid” is a large collection of commercial LPs
formerly in the library of Dutch TV and Radio,
now freely available to download in a plethora of
formats: Concert Hall, Decca, DG, HMV, Nixa,
Philips, Supraphon, Vox and so on, mostly from the
1950s. Unfortunately, the transfers are often poor,
the main defect being ludicrously low levels; some
contain long silences and other mistakes. Possibly
these have been corrected since I last visited but a
quick look reminds me of other serious drawbacks,
such as the lack of discographical data: if no picture
has been posted, you’ve no idea what record you’re
listening to. And LPs are presented for browsing
in no useful order, such as upload date, label or
catalogue number, so that you have to search
for composer, titles (mostly in Dutch, fine for a
national archive but not for a Europe-wide one)
and artists – but searches return very unreliable
results. The Archive has potentially good content
and good ideas, such as its offer to host more such
collections – but these shortcomings need to be
addressed.
A different kind of radio archive is the Other
Minds Archive of original broadcast recordings
from the US Pacifica radio network. The content
is mostly twentieth-century American avant-garde
music (Cowell, Cage, Nancarrow and on) and
associated documentary material but is rapidly
becoming historical. The avant-garde is well
served on the internet, with at least two important
sites devoted to recordings, one of them called
“ubuweb”, the cult home of “visual, concrete and
sound poetry (historical, contemporary, insane)”.
Several European radio stations offer downloads
of more traditional repertoire, notably Holland’s
Radio 4, which in 2008 celebrated the one
hundred and twentieth anniversary of the (Royal)
Concertgebouw Orchestra with downloads of
symphonies conducted by Bernard Haitink and
others (but modern, not historical recordings).
Swedish Radio’s P2 Arkiv Poddradio has intriguing
archival downloads: Fritz Busch conducting
Berwald, Dean Dixon in Brahms and Bruno
Walter in Schubert, plus less well-known Swedish
artists. In Denmark, the Royal Academy of Music
in Aarhus is rare instance of a conservatoire offering
historical recordings: it hosts the impressive
International Historical Organ Recording
Collection, an unparalleled survey of the legacies
of players many of whom are poorly represented on
CD, if at all: Jeanne Demessieux, Fritz Heitmann,
Fernando Germani, André Marchal, Alfred Sittard
and others. Many of the originals apparently come
from the collection of Michael Gartz, whose name
will crop up again in the second article, which will
discuss historical downloads made available by
individual collectors and enthusiasts.
CRC
LINKS
“American Memory”, Library of Congress:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization
Project, University of California at Santa
Barbara:
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu
Archival Sound Recordings, British Library,
classical music section
http://sounds.bl.uk/BrowseCategory.
aspx?category=Classical-music
CHARM/MBI sound archive, King’s College,
London:
http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/sound/sound.html
CHARM discographical resources:
http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/discography/
disco.html
Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
“Paroles et Musiques”:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/Search?n=15&p=1&lang=E
N&adva=1&adv=1&t_oai_set=audio
Les Voix Ensevelies’ (Urnes de l’Opéra),
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
http://expositions.bnf.fr/voix/index.htm
The Virtual Gramophone, Library and
Archives Canada:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/
gramophone/index-e.html
Public Classical Music Beeld en Geluid,
European Archive:
http://www.europarchive.org/collection.
php?id=public_classical_music_BeG
Other Minds Archive, Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/other_minds
ubuweb:
http://www.ubu.com/
Avant Garde Project:
http://www.avantgardeproject.org/
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra downloads,
Radio 4, Holland:
http://kco.radio4.nl/
P2 Arkiv Poddradio, Swedish Radio:
http://sverigesradio.se/sida/poddradio.
aspx?programid=2332&pid=3359
International Historical Organ Recording
Collection, Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus:
http://ihorc.blogspot.com/
49
CRC Summer 2010
audio & the record collector
Accidental stereo and dual mono revisited
David Patmore
I
n the autumn of 2005 Naxos reissued several
of Sir Edward Elgar’s electrical recordings:
the five Pomp and Circumstance Marches, the
Enigma Variations and the Cockaigne Overture,
together with an interesting bonus: the third side
of the original 78rpm recording of Cockaigne in
“accidental stereo” (Naxos C 8.111022). In a long
note to this release, recording transfer engineer
Mark Obert-Thorn explained what this “dual mono”
actually was. Evidently it was quite common in the
days of 78rpm electrical recording for two cutting
turntables to be used, with both fed from a single
Leopold Stokowski
50
microphone. The purpose of this arrangement
was for one of the turntables to function as backup, should something go wrong with the other. In
some cases, two microphones were used, thus each
feeding a separate turntable. This may have been
because equipment that was normally in use was
not working properly and so other arrangements
had to be made, or perhaps for experimentation.
In 1932 for instance, shortly before the first stereo
recordings were made by Leopold Stokowski with
Bell Laboratories (as featured in the CRC Spring
issue, page 53), RCA Victor made a long-playing
CRC Summer 2010
audio & the record collector
on headphones Kay would then work until he
was satisfied that he had the two recordings well
synchronised. The second stage was to dub the
cassette recordings on to a 15-ips tape, then
splicing the best parts of the cassette recordings to
create a single performance, which was balanced
and equalised to produce the final result.
Sir Edward Elgar
ten-inch 78-rpm recording with Duke Ellington
and used two turntables to compare frequency
responses of microphones or cutters. The matrices
thus produced had different prefixes: LBVE
for the recording using traditional technology,
and LBSHQ for the recording made using the
company’s then new “High Quality” recording
process.
In the early 1980s two record collectors and
engineers based in Venice, California – Brad Kay
and Steven Lasker – noticed when listening to
the commercially issued version of the Ellington
disc and to an unissued test pressing of the
same recording, that the placement of certain
instruments was slightly different between the
two versions. By synchronising and recording the
two takes together they found that they had two
different channels of the same recording, reflecting
the slightly different microphone placements. The
result might be termed “unintentional stereo”,
“accidental stereo” or “dual mono” but the sound
was certainly clearer and wider than the more
usual single track mono recording of the period.
Stimulated by this discovery, Kay went on to track
down other recordings from the same period made
in this way, by artists such as Elgar, Sir Eugene
Goossens, Koussevitzky, and Stokowski (Le carnival
des animaux by Saint-Saëns). In a BBC broadcast
of 1986, Brad Kay explained in detail to Barry Fox
how he went about reconstructing these unusual
recordings. The first stage was to synchronise the
two takes. This was done by recording one of the
records on to 15-ips tape while the other record
played on a turntable. The tape was run into the
left channel of a cassette recorder, and the disc into
the right hand channel. Monitoring the recordings
The Naxos issue
Using the same recordings and similar techniques
to those developed by Kay, Mark Obert-Thorn
made his own “accidental stereo” transfers of Side 3
of the Cockaigne recording some years later for the
Naxos CD. This used the alternate Take 1A issued
by RCA Victor in the USA in the 1930s (and
which was also used for later HMV pressings) and
the original Take 1 published version. Obert-Thorn
describes his sense of this recording in the note for
this issue: “From repeated hearings, it appears to
me as though one microphone was trained on the
centre of the orchestra, while the other was pointed
somewhat to the right”. He was able to verify his
aural understanding of this orchestra placement
by referring to a photograph taken of Elgar nine
months earlier, when he was recording his Violin
Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin in the newlyopened Abbey Road Studio No. 1. Here the strings
were spread across the stage with the winds behind
them; the double-basses were ranged along the far
Elgar at Abbey Road in 1931
51
CRC Summer 2010
audio & the record collector
right, with the tuba at the rear on the right hand
side. The French horns were located toward the
left hand side at the back, with the rest of the brass
section in the middle. The sound of the “accidental
stereo” version conforms to this orchestral layout.
For Obert-Thorn, the sense of separation within
the orchestral layout was more pronounced than in
the early test stereo recordings made nine months
later by Alan Blumlein, with Sir Thomas Beecham
conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra
in sections of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.
Surprisingly, Brad Kay’s discovery was not
unanimously greeted with acclamation – several
commentators denied the existence of the two
separate recordings and suggested that these
recordings were in some way “not quite right”.
But now, with far more sophisticated computer
programmes than were available in the 1980s, and
which display wave-forms and so forth, it is easily
possible to analyse the output of two recordings
and see whether they are of the same performance
or not. The more recent experience of the notorious
Barrington-Coupe “Joyce Hatto” recordings is
a case in point where such techniques have been
successfully used. And the ear itself, especially
with the aid of headphones, can easily tell when
true stereo channels are present and when they are
not. So it is now easy to verify these recordings,
should verification be required. The reality today
is probably that interest in old recordings and early
recording techniques is not sufficiently widespread
to justify large-scale investment in hunting out and
synchronising dual recorded 78-rpm productions
for a series of “accidental stereo” issues. But, as with
the Stokowski recordings discussed in the last issue,
a well-planned CD of recordings made in this way
– of both popular and classical repertoire – might
well find an interested and appreciative audience.
(With grateful thanks to Mark Obert-Thorn for
valued assistance.)
Editorial postscript
Many years ago the EMI transfer engineer Peter
Bown made a rough synchronisation of another
Elgar-conducted 78rpm side which existed in
two versions. This was Side 2 of the Prelude to
The Kingdom, recorded with the BBC Symphony
52
Orchestra at Abbey Road in the same session as
that of the Cockaigne Overture, on 11 April 1933.
I was given a cassette tape copy of the results of this
experiment, and the effect seemed astonishing, not
so much because of stereo placement, but because
the combined takes gave a depth to the sound
quality, a sense of space round both the ensemble
and individual instruments that for me made it
sound like a recording from the 1950s. As David
Patmore indicates in his article, this development
made little headway, since experienced judges
such as the transfers engineers Anthony Griffith
and Keith Hardwick were not convinced that a
true stereo effect had been achieved: in the case of
the Kingdom Prelude they were able to argue that
since the synchronisation was inexact this in itself
provided a form of artificial stereo. At one point
there were plans to include examples of “accidental
stereo” in the CD Elgar Edition of 1992-93, but
opposition prevailed and the idea was abandoned.
As David Patmore suggests, the demand for new
editions of “accidental stereo” is now probably
insufficient to justify the considerable amount
of studio work involved, but in the 1920s and
1930s the use of two turntables, recording
simultaneously, was widespread, even if erratic,
and this practice even pre-dated the introduction
of electrical recording. Imagine how the sound of
a late-acoustic recording would be transformed
when heard in “accidental stereo”!
Alan Sanders
CRC Summer 2010
surface noise
Leslie Gerber finds more recorded
disasters
N
umerous flaws are audible on an LP first
issued by the Esoteric label (L ES512)
of dance music by Beethoven, Mozart, and
Schubert conducted by René Leibowitz.
Leibowitz was a reputable and sometimes
inspired conductor, but he was unable to
inspire excellence in the French National Radio
Orchestra, which plays the Beethoven and
Mozart. Even worse, in Webern’s arrangement
of six Schubert German Dances, the “Paris
Philharmonic” begins with some of the most
painfully out-of-tune playing ever heard on an
issued recording. This record had a long life
as Counterpoint/Esoteric L 512 and L 5512
(fake stereo), but it never improved.
Every connoisseur of great bad recordings is
familiar with the singer Florence Foster Jenkins.
But another wonderfully bad singer, Vassilka
Petrova, made recordings for two commercial
labels. Unlike Jenkins, Petrova actually had
something of a voice, but it is drastically out of
control. She recorded a complete version of Il
trovatore for Ace (L A1001/6 – like Melodiya,
Ace numbered its sides rather than its discs), an
aria collection (L A1007/8), and an abridged
version of Aida (L A1009/12). However,
she also participated in two complete opera
recordings for the budget Remington label,
Tosca (L RLP199 62) and Cavalleria rusticana
(L RLP199 74). All of these recordings were
made with the Florence May Festival Orchestra
under a various Italian conductors. These LPs
are very scarce, and they used to bring high
prices from collectors, presumably ones who
share my love for inadvertent humour.
Hearing Petrova today, it’s amazing to
consider that so awful a singer was allowed to
record – even if, as has been rumoured, she was
married to a recording director. She is probably
the worst singer ever to record any role in a
complete opera performance. She can now be
heard on CD, in the marvellous compilation
“The Muse Surmounted” (C Homophone
1001), joined by a group of her artistic equals.
A somewhat more commonly-found disaster
is the hilarious version of Handel’s Music for the
Royal Fireworks performed by the Telemann
Society, an organisation aptly described by one
critic as “the Florence Foster Jenkins of the
Baroque”. This amazing recording, conducted
by the Society’s founder Richard Schulze, was
issued by the Vox label (L STDL 500.750)
and was then reissued by the Society’s own
label Amphion (L CL2140). According to the
Telemann Society, theirs was the first recording
of this music to use period brass instruments.
The disc even includes a demonstration band
which shows how the natural scale sounds out
of tune to our ears. The brass players on this
recording (members of the Boston Symphony,
who allowed their names to be listed!) obviously
had no experience with these instruments and
did not know how to bend the pitches with lip
pressure, as baroque players would have done.
The results are ear-splittingly hilarious, especially
in the raucous “La réjouissance” with its audible
tape splices. Schulze eventually was arrested, but
for currency transactions, not crimes against the
art of music.
The Urania company’s recording director
must have been asleep when he passed an LP
of Khachaturian’s Gayne Suite – not one of
the company’s many German radio tapes but a
recording made specifically for Urania by the
Paris Opéra Orchestra under the direction of
Georges Sebastian. Most of the recording is
competent if undistinguished. But the “Sabre
Dance” sounds as if the orchestra had just
returned from a long lunch with a great deal of
wine. The brass players make some of the rudest
sounds you’ll ever hear, the percussionists are
usually off the beat (especially the tambourine
in the central section, which is never in proper
time) and the whole piece is a farce. Urania put
it out as L UX 107 and L UR 107; it was also
reissued as Forum L FL301, and in fake stereo
editions as well. It sounds equally hilarious in all
of them.
CRC
53
CRC Summer 2010
continental report
A Gulda celebration
T
his year the piano world has good reason to
remember the art of the great Friedrich Gulda,
because it is the tenth anniversary of his death.
Gulda was a rather the “enfant terrible” of the
piano scene in his late career. But he still has a lot
of fans, who admired his genius and did not worry
about his sometimes eccentric behaviour on stage
and in life. After his death Deutsche Grammophon
released some rare Gulda recordings, “The Gulda
Mozart Tapes”, some Bach, and early this year an
outstanding Chopin collection on two discs. But
there are other labels keeping alive the memory
of the great pianist, especially Orfeo in Munich.
The latest release is quite sensational and a “must
have” for piano enthusiasts: it contains Gulda’s
first complete Beethoven sonata cycle recorded in
1953-54 at RAVAG, the Viennese radio station
that was controlled by the Russian occupying
powers at that time. The nine-CD box also includes
the Eroica Variations and Diabelli Variations from
the archives of the ORF, recorded in 1957 (C 808
109 L). Two recordings from Decca and Amadeo
contained in the box are well-known to collectors.
Beethoven was always at the core of Gulda’s
repertoire, and he was one of the sonatas’ leading
interpreters. His precise manner, his clear,
transparent and straight approach combined
with an instinctive sense for the structure and
architecture of the music makes his playing highly
convincing. All these basics of Gulda’s style we
can find in this wonderful first recording of the
Beethoven sonatas, released for the first time.
Piano enthusiasts will be fond of comparing the
different versions. Let me say that the first one is
full of freshness and spontaneity.
54
Norbert Hornig
But there is more from Gulda. In its new
series “Edition Schwetzinger Festspiele”, Hänssler
Classic has released a 1959 piano recital. Gulda
plays works by Bach, Haydn and Beethoven with
fantastic technical control. The tapes are from
the archives of the Südwestrundfunk (SWR) and
the sound quality and remastering are very good
(C 93.704).
In 1977 the Amadeus Quartet played at the
famous Schwetzingen Castle. Hänssler now
release two items from a memorable concert –
Britten’s Third Quartet coupled with Schubert’s
Death and the Maiden Quartet. This was a really
special event because the Amadeus had premiered
Britten’s last quartet some months before at The
Maltings, Snape (C 93.706). Hänssler Classic has
also expanded its “Historic” series with recordings
from the archives of the Südwestrundfunk.
Ida Haendel in her prime gives impressive
performances of the Tchaikovsky and Dvořák
concertos with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony
Orchestra under Hans Müller-Kray, recorded
in 1960 and 1965 at the Stuttgart Liederhalle
(C 94.205). A new double CD-set is dedicated
to the Hungarian pianist Géza Anda. This
edition brings together studio recordings from
1950-51 with works by Haydn, Schumann, Ravel
and Liebermann and a live 1955 recital from
Ludwigsburg of works by Chopin, Schumann,
and Brahms (C 94.211).
On 28 May Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday. The Audite
label has honoured the great singer with a very
special collection entitled “Fischer-Dieskau – The
Birthday Edition”. This contains unreleased studio
and live performances from across the singer’s
career, taken from RIAS and SFB radio tapes. It is
difficult to point out a highlight here, for FischerDieskau’s unique art of singing is outstanding in
every aspect. The collections contains a Mahler
song recital with Daniel Barenboim, from the
Berlin Philharmonie in 1971 (C 95.634), a
compilation of Brahms songs with Tamás Vásáry
from 1972 (C 95.635), duets and songs by
Schumann, Beethoven and Mahler with FischerDieskau’s wife Julia Varady (C 95.636) and a
collection of songs by Reger, Sutermeister and
Hindemith (C 95.637).
CRC
CRC Summer 2010
Shuichiro Kawai
Tower Records in Japan
I
f the commercial value of a particular
recording is set, not by its artistic contents,
but by the scarcity of available secondhand
copies – as Leslie Gerber has pointed out
in these pages – there lies a big business
opportunity. This is exactly what Japan’s
Tower Records has employed as one of its
tactics to survive this economically drearylooking time. Over the past few years, this
largest record chain in Japan has created an
impressive catalogue of its own, consisting
of over 250 CDs so far. Hand-picked, all
these CDs are licensed from back catalogues
of various labels including Universal, RCA,
and Warner and issued under such titles as
“Vintage Collection”, “Precious Collection”
and “Detour Collection” respectively. Tower
has even extended its hand to foreign labels like
Testament and Tahra in recent years, resulting,
for example, in the release of Havergal Brian’s
Gothic Symphony, with Sir Adrian Boult
conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra,
soloists and choruses, recorded live at its first
professional performance in October 1966 at
the Royal Albert Hall in London (C TSBT2
8454).
It is, however, not a recent development
for Tower to release CDs of its own: back
in 1996, it issued a first batch of historical
CDs licensed from Toshiba EMI – classic
recordings of the complete string quartets of
Beethoven and Bartók with the Végh Quartet,
followed by Bruno Walter’s radio recordings
with American orchestras. These issues did not
apparently sell well, so far as I can remember,
since a lot of stock ended up in bargain bins
years later. It is certain that this failure taught
the company an invaluable lesson that has
made the present success possible.
There is a very sophisticated philosophy
behind these reissues, it seems. First and
foremost, all Tower’s selections reflect
exquisitely refined tastes which appeal to the
elitism of seasoned collectors, as typically
shown in the fact that its catalogue contains
no recordings of Furtwängler, for example.
far eastern viewpoint
Instead, it is full of recordings with Japanese
musicians and of works by Japanese composers,
most of which belonged to the least selling
category when they were originally released
decades ago. These domestic recordings have
now become best sellers, thanks partly to the
efforts of music critics of the new generation,
headed by Morihide Katayama, known widely
as the planner of Naxos’s Japanese composer
series. Tower’s low pricing of these discs
is no doubt another trigger to arouse the
adventurous mind of many collectors. Sensibly
a small number of copies are produced in
order not to saturate the market. Thus it is
financially less risky if a given release does not
sell as expected.
It should be noted that reissues under
such a scheme are also beneficial for record
companies: all they have to do is simply copy
existing masters. This, perhaps, is the reason
why most of the reissues are taken from
existing CD issues. After all, Compact Disc
has a history going back nearly 30 years, and
there are lots of deletions to attract the interest
of collectors.
Here are some examples from the Tower
catalogue – Bach: Six solo cello suites with
Enrico Mainardi (C PROA59/61); Beethoven:
Five cello sonatas with Mainardi and Carlo
Zecchi (C PROA141/2); Mozart and
Beethoven Violin Sonatas with Lola Bobesco
and Jacques Genty (C PROA143/4); Mozart:
Violin Concerto No. 4, etc. with Johanna
Martzy (C PROA15); Handel: Six violin
sonatas with Henryk Szeryng and Huguette
Dreyfus (C PROA17); Wilhelm Kempff
plays the organ in Hiroshima (C PROA20);
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8, with Yevgeny
Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad
Philharmonic (C PROA31); Beethoven: Nine
violin sonatas with Sándor Végh and András
Schiff (C PROA252/5); Wagner: Tristan
und Isolde with Reginald Goodall conducting
the Welsh National Opera (C PROA67/70);
Anthologies of Japanese cello works with Ko
Iwasaki (C QIAG50031/2 & 50033/4); Janós
Starker’s 1970 and 1981 Tokyo recordings
(C NCS593/4).
CRC
55
CRC Summer 2010
reviews
BOOKS
56 Weingartner biography
57 Kondrashin biography
DVDs
58 Rimsky Korsakov Sadko
59 Tchaikovsky Iolanta
78rpm
60 Historic Masters/Tamagno
LPs
61 Mahler/Giulini
61 Messaien/Barenboim etc
62 Wagner Parsifal
CDs – ORCHESTRAL
63 Beethoven, Brahms/Gould
64 Bruckner symphonies/Andreae
65 Bruckner symphonies/Giulini
66 Dvořák symphonies/Rowicki
67 Dvořák, Tchaikovsky/Chung/Giulini
68 Kodály collection/Kertész/Doráti
69 Liszt tone poems/Haitink
70 Mahler/Zareska/Van Beinum
70 Mendelssohn, Shostakovich/Toscanini
72 Mozart, Strauss etc/Busch
72 Vaughan Williams/Barbirolli
73 Barbirolli/Beethoven, Schubert etc
73 Giulini/Debussy, Ravel etc
74 D. Nadien collection
76 Oistrakh/Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky
76 Tennstedt/Glinka, Mahler
CDs – CHAMBER & INSTRUMENTAL
77 Bach/Gould
77 Bach, Mozart/Pasquier Trio
78 Beethoven, Schubert/Nikoleyeva
79 Chopin/Rubinstein
79 Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin/Merzhanov
80 Debussy/Richter
80 Hindemith/Hindemith
81 Mozart/Amadeus Quartet
82 R. Farrell/complete recordings, Vol. 2
83 Finnish composers play
83 Horowitz at Carnegie Hall
85 M. Zadora/complete recordings
CDs – VOCAL & CHORAL
86 Gerville-Réache, Morelli,
Artôt de Padilla etc.
87 Lisitsian in concert
88 Melchior sings Wagner
CDs – OPERA
89 Korngold Violanta
89 Mozart Così fan tutte
90 Smetana Bartered Bride
91 Verdi Ballo in maschera
CDs - COLLECTIONS
92 D. Brain
92 Copenhagen 1931-39
COMPACT DISC ROUND-UP
93 Munch in concert etc.
DOWNLOADS
97 Pristine Audio issues
56
books
BOOKS
Im Mass der Moderne: Felix Weingartner
– Dirigent, Komponist, Autor, Reisender.
Edited by Simon Obert and Matthias Schmidt.
Schwabel Verlag Basel. 475 pages. Hardback.
ISBN: 978-3-7965-2519-3. €34.00.
From Bayreuth to Berlin, Boston and Basel, from
London and Leningrad (always via Vienna) to
Tokyo, Felix Weingartner was always in the thick
of things, always combative, sometimes litigious,
and inordinately conscious of his self-worth. His
recorded legacy, some of it currently available in fine
transfers (particularly Mark Obert-Thorn’s work
for Naxos), is the most important and influential
of his era – that is, the era of Mahler and Strauss.
His lengthy autobiography, two volumes published
in German, translated and incompetently hacked
in the process, with another volume unpublished,
remains nearly 70 years after his death the principal
but always partial source of information about his
life. Grove continues to list my 1976 compilation
as the sole post-war book-length study about him.
Here, it hardly needs stating, lies the richest
seam for an overdue detailed biography. The
present volume is a significant step forward, but
also unfortunately half a step back. As its title
indicates, it contains essays covering all aspects
of Weingartner’s life, personality, composing,
conducting and other interests, the work of
some 18 writers including items by a player and a
surviving relative with first-hand memories. These
are interspersed with extracts from Weingartner’s
copious writings including, most valuably, part
of the unpublished third volume of memoirs
here dealing with his later Swiss years. The Swiss
bias is evident and understandable, given that
the substantial collection left by his fifth, Swiss
wife, Carmen Studer, went after her death to
Basel University. From these papers, too, come
a plethora of photographs, many never before
published. For readers without German, these
will naturally be the main centre of attraction in
this wholly German-language volume (save for
a few end-noted sentences from various sources,
including my 1976 analysis). For others, the essays
on Weingartner’s conducting style and his place in
CRC Summer 2010
books
the history of conducting, including one dealing
in detail with his approach to the Brahms First
Symphony, another comparing him and Mahler as
conductors, will be illuminating.
Herein, however, lies the half-step backwards.
Despite recent excellent efforts to raise interest
again in Weingartner’s many compositions, his
conducting will almost certainly continue to be
his principal claim to immortality; and of that
the best evidence – again despite his copious
writings – must lie in his recordings, which will
surely continue to fascinate for as long as the
history of musical interpretation absorbs listeners
and provides new fields for academe. A basic tool
for readers and researchers is a full discography
and, at the very least, a consideration of all the
surviving non-commercial audio material. The
mere list of studio recordings here offered in place
of a discography – and after 35 years mine could
do with a major facelift – is patently inadequate.
I can find no mention of the enormously valuable
complete off-air Eroica from Salzburg, nor of the
wonderful, if too brief, extracts from Flagstad’s
Vienna opera debut in Götterdämmerung that
supplement Weingartner’s meagre but highly
distinctive recorded Wagner legacy. Nor, even, do
the Vienna opera extracts from the May collection
issued by Koch get listed. I would have traded
some pages devoted to side-by-side comparisons
between Weingartner’s successive rewrites about
symphony composers since Beethoven for such
basic information, since this aspect of his written
legacy retains only a period interest.
A signal contribution, then, towards that
comprehensive biography, with some opportunities lost. Who will now take up the major
challenge?
Christopher Dyment
Kirill Kondrashin – His life in music
by Gregor Tassie
Published by Scarecrow Press, Maryland, USA.
352 pages.
Hardback. ISBN978-0-8108-6974-5. $65.00
Gregor Tassie’s meticulously detailed account
of Kondrashin’s career suggests an ambitious,
talented musician who managed to carve a
reviews
successful career with great skill and judgement in
a political environment where just one false move
could have easily led to disastrous consequencies.
He was a committed Communist Party member
and a supporter of the regime, but he had the wit
to avoid trouble without harming others, and the
difficulties of the 1930s and 1940s largely passed
him by – though he was highly active in marshalling
civilian defensive resistance in the wartime siege of
Leningrad: at that time he had been assistant to Boris
Khaikin at the city’s Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre
since 1936. An appointment as staff conductor
at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1943 brought its own
potential dangers, since Josef Stalin took a close
interest in the activities of the company. Contact
with the Tchaikovsky Competition prize-winning
pianist Van Cliburn in 1958 led to engagements in
the West and in 1960 Kondrashin was appointed
Chief Conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic
Orchestra. In 1975 he resigned in protest against
the poor salaries paid to his musicians, and the twin
incentives of disillusionment with the regime and a
love affair with a young Dutch woman caused his
defection to the West in 1978. He died of a heart
attack in March 1981 a day or two after his sixtyseventh birthday.
Apart from details of his late romance, and
an account of his upbringing (his parents were
orchestral musicians), Tassie sticks to Kondrashin’s
“Life in music”, as the book’s title suggests, and we
learn little about his three marriages or life away
from the concert platform. More important to us
now is the recorded legacy as charted in the book’s
discography. He was a friend of Shostakovich
and recorded all his 15 symphonies; his wideranging musical sympathies and skill as a concerto
conductor led to important recordings with soloists
such as David Oistrakh (in particular), Leonid
Kogan, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Mstislav
Rostropovich and of course Van Cliburn.
An impression gained from Tassie’s book is
that Kondrashin had an awareness of his own
outstanding talents, but didn’t regard himself
as a “great” conductor. In that judgement he was
probably right, but he played a significant role in
Russian musical life of his time, and many fine
recordings bear eloquent testimony to his qualities
as a sincere, faithful interpreter.
Alan Sanders
57
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reviews
DVDs
Rimsky-Korsakov Sadko. Vladimir
Atlantov (ten) Sadko; Irina Arkhipova
(mez) Lyubava; Boris Morozov (bs) Sea King;
Tamara Milashkina (sop) Volkhova; Nina
Grigorieva (mez) Nezhata; Andrei Sokolov
(ten) Foma; Valery Jaroslavtsev (bs) Luka;
Petr Glubokiy (ten) Duda; Konstantin
Baskov (bs) Sopel: Alexander Ognivtsev
(bs) Viking Guest; Lev Kuznetsov (ten) Indian
Guest; Alexander Voroshilo (bar) Venetian
Guest; Orchestra & Chorus of the Bolshoi
Theatre / Yuri Simonov.
VAI l F 4512 (173mins; Colour; 4:3; NTSC)
rec. Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow 1980.
Sadko (1896), sixth of Rimsky-Korsakov’s 15
operas, is in many respects the richest of all. The
numinous conclusion of Kitezh, fourteenth on
the list, may be lacking, but so are the longueurs
that precede that radiant ending. What Sadko,
which began life in 1867 as a short orchestral
“tableau”, achieves is operatic entertainment on
many levels, of a Meyerbeerian kind but without
the portentous Scribe librettos, and with a strong
foundation of Russian folklore. Indeed, the
composer termed it an “opera bylina” – an operatic
version of the traditional heroic poem – and its
peculiar charms issue directly from its contrasted
story-book worlds: late-medieval Novgorod,
depicted in folk-accented choruses and ballads,
and the underwater kingdom of nearby Lake
Ilmen, on which all Rimsky’s “magical” harmonic
and instrumental resources were lavished.
It’s a captivating opera which deserves more
frequent international revival than it ever
receives. One obstacle is, of course, its exorbitant
requirements: three great singers in the principal
roles and many good ones in the minor (the
Viking, Hindu and Venetian foreign traders
briefly making showpiece appearances in Scene
4 once attracted such major-league artists as
Chaliapin, Kozlovsky and Lisitsian), large chorus
and corps de ballet, and an exotically stocked large
orchestra. The other is stylistic: non-Russian
forces tend to find difficulty in bringing off
its mixture of rumbustiousness and domestic
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DVDs
poignancy on land (Lyubava, abandoned for 12
years by the singer-sailor Sadko, is one of opera’s
worst-treated wives) and iridescent fantasy on and
under water. Luckily, more than one good Sadko
recording has been available at various times,
including two from the Bolshoi in the immediate
post-war period, and Philips’s 1994 live recording
from Gergiev’s Maryiinsky Theatre.
Now more than one good Sadko DVD is on
offer. VAI’s release of a 1980 Bolshoi performance,
conducted by Simonov, the company’s then
musical director, faces competition from the
film of the same Gergiev/Maryiinsky production
mentioned above, which Philips published first in
video and later in DVD. Both versions give the
work uncut, in a reading that supplies a detailed
snapshot of the contemporary theatrical ethos –
in, respectively, pre-glasnost Moscow and Gergievera St Petersburg – and also a vividly illustrated
disquisition, so to speak, on the Rimskian
theatrical aesthetic. The St Petersburg show, which
in January 1994 I was lucky enough to encounter
in situ, made itself intentionally backward-looking
by revival of the painter Korovin’s 1920 sets and
costume designs; in filmic terms it provides far
the fuller experience, to which the Kirov Ballet
dancers add enormously. The Bolshoi staging, by
the venerable Boris Pokrovsky, is “traditional” in a
less positive sense, with stage pictures and routines
panto-predictable – in itself not displeasing – and
film quality muzzy in parts.
But in vocal terms the Bolshoi Sadko proves
superior, though not uniformly so. As discophiles
know well, Milashkina, leading company
soprano of the post-Vishnevskaya era, possessed
an exceptionally strong, secure instrument. As
the underwater princess Volkhova, cause of
Sadko’s prolonged absence from the marital
bed, she appears, alas, equally unsuited to florid
passagework and sea-creature costume. (Gergiev’s
Volkova, Valentina Tsidipova, conveys contrasting
vocal and physical allure.) The Bolshoi’s
three “guest” interventions are efficiently but
unglamorously delivered, and in the wonderful
travesti role of Nezhata the boy musician, the
Bolshoi’s Grigorieva lacks the “clang” of the
Kirov’s Larissa Diadkova.
On the other hand, the Bolshoi chorus is
CRC Summer 2010
DVDs
fabulously strong, Simonov catches more of
Rimskian colour (if not spaciousness) than
Gergiev, and two of Russia’s top tweniethcentury singers are on hand to provide a special
magnetism. Atlantov, a Covent Garden Otello
and Canio, offers here much more than the
splendid clarion tenor he showed to London:
singing in Russian permits him to add distinctive
phrasing and word-utterance, a wide dynamic
range, unfailingly accurate intonation (in stark
contrast to the uncertain pitching of Philips’s
Sadko, Vladimir Galusin), and a physical aptness
which diminishes the character’s unattractiveness.
The recently-departed, much-mourned Arkhipova
matches him in stage address – not exactly acting
in today’s terms, but no less commanding for that
– and surpasses him in exquisite musicianship.
Lyubava is generally considered an ungrateful
assignment, but you would never guess so here.
In sum, both Sadko DVDs have much to offer: I
shan’t be discarding either.
Max Loppert
Tchaikovsky Iolanta. Galina Kalinina (sop)
Iolanta; Artur Eisen (bs) King René; Lev
Kuznetsov (ten) Vaudémont; Igor Morozov
(bar) Robert; Vladimir Malchenko (bar) IbnHakia; Nina Grigorieva (mez) Martha; Nina
Larionova (sop) Brigitta; Galina Koroleva
(mez) Laura; Valery Jaroslavtsev (bar)
Bertrand; Oleg Biktimorov (ten) Alméric;
Orchestra & Chorus of the Bolshoi Theatre
/ Ruben Vardanian.
VAI l F 4514 (92mins; Colour; 4:3; NTSC) rec.
Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow 1982.
This first-ever DVD issue of Tchaikovsky’s last
opera is yet another confirmation that a work
once derided by scholars and critics – Gerald
Abraham, for instance, deemed it “dramatically
inadequate and rather characterless”, and David
Brown “insipid” – has in recent decades enjoyed
a restorative pendulum swing in both critical and
popular favour. Done first, in December 1892
(two months before the composer’s death), in a
St Petersburg double bill with The Nutcracker,
it was then more widely prized than its balletic
companion; subsequently, of course, both works
reviews
experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune, and
in the West it was only in post-war years that the
opera gradually, and only occasionally, achieved
theatrical production.
Internationally, however, Tchaikovsky the
composer of 12 operas is now no longer
patronised as having been fully successful in only
two of those operas, Onegin and Queen of Spades;
and non-Russian stagings of Iolanta, such as those
of Britain’s Opera North in 1992 , have done a
great deal to alter received opinion in its and its
composer’s favour. Most powerful advocate of all
has been Valery Gergiev, who made it one of the
earlier – and artistically most potent – issues of his
landmark Philips/Kirov opera-recording series.
In spite of this, the 90-minute one-acter remains,
probably, a “special case”. It is a “fragile piece” (in
the words of John Allison, current editor of Opera
and one of its most persistent champions), whose
apparent lack of dramatic energy relates directly
to the fact of its being peopled entirely with Nice
Characters. Almost everybody on stage loves
the blind young Provençal heroine and wishes
to protect her from harm and unhappiness; and
absolutely everybody rejoices in her final recovery
of sight, itself brought on by the transports
of first love. Yet in a performance alert to the
predominating gentleness of outlook, in terms
of musical style and emotional depiction, the
delicate beauties and subtle workings of the score
not only become abundantly clear, but promote a
tenderly delicate and touching music-drama.
They certainly do so in this 1982 Bolshoi
performance, of which one of the most affecting
qualities is unforced simplicity – a naturalness
of approach reminding one that the tradition
for performing the opera was not lost in its
native land, unlike beyond Russian borders. The
picture-postcard setting and stock production,
both old-fashioned in a way that now seems
“historic”, add to this feeling of idiomatic aptness.
The opera’s opening numbers are fashioned out
of ensembles for Iolanta and her handmaidens
in which female voices solo and choral are
woven together in immaculately judged balance,
creating what Richard Taruskin (in The New
Grove Dictionary of Opera) calls “a consummate
pre-Raphaelite pastel”; under Ruben Vardanian’s
59
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reviews
unhurried baton they are delivered in exactly the
right spirit, and make a commensurate effect.
Throughout, the Bolshoi choral singing is a
special pleasure.
Ideally, an Iolanta performance requires, in
the tenor, baritone, bass-baritone and bass roles
of Vaudemont, Robert, the physician Ibn-Hakia
and King René, singers of greater individuality
of timbre and more distinctive feeling for the
fine detail of Tchaikovskyan phrase than the
solidly competent but unremarkable Bolshoi cast
members on show here. (Many past aria recordings
can be summoned to demonstrate the point, for
example Nicolai Ghiaurov’s magnificent 1964
account of René’s C-minor outpouring of guiltridden parental pathos.) But the soprano Galina
Kalinina makes an entirely admirable heroine,
able to manifest both vocal sensitivity and, where
needed, strength, and to balance “personal”
tone-colouring, poignancy of bearing, intensity
of expression and directness of delivery. Later in
her career this same singer muscled her voice to
take on such heavyweight roles (played in many
European theatres) as Tosca and Turandot; here,
more than simply proving herself in the role’s
proper vocal category, she almost immediately
seizes it to become as by right – as any Iolanta
needs to – the listener-spectator’s genuine focal
point.
Max Loppert
78rpm
Francesco Tamagno – the complete teninch recordings.
Arias from Otello, Le prophète, Andrea Chénier,
Il trovatore, Hérodiade, Samson et Dalila,
Guglielmo Tell plus song by unknown baritone.
Francesco Tamagno (ten), with piano
accompaniment.
Historic Masters m HMFT8/22 (15 vinyl 78rpm
discs); rec. Ospedaletti, Italy, 7-11/2/03. Price,
including postage, £99 to UK addresses, £104
to European addresses and £118 to the USA.
Available from Roger Beardsley, 16 Highfield
Rd, North Thoresby, Lincolnshire, DN36 5RT,
England. Tel (+44) (0) 1472 840236. E-mail:
[email protected].
60
78rpm
This set constitutes a first for Historic Masters,
and I would guess that it will remain unique.
Taking this set in conjunction with the set of
the 12-inch recordings issued in 2007, they have
now issued every known recording of Francesco
Tamagno, one of the most important singers to
have recorded. Unlike the 12-inch set, there are
no major discoveries here, and though there are
several sides which have never been issued in any
form before, all are just alternative takes of arias
that were originally issued. I think this may well be
one of the reasons that this set is so inexpensive,
costing only half the price per disc of the 12-inch
set and other Historic Masters issues.
The main reason for its issue was probably the
same reasoning behind the Patti and Melba boxes:
the discovery in the DG archive in Germany
of the original shells which take us a significant
step closer to the waxes on which the recordings
were made. Of the 28 Tamagno sides here, 21 are
pressed from these original metals, the other seven
being from what are called copy shells, as used for
all commercial pressings up until now. Unlike the
Patti and Melba sets, which used only the newly
discovered original metals, this combination of
original and copy shells allows us to hear exactly
what difference there is between them, and the
difference is immediately apparent. The recordings
were always among the most vivid and arresting
of those made at the time, but the new discs give
the feel of drawing back a veil from the speakers.
By comparison, the copy masters have a soft-edged,
slightly muffled quality, whereas Tamagno leaps out
from the original metals and is almost in the room.
These are far more vivid, purely as recordings of a
voice, than most digital recordings of the present
day.
Having all the 28 sides in chronological
sequence also allows us to see the recording session
develop as both engineers and singer tried out
different ideas for the sides. For example, the first
matrix of “Sopra Berta” from Le prophète starts
with a long, meandering and unnecessary piano
introduction, which is unceremoniously ditched
on the second take (though the first matrix was the
one chosen for issue). Even more interesting is the
difference between the first and subsequent takes
of the “Improvviso” from Andrea Chénier. This aria
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LPs
is too long to fit on a ten-inch side, and the first
idea was to do the whole aria with several large
internal cuts. Clearly, this was found artistically
unsatisfactory (this side was never issued) and the
subsequent two takes stop at the end of the first
part of the aria, which is a disappointing place to
stop, but at least a musical one.
As with the previous 12-inch set, there is a
bonus side of an unnamed baritone (probably
Tamagno’s brother), here singing Gastaldon’s “Ti
vorrei rapire”. Although this is interesting to an
extent, I can’t honestly say that I can find any real
pleasure in it, and can’t imagine anyone wanting to
hear it more than a couple of times.
The extremely reasonable price for this set has
its consequences, since we do not get the beautiful
LP-type box or lavishly-produced colour booklet
we had for the other single-singer sets. A perfectly
adequate utilitarian cardboard box is provided,
but no notes of any sort; all the information is
contained on the eight-sided order form (which is
also available to download from the HM website).
Only the most curmudgeonly collector could
complain at the economy measures, given the
price.
I am absolutely delighted to have this set,
especially for the eight sides which have never been
issued in 78rpm form, but almost equally for the
superlative sound of records I have known since my
teenage years. This set is an absolute bargain and
will provide pleasure for as long as you can lift a
stylus on to a disc. Paul Steinson
LPs
Mahler Symphony No. 9 in D.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Carlo Maria
Giulini.
Speakers Corner F L DG 2707 097 (two discs);
rec. Medinah Temple, Chicago, 4/76.
Giulini’s two Mahler symphony recordings were
both with the Chicago Symphony and produced
at the same venue – No. 1 was for EMI (1971).
Günther Breest (who would later persuade Giulini
to move to Sony) was responsible for this more
ambitious DG project, with Klaus Scheibe as his
reviews
engineer. Speakers Corner have printed details of
five of the eight international awards gained by the
set on the cover, substituting a double sleeve for
the original box – although the skin tones suffer on
the front portrait, the insert texts (Deryck Cooke/
Constantin Floros) are bound in on stout glossy
sheets. I wish I could say the vinyl transfers were
an improvement too: they are cut at a lower level
than the 1977 German pressings and with greater
blank spaces after the two inner movements.
But at high dynamic levels the sound seems
compressed. The tapes were evidently pushed hard
(a colleague always believes a faulty microphone
passed undetected but I suspect that what sounds
like oscillation during parts of sides 1 and 4 is the
outcome of the Chicago strings’ vibrato) but DG’s
transfers convey a vast open soundstage which is
compromised here – albeit the sound is better than
in DG’s “Originals” reissue (C 463 609-2).
The set represents some remarkable
conducting on Giulini’s part, tempi seemingly
adjusted to achieving the best inner details of
scoring (although the first two sections of the
Ländler movement are surprisingly fast). Yet
to my ears, that which others have admired as
seeing the score in wholly abstract terms sounds
more a sanitisation. (In 1982 Solti would turn the
Rondo into a CSO orchestral showpiece – but
that’s another story). My comparisons convinced
me that Barbirolli’s Mahler Ninth is one of his
greatest recordings (EMI C 5 67926 2) not least
because the Berlin strings have a spareness entirely
apt for the finale, which the Chicagoans spoil
with saturated tone. Christopher Breunig
Messiaen Quatuor pour la fin du temps.
Luban Yordanoff (vn); Albert Tétard (vlc);
Claude Desurmont (cl); Daniel Barenboim
(pf ).
Speakers Corner F L DG 2531 093; rec.
Maison de la Mutualité, Paris, 4/78.
Given that a recording was made in 1956 with two
of the four musicians who, then prisoners of war,
had premiered this work in 1941 – Messiaen and
cellist Etienne Pasquier (Musidisc L 30 RC 719;
Accord C 461 744-2), CRC readers may query the
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authenticity of this Breest/Scheibe production.
It features three principals of the Orchestre de
Paris with its conductor from 1975-89, Daniel
Barenboim. It is 6’06” longer than the composer’s
own version. (Though not up to date, many
recording timings are tabulated at http://www.11.
ocn.ne.jp/~messiaen/discography/disks_quatuor.
html; the LP sleeve here only aggregates timings
for sides 1 and 2) However, Messiaen attended the
sessions and indeed “authorised” publication. The
LP has a four-language insert with a scrupulously
detailed study by Josef Häusler, though he doesn’t
mention the original violinist Jean Le Boulaire or
clarinettist Henri Akoka – incidentally, Messiaen
and Pasquier wrote notes for a later DG version,
C 469 052-2.
The more energetic sections come off better
than the quiet music, which is given in a somewhat
literal fashion – I except Tétard’s playing in (v)
where he is sensitively partnered by Barenboim.
And a washy acoustic (perhaps added reverb:
but it’s not there for the clarinet solo movement)
doesn’t help the listener; the instruments are
set forward, the cellist occasionally suffering so
far as pinpointing is concerned. What might
be misconstrued as tracking distortion in (vi),
“Danse de la fureur”, stems from Messiaen’s unison
writing, as the effect appears in other, digital,
recordings. The new pressing is perhaps marginally
cleaner here than the DG, but the two are mostly
indistinguishable.
Barenboim,
incidentally,
slightly lags behind his colleagues at times in this
movement – so much for claims that he “leads” the
quartet. Licensed to EMI, a beautifully balanced
Quatuor with Gawriloff/Palm/Deinzer/Kontarsky
(Harmonia Mundi, 1976), filler to L EX27 04683, is musically more consistently rewarding; this
performance was also issued on CD (EMI C CDS
7 47463-8).
Christopher Breunig
Wagner Parsifal. Jess Thomas (ten) Parsifal;
George London (bs-bar) Amfortas; Martti
Talvela (bs) Titurel; Hans Hotter (bs-bar)
Gurnemanz; Gustav Neidlinger (bs) Klingsor;
Irene Dalis (mez) Kundry; Niels Möller (ten)
First Grail Knight; Gerd Nienstedt (bs) Second
Grail Knight; Gundula Janowitz; Anja Silva;
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LPs
Else-Margrete Gardelli; Dorothea Siebert;
Rita Bartos; Sona Cervena (sops) Flower
Maidens; Chorus and Orchestra of the
Bayreuth Festival / Hans Knappertsbusch.
Speakers Corner F L 835220 (five LPs); rec.
Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, 8/62.
A freshly minted Parsifal on vinyl is something new
for the twenty-first century. The recording itself is
of course one of the most famous of all. Since Karl
Muck, Knappertsbusch has been the conductor
most closely associated with the opera, and his
conducting has been said (New Grove, 1992) to be
“probably the highest musical achievement of the
post-war regime at Bayreuth”. The 1951 recording
from the Festspielhaus has also a secure place in the
annals, but this, from 1962, may be seen as in some
respects even more important as representing a
further matured understanding on the conductor’s
part and having the advantages of relatively modern
recording techniques.
The new, and newsworthy, element is vinyl in
2010. Produced by Speakers Corner in Germany,
the set takes its place in an already well-stocked
catalogue in which it is, as far as I can see, the
first complete opera. As readers of this magazine
will know better than most, there exists among
collectors a substantial constituency that prefers
LP to CD as sound. In particular it deplores, in
varying degrees, the sound produced by digital
re-mastering, finding it (again in varying degrees)
harsh: “glaring” is a word in regular use, and (for
my own view of it) I would say that the sound
engineers, characteristically using modern criteria,
try to make modern-sounding recordings out of the
old originals and succeed mostly in making them
sound like bad modern recordings. Many complain,
but Speakers Corner has done something about it.
They have looked after the interests of LP lovers as,
in this country, Historic Masters have looked after
those of the collectors of 78s.
The choice of opera and recording is beyond
reproach – an uncontested classic of the
gramophone that has survived later competition
and gained in glory from it. But it is a bold
choice too, for Parsifal involves, by most people’s
standards, a considerable expense, and for the
privilege of hearing it in this special edition of the
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CDs - orchestral
five original LPs the price asked, I believe, is in the
region of £85. So many personal factors must enter
into the inevitable question, “Is it worth it?” that I
shall not attempt to give an answer, but I will give
assurance that my copy is an immaculate pressing,
the sound free and natural, harshness and “glare”
being mercifully absent. Some of the hazards of
live recording play a part – half the audience, for
instance, seems to be afflicted with a cold and to
have brought along their coughs and sneezes to be
released in well-chosen quiet passages or (better
still) moments of silence. And, willing as one may
be to get up and change sides every half-hour, it is
not without protest that one does so when Parsifal’s
cry of “Amfortas!” awaits its immediate attachment
“die Wunde!”.
But niggles and discomforts vanish in the face
of the great work and the great performance. Before
hearing this, I spent an evening with the 1951
recording (on CD). I think the commentators
(Robin Holloway in Opera on Record for instance)
who find a greater fluidity in the later performance
are right; the orchestral playing too is rather more
polished and assured. I’m more influenced by the
quality of the singing, and expected to find the
earlier cast superior whereas, in fact, it would be
very difficult (and I haven’t succeeded in doing
so) to establish an overall preference for either.
The Kundry of Irene Dalis and the Parsifal of Jess
Thomas seem much better than was thought at
the time, Dalis making each utterance tell in Act
1 and producing unexpectedly beautiful tone to
contrast in the seductions of Act 2, while Thomas
grows in depth with the character and sings
with admirable firmness and breadth. George
London is the one principal common to both
performances, and while the years have reduced
the inescapably healthy condition of his voice,
he is still not quite able to suggest the sickness
of body and soul that is so essential in Amfortas.
Similarly Gustav Neidlinger’s manly tones are just
too good for Klingsor (Otakar Kraus was just
right at Covent Garden) – they earn gratitude
even so. But of course so much more depends on
the Gurnemanz. In 1951 it was Ludwig Weber
(Gottlob Frick at Covent Garden under Kempe),
and both are superb. Hans Hotter, probably the
most renowned singer of the part, has, we know,
what is often (inaccurately I think) referred to
as his “wobble”. In some degree it affects almost
each of his phrases here – but (whether part of the
Parsifal “zauber” I don’t know) I really do not find
that it spoils this wonderfully generous portrayal
or the quite exceptional warmth and beauty of
the voice. His performance is justly famous and
deeply moving.
The opera itself dwarfs all else. Reviewing the
recent issue of the Covent Garden performance
under Kempe (CRC Spring issue, page 95), I
wrote that I had found Parsifal moving, not as an
immediate emotional “blow”, but in retrospect, in
its way of circling in the mind long after the event.
Here I found it quite suddenly and powerfully
moving – at precisely that moment when the
emotional release is most overwhelming, when
goodness emerges from pain, when redemption
comes upon the earth with Kundry in Act 3 and
the spring-like, pastoral blessedness of the Good
Friday music falls upon ears so accustomed to
a pained chromaticism. Would the effect have
been similar with another recording? Quite
possibly. Would it have been so powerful? Surely
not.
John Steane
CDs ORCHESTRAL
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, Op.
19a. Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34b.
Glenn Gould (pf ); aColumbia Symphony
Orchestra / Leonard Bernstein; bMontreal
String Quartet (Hyman Bress, vn, Mildred
Goodman, vn, Otto Joachim, va; Walter
Joachim, vlc).
Naxos mono B C 8.111341 (65mins; ADD); rec.
aColumbia Studios, New York City, 9-11/5/57;
bCBC Studios, Montréal, 8/57.
This Beethoven Second was Glenn Gould’s
first concerto recording. It was not released
on LP in the UK and first appeared on CD in
1993 (Sony C SM3K5632). Gould was 24 at
the time of recording, and there is certainly a
freshness of approach that speaks little of the
interiorisations that were to follow. This is a jewel
of a performance. Gould was not yet steersman
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of his own ship – the producer refused to allow
him to re-record some trills, apparently. But the
keyboard command is unmistakable, whether in
the tricky, rapid articulation of the first movement
or in the superbly balanced chords and directness
of expression with near-vocal legato of the Adagio.
Recorded in Columbia 30th Street Studios, there
is perhaps a detectable dryness in the sound that
affects the woodwind most.
It is worth hearing this performance for the
cadenza. Shorn of orchestral encumbrance, Gould
suddenly finds himself fully. Lines are moulded
perfectly (despite characteristic minimal use of
pedal); counterpoint is heavenly. This is followed
by the weakest part of the performance, Bernstein’s
soupy way with the opening of the Adagio. Gould’s
purity of line compensates; the finale is a burst of
energy. Few pianists articulate the semiquavers as
here, and there is a great sense of play.
Gould is at one with Brahms’s counterpoint in
the broadcast performance of the F minor Piano
Quintet, and he marries this with a sense of the
dramatic. The Montreal Quartet plays with a
wiry determination. The grit of the initial Allegro
non troppo is most involving but is tempered by
touches of upper-end colouring in the recording
itself (these recur in the Poco sostenuto section of
the finale). The Andante un poco allegro is very
true to its intermezzo nature, with no sense of a
temptation to dawdle; a shame the allegro is rather
leaden at times. No doubting the excitement of the
final pages, but one is better served here by Gilels
or Pollini (both on DG). Colin Clarke
Bruckner Symphonies – No. 1 in C minor;
No. 2 in C minor; No. 3 in D minor; No. 4 in E
flat, Romantic; No. 5 in B flat; No. 6 in A; No. 7
in E flat; No. 8 in C minor; No. 9 in D minor; Te
Deuma.
aEmmy Loose (sop); aHildegard RösslMajdan (con); aAnton Dermota (ten);
aGottlob Frick (bs); aSingverein der
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna;
Vienna Symphony Orchestra / Volkmar
Andreae.
Music & Arts mono M C CD-1227 (nine discs;
9hrs 14mins; ADD); rec. Vienna. 1-2/53.
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This set fully deserves the epithet “historic”. It
preserves one of the earliest and finest broadcast
cycles of Bruckner’s symphonies. The cycle
emanates from the archives of the Radio Verkehrs
AG, the broadcasting authority in occupied
Vienna’s Soviet zone after the second world war.
The tapes were inherited by Austrian Radio (ORF)
in 1958. RAVAG had decided, for cultural reasons,
to broadcast a complete studio cycle of Bruckner’s
symphonies in January and February 1953. They
hired the Vienna Symphony for the broadcasts,
thereby continuing a well-established relationship
between that orchestra and Wiener Rundfunk.
The Swiss-born Volkmar Andreae, who directed
the performances, was well qualified for the task.
He was a highly experienced conductor steeped in
the Austro-German symphonic repertoire. He had
been chief conductor of Zürich’s Tonhalle Orchestra for over four decades (1906-49), a period almost
as long as his compatriot Ansermet’s tenure at the
Suisse Romande Orchestra. Andreae frequently
conducted the VSO and the Berlin and Vienna
Philharmonic orchestras. He conducted Bruckner’s
works over 250 times, and led the Swiss premieres
of the Fourth and Ninth symphonies (in 1909 and
1907). He presented three Bruckner symphonies
in most of his Zürich concert seasons and recorded
the First Symphony with the NiederösterreichesTonkünstler Orchester (Masterseal L MW-40)
and the Third Symphony with the VSO (Epic L
LC 3218). Apart from these discs, he recorded very
little on commercial discs – a process for which he
had disdain, believing that the living recreation of
music was more deserving of his energies.
Andreae’s credentials are impressive on paper, but
how does a conductor who made few commercial
discs rise to the challenge of a complete Bruckner
symphony cycle? This can be answered positively.
Andreae’s conducting throughout the cycle is
consistently insightful. He offers committed, vital
performances full of momentum, lyrical feeling
and concentration, with the occasional portamento
or slide included. Though he chose his performing
editions pragmatically, his extensive study of
tempi, dynamics, instrumentation and symphonic
structure underpin these idiomatic Bruckner
readings. His conception of the Ninth Symphony,
for example, offers stark, craggy climaxes and an
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CDs - orchestral
almost modernistic interpretation. He pounds out
the Symphony’s scherzo in a threatening manner,
but finds lyrical repose in the long slow movement
that follows. Andreae sometimes pushes the music
forward when the dynamic markings rise above
forte and then lessens the tempo when the dynamics
subside to piano. This can be heard several times
in the Sixth Symphony’s opening movement.
Though this stylistic approach, favoured by many
conductors of his generation, is discredited today,
Andreae’s innate feel for the ebb and flow of a
Bruckner symphonic movement makes it sound
natural. He is particularly subtle in layering the
levels of orchestral sound so that the brass do not
dominate the strings. Transition points, often
involving quiet timpani rolls or solo woodwind
interjections, are skilfully and seamlessly handled.
The Vienna Symphony, always in the shadow
of the Vienna Philharmonic, could play very
well, and it was a much-recorded orchestra in the
1950s. Under Andreae, it sounds impressive and
well balanced; there are some distinguished solo
contributions. Raggedness is not absent from some
climaxes, but this is not a serious listening problem.
To sample the sound of the VSO, one could listen
to the austere brass chords at 10’28” or the tutti
at 14’30” in the first movement of the Seventh
Symphony: these offer an accurate impression of
the musical standards found throughout the set.
Plucked strings are well caught by the microphones,
even at pianissimo levels.
Aaron Z. Snyder has done an excellent
restoration job on the digital tapes. His approach is
relatively non-interventionist, but he has touched
up some occasionally out-of-tune horn passages. A
snippet missing from the Te Deum was overcome by
inclusion of this moment from another recording.
Generally, the sound is well up to the standards
of good mono broadcasting from the early 1950s.
This is not a set that one would pull off the shelf
occasionally to check points of comparison with
other Bruckner conductors. On the contrary, it
is a valuable resource that will provide enduring
musical pleasure. The inclusion of a bright, well
sung version of the Te Deum, with fine soloists, is
a welcome bonus.
Music & Arts have exercised considerable
care to present the set in a scholarly fashion.
reviews
The accompanying booklet includes 40 pages
of fascinating material. Gert Fischer writes an
interesting career profile of Andreae, accompanied
by a complete list of the conductor’s preserved
studio broadcasts and commercial discs. A timeline
of Andreae’s career is included. This information is
only presented in German. Mark W. Kluge writes
(only in English) of the editions chosen for the
performances and assesses some of the conductor’s
interpretative choices. By giving wider currency to a
little known mid-twentieth century conductor and
offering the listener a historic cycle of Bruckner’s
symphonies, Music & Arts have done exactly what
a specialist producer of classical CDs should do
rather than duplicating material by conductors
who were more favoured by commercial record
companies.
Kenneth Morgan
Bruckner Symphony No. 7 in E.
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Carlo Maria
Giulini.
Testament M C SBT1437 (64mins; ADD); rec.
Philharmonie, Berlin, 5/3/85.
Bruckner Symphony No. 8 in C minor.
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Carlo Maria
Giulini.
Testament M C SBT2 1436 (two discs; 85mins;
ADD); rec. Philharmonie, Berlin, 17/2/84.
Giulini uses Leopold Nowak’s editions of both
these symphonies. Nowak consistently published
versions of the scores which presented Bruckner’s
last thoughts, but some commentators prefer the
Brucknerverlag editions prepared by Robert Haas
(with contributions from Oeser and Orel) which
did not accept alterations that might have been due
to the influence of others.
In the case of No. 7 there are two major
differences between the editions. In the original
score of the finale there a number of tempo
variations which are not in Bruckner’s hand. Haas
omits these but Nowak includes them (albeit in
bracketed form). Then there is the question of
the percussion at a climactic moment of the slow
movement where three bars later than the triple
forte entry of timpani, triangle and cymbals, an
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unknown hand has faintly inscribed: “gilt nicht”
above the timpani part. Haas accepts the theory
that suggests that this means omission of all of
these percussive instruments but Nowak includes
them. Giulini tends to follow Nowak’s editorial
tempo changes in the finale, though not too
disturbingly, but it is most gratifying that the
commencement of the coda, which reiterates the
opening theme, is at a tempo identical to that at the
start of the movement – many a conductor slows
enormously at this point. In fact, whilst being fairly
flexible with tempo, Giulini achieves a natural flow
throughout – genuine rubato but on a large scale.
This is one of the most expressive performances
that I have encountered.
Leopold Nowak’s publication of the original
version of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was
revelatory and Georg Tintner’s recording on
Naxos is an excellent representation of it, but this
recording presents Nowak’s edition of Bruckner’s
better-known revision. Here the composer
greatly altered the first movement, rewrote the
trio section and made alterations and cuts in
movements 3 and 4. Certainly this revision makes
for a superior work, but where the rewritings in
the first two movements represent considerable
improvements, the cuts in movements 3 and 4
may well have been due to the influence of others,
and Robert Haas restored this omitted music
in his excellent edition. The musical contour
of the uncut version seems much superior. For
all this, Giulini gives a towering interpretation
of Nowak’s version. The very opening grows
dramatically with immensely sensitive phrasing;
the conductor moulds this very large orchestra
with the subtlety of a skilled pianist. An unusually
relaxed approach to the Scherzo (over two
minutes longer than Jochum or Böhm and over
a minute longer than Kempe or Furtwängler) is
surprisingly effective and Giulini’s deliberation
gives the movement enormous stature. The clarity
of inner detail in the final two movements reveals
much that is often lost but the excellent quality
of the recording – very similar to that provided
for Symphony No. 7 – does have a “front of the
orchestra” feel. It is refreshing to hear Bruckner
with clear, assertive brass that does not overpower
the strings, but the rear of the orchestra seems far
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back, with the result that the great tutti passages
lack dynamic contrast.
These carefully refurbished recordings do
justice to performances of considerable stature by a
superb conductor. What a shame that the applause
was not removed – the listener needs time to reflect
after hearing great music.
Antony Hodgson
Dvořák Symphonies – No. 1 in C minor, B9,
The Bells of Zlonicea; No. 2 in B flat; B12b; No. 3
in E flat, B34c; No. 4 in D minor; B41d; No. 5 in F,
B54e; No. 6 in D, B112f; No. 7 in D minor, B141g;
No. 8 in G, B163h; No. 9 in E minor, B178, From
the New World i; Overtures – Carnaval, B169j;
My Country, B125ak; Othello, B174l; Hussite,
B132m.
London Symphony Orchestra / Witold Rowicki.
Decca B C 478 2296 (six discs; 7hrs 5mins;
ADD); rec. Wembley Town Hall, London;
f7-9/1/65; ej3-6/2/67; hi18-21/1/69; abdl1929/8/70; cgkm29/11-4/12/71.
The finest of Dvořák’s music seems to combine
naturalness and vitality with a convincing sense
of form. Listening in succession to his nine
symphonies reminds us that this achievement
– perhaps most convincing in Nos. 6, 7 and 9 –
came only after much striving. Like Beethoven’s
before him, Dvořák’s naturalness was often the
result of the disciplining of a huge natural talent.
Paradoxically, with both composers, the impression
of spontaneity sometimes involved hard work.
Witold Rowicki’s complete Philips recording
of all the symphonies has always tended to be
overshadowed by Decca’s, made by István Kertész
with the same orchestra. Rowicki’s reputation in
his native Poland reached a peak when he worked
with the Warsaw Philharmonic (1950-77) and but
for the political barriers of those times he would
doubtlessly have had an international reputation.
These recordings, with what was probably the finest
British orchestra of the time, are very consistent in
technical quality. Wembley Town Hall is heard
here as a spacious, though not highly reverberant
auditorium.
Although the last three at least of Dvořák’s
symphonies are in the international repertoire,
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CDs - orchestral
I sampled a number of Czech Philharmonic
performances made between 1951 and 1983 in
parallel with Rowicki’s London set: Talich of
course (Nos. 8 and 9) but also Sejna (Nos. 5, 6 and
7). The earlier of two complete sets with Václav
Neumann, almost contemporary with Rowicki’s,
made a particularly interesting comparison as did
Neumann’s digital remake of about ten years later.
Rowicki is particularly convincing in matters
of transition. The change of mood after what
always sounds like a slow introduction to the first
movement of No. 8 is so vivid that it sounds almost
as if the tempo has changed. It hasn’t. Dvořák marks
the Beethoven-like passage of counterpoint about
half a minute into No. 6 “a little more animated”.
Rowicki again achieves this with no change of
pace. Such strongly characterised transitions of
mood with no intrusive accelerations or lingerings
help to punctuate Dvořák’s music naturally and
idiomatically.
Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4 show the composer
emerging from the strong influence of Liszt and
Wagner. While they contain some attractive
passages – such as the “knights in shining armour”
music at the centre of No. 3’s slow movement –
there is little that reminds us of the Dvořák we
know and love. That composer suddenly appears
in No. 5 whose first movement, often described
as “pastoral” is here unusually brisk and vital, as
indeed is the rest of this underrated symphony.
The first movement repeat is taken in the splendid
No. 6; 14 bars of vintage Dvořák (new to me) are
suddenly heard. In a few passages I thought that
Rowicki gave too much encouragement to the
brass; the climaxes of No. 8’s finale become noisy
and opaque. Throughout, No. 7 is immensely
cogent with a darkly serious first movement
and only a little slowing down in the finale for
“expressive” moments.
Neumann’s Czech Philharmonic performances
mentioned above reveal orchestral playing in deep
contrast to that of the LSO. The famous Czech
strings make a vivid impression as the melodies
in the first violins sing out ardently, glowingly
and with immense power. The London violins are
beyond criticism in their adroit delivery but the
Czechs are truly memorable. The Czech violas too
make telling and very “present” contributions at
reviews
key moments as does the whole woodwind section
which is more prominent and less blended than
the excellent London wind. Finally the wonderful
bass lines of the music and the timpani are more
focused and sonorous in the Prague recordings,
so that the music remains transparent in even the
heaviest passages.
It is a strange fact that despite the different
work of three conductors over a period of more
than 30 years, any one of the Czech performances
seems to differ more from the London set than
it does from any of its companions. This surely
points strongly to the huge contribution that the
orchestras themselves make to the interpretations.
When we speak of “Rattle’s Mahler” or “Ansermet’s
Stravinsky” we speak as if their orchestras do not
exist. That approach simply will not do here. Food
for thought!
Returning finally to Rowicki; his set is well
recorded and has real individuality. The other
recordings sampled show, however, that the art
of performing Dvořák’s music is not a completely
international matter and that performances
from his own country continue to have unique
qualities, not necessarily all of them related to
conducting. Graham Silcock
Dvořák Symphony No. 7 in D minor, B141.
Mussorgsky Khovanshchina – Prelude.
Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35a.
aKyung Wha Chung (vn); Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra / Carlo Maria
Giulini.
Testament M C SBT2 1439 (two discs; 85mins;
ADD); rec. Philharmonie, Berlin, 11/5/73.
If I were asked which non-Czech conductors
had impressed me most in Dvořák’s Symphony
No. 7, my answers would be Monteux, Rowicki,
Colin Davis (at various times with the LSO) and
Schmidt-Isserstedt. I wouldn’t necessarily think
of Giulini, who made two studio recordings
– in 1976 with the LPO (EMI) and, far more
expansive, in 1993 with the Concertgebouw
(Sony). There’s also a 1969 LPO live performance
on BBC Legends and a 1967 Chicago SO in its
Archive volumes.
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Discussing Giulini’s repertoire with the
orchestra, Helge Grünewald says that the Seventh
was unusual for them (DG made two BPO
recordings, Leitner in 1955, Kubelík in 1971)
but that the Tagesspiegel critic praised Giulini’s
“thrilling solution” to inherent problems of form
and structure in the symphony. You have to respect
Giulini’s musical integrity, yet in this instance he
doesn’t match Kubelík for characterisation – those
little nudges and shrewd inner voicings that mark
out his Berlin recording. DG’s sound too is more
luminous, although in the digital version (C 463
158-2) there is some distortion at climaxes; this
radio production is cleaner but bass heavy. Giulini’s
Poco adagio (10’50”) is sober; Kubelík (9’42”)
is more “pictorial”. Pure Dvořák as opposed to a
weighty, more Brahmsian account.
Kyung-Wha Chung made her Decca debut
recording in the Tchaikovsky Concerto (LSO/
Previn, 1970), with a less interesting Montréal/
Dutoit remake in 1982, while on the internet you
can find a 9’45” live excerpt, with Abbado and the
International Youth Orchestra from 1976. This
concert has her first Berlin performance, given
when she was 24. She is balanced rather forward of
the orchestra and there’s a slight edge to the tone,
which exaggerates the effect of her very first entry,
in the cadenza and during those accelerandos in
the (conventionally cut) finale. Certainly, Chung
finds more inwardness in the Canzonetta than in
her relatively bland first Decca. Apart from one
brief glitch in her first-movement cadenza, her
live performance is technically impressive. The
applause is rapturous.
In the opening Mussorgsky prelude Giulini
creates a wonderful sense of expectancy with
fastidious balance of texture and colour – this and
the Violin Concerto make the special-priced set of
interest.
Christopher Breunig
Kodály Háry János – Singspiel in four
adventuresa; Háry János – Suiteb; Dances
of Galántab; Peacock Variationsb; Dances of
Marosszékb; Theatre Overtureb; Concerto
for Orchestrab; Symphony in Cb; Psalmus
Hungaricus, Op. 13c; Minuetto seriob; Ballet
Musicb; Magyar Rondob.
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aErszébet Komlossy (mez) Orzse; aLászló
Palócz (bs-bar) Marczi; aGyörgy Melis (bar)
Háry/Napoleon; aZsolt Bende (bar) Bombazine
& Ebelasztin; aOlga Szönyi (sop) Marie-Louise;
aMárgit Lászlo (sop) Empress; aWandsworth
School Chorus; aEdinburgh Festival Chorus;
acLondon Symphony Orchestra / István
Kertész; cLajos Kozma (ten); cBrighton
Festival Chorus; cWandsworth School Boys’
Choir; bPhilharmonia Hungarica / Antal
Doráti.
Decca B C 478 2303 (four discs; 4hr 54mins;
ADD); rec. aLondon, 1968; cKingsway Hall,
London, 9/70; bMarl, Germany, 9-12/1973.
Retailing at between £18 and £20, this four-disc
set from Decca in Universal’s new “Collectors’
Edition” series presents a useful overview of
Kodály’s principal orchestral works for those
wishing to encounter them en masse. The set is split
evenly between two major Hungarian conductors
of different generations: Antal Doráti conducts
the Philharmonia Hungarica, an orchestra of
refugees from the 1956 uprising, now sadly no
more, in the various different orchestral works,
while István Kertész, himself also an emigrant
from Hungary following the 1956 uprising, takes
the lead for complete performances of Háry János
and Psalmus Hungaricus. Decca’s late 1960s and
early 1970s recordings offer the finest sound of
the period, which remains very good indeed,
offering exceptional clarity and lifelike balance if
a slightly antiseptic acoustic. The same might be
said of several of the performances: Doráti was a
recording conductor par excellence, who could be
guaranteed to deliver characterful performances
like an efficient film director: on time, on budget,
and with plenty of impact, as here. But whether
a disc containing the Háry János Suite, Dances of
Galánta, and the Peacock Variations, all of which
share a similarly energetic Hungarian folk idiom,
bears repeated listening will be very much a matter
of personal taste. The second of Doráti’s discs
offers slightly more unusual fare in the shape of
the Concerto for Orchestra and Symphony in C,
both fine if not strongly memorable works, here
effectively executed, and well worth investigating.
István Kertész’s complete account of Háry János,
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with Peter Ustinov as a most engaging narrator,
was one of the highlights of the conductor’s large
discography created with the LSO, and it remains
a significant recording. The illustrative wit of
Kodály is very much to the fore without at any time
becoming overblown, and the players display their
customary virtuosity throughout. Kertész’s account
of the Psalmus Hungaricus, with Lajos Kosma
as the vigorous tenor soloist, is, appropriately,
extremely powerful, and ends this tribute to a
major Hungarian composer with suitable fervour
and intensity.
David Patmore
Liszt Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne,
S95; Festklänge, S101; Hamlet, S104; Héroïde
funèbre, S102; Hungaria, S103; Hunnenschlacht,
S105; Die Ideale, S106; Mazeppa, S100;
Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S110; Orpheus, S98; Les
préludes, S97; Prometheus, S99; Tasso, S96; Von
der Wiege bis zum Grabe, S107.
London Philharmonic Orchestra / Bernard
Haitink.
Decca B C 478 2309 (four discs; 4hrs 45mins;
ADD); rec. London, 1968-71.
The 13 symphonic poems of Franz Liszt helped
to revolutionise music, its form and content, in
the nineteenth century: single movements of
varying lengths inspired by literature, painting
and events contemporaneous to the creation of
the music itself. Of the 13 (plus here Mephisto
Waltz No.1), only Les préludes seems to have
become relatively popular. Quite why the
other works are less well known is somewhat
baffling, for each is distinct on its own terms
and each stands apart in the canon as a whole.
Liszt’s musical innovation and imagination is
often startling, something that Berlioz would
have applauded, the musical ideas striking and
fuelling vivid narratives. True, sometimes one
senses Liszt’s need to encapsulate an image
in sound rather too consciously, so that he
compromises the flow of a piece, or there is
too much repetition to support the ideal of his
vision; thus Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne,
inspired by a poem by Victor Hugo, and the first
of the symphonic poems, might be considered
reviews
overlong (it takes 30 minutes under Haitink’s
direction), lacking purpose, and too sectionalised
in response to Hugo’s text. Yet at any one time
the ear is delighted by Liszt’s orchestral prowess
and his creative response.
As the other works are explored, one
recognises this composer’s harmonic and
scoring fingerprints and that they are constantly
evolving in terms of their own development, and
also specifically related to the stimulus that each
of the extra-musical subjects brings. One might
find some musical ideas trite, the composer’s
response melodramatic, yet there is also
something glorious that makes a revisit to the
piece in question certain – Tasso, for example. As
for Les préludes, yes, returning to it now reminds
one that its standing-apart from Liszt’s other
symphonic poems is understandable; the concise
structure and the memorable invention – tender,
striving and heroic – does cite a particular
admiration for Liszt’s achievement. But Orpheus,
music inspired by the art of music itself, is raptly
beautiful, the finest feelings expressed; Hamlet
is vivid in its tragic characterisation; Die Ideale is
musically explorative; and Von der Wiege bis zum
Grabe (“From the Cradle to the Grave”), which
Boulez has conducted, reveals a refinement and
economy that suggests no looking back.
Bernard Haitink conducts typically scrupulous
performances, arguably too sober at times, maybe
too literal, where youth combines with middleage experience – Festklänge fades beside memories
of a rip-roaring live account from Chicago under
Solti. These recordings are now 40 years old and
document the work of a conductor now in his
Indian Summer period who was then stepping
surely into international recognition. The fugal
content in Prometheus seems rather academic,
but Haitink finds the drive and edge of Mazeppa
well enough, although one can imagine a more
brazen approach, and he also brings out the
darkness and glower of Héroïde funèbre (an
extended funeral march that one assumes Mahler
would have been interested in). Well though the
London Philharmonic plays, there are times when
its response is more professional than seasoned,
responding to a charismatic maestro, yes, and a
good organiser, yet Kurt Masur’s Leipzig accounts
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for EMI are that bit more inspired and lived-with
(I retain the LPs, for the early CD transfers were
discoloured), and in the symphonic poems that he
recorded, Golovanov was entirely his own man.
The sound afforded Haitink is a little dry, but good
enough, and certainly his survey would make a
good introduction to this music as well as a sane
supplement to existing preferences. Colin Anderson
Mahler Symphony No. 4 in Ga; Lieder eines
fahrenden Gesellenb.
aMargaret Ritchie (sop); bEugenia Zareska
(mez); aConcertgebouw Orchestra; bLondon
Philharmonic Orchestra / Eduard van
Beinum.
Beulah mono M C 2PD17 (64mins; ADD); rec.
bKingsway Hall, London, 27/11 & 16/12/47;
aGrote Zaal, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam,
4 & 5/52.
This is an outstandingly successful transfer
of the symphony – comparison with my
smooth-surfaced Decca LP (L LXT2718) was
fascinating. The original was an exceptional
recording for its day and on transfer to CD
the sound remains more than acceptable. The
bright strings are a touch smoother but certainly
natural, the bass line has a little more presence
but, surprisingly, the high percussion is more
evident on my LP. I recall Van Beinum being
criticised for swiftness in the first movement
and I realise that there is a danger of such an
approach detracting from the expressiveness of
the music, but Van Beinum is so elegant and
his underlying rhythms are so subtly placed
that the booklet’s description of the music as
“cheerful, carefree and sunny” is aptly justified.
The Scherzo skips delightfully forward with an
ideally balanced solo violin, and the spacious
approach to the slow movement results in one
of the most gracious and beautiful performances
on record. The 58-year-old recording still stuns
the ear with its powerful impact at the main
climax. Margaret Ritchie’s contribution to
the finale did not impress some critics. Their
comments implied too much innocence and not
enough command but I find her very suitably
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delicate and never too forward in balance – my
description would be “charmingly understated”.
Eugenia Zareska’s powerful mezzo voice is
reproduced in the song-cycle with admirable
clarity and her phrasing is superb but the
excellent recorded quality of the Symphony
makes it all the more obvious that she was
given no more than adequate quality on 78s
of the period. It is also worrying that a woman
should sing these four songs which represent
a young man’s grief at the loss of his lady-love.
It is necessary to ignore the sense of the words,
come to terms with the orchestral sound and
ignore the unwise cutting of the surface noise to
complete silence between songs before Zareska’s
fine artistry can be appreciated. She is grippingly
dramatic in Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer.
Despite these reservations here is a very fine
Fourth Symphony. A rich treasury of Eduard
van Beinum’s recordings still awaits reissue and
I look forward to more releases. Antony Hodgson
Mendelssohn Symphonies – No. 3 in A
minor, Op. 56 Scottisha; No. 4 in A, Op. 90
Italianb; No. 5 in D, Op. 107 Reformationc.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Opp. 21 & 61
– Overture; Ye spotted snakesd; Overtures –
Hebrides, Op. 26e; Die schöne Melusine, Op.
32f. String Quintet No. 2 in B flat, Op. 87 – III,
Adagio e lentog. Violin Concerto in E minor,
Op. 64h.
hJascha Heifetz (vn); NBC Symphony
Orchestra / Arturo Toscanini.
Guild Historical mono M C GHCD2358/9
(two discs; 2hrs 32 mins; ADD); rec. New
York, a5/4/41; c8/11/42; h4/9/44; e11/4/45;
f1/1/47; g11/1/47; d1/11/47; b28/2/54.
Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 in C, Op. 60,
Leningrad.
NBC Symphony Orchestra / Arturo
Toscanini.
Opus Kura mono M C OPK7050 (72mins;
ADD); rec. New York, 19/7/42.
Whether on or not one likes the Shostakovich
performance – and the composer is said to
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have pronounced it “worthless” – there can
be no argument about the sonic superiority of
this transfer, which despite its occasional sonic
overload puts RCA’s comparatively muffled
and colourless CD to shame. The performance
was historic, not only through its offering of a
western-hemisphere premiere of the work, but
also for its association with the early days of
the second world war and “the battle against
barbarism and the Hitler hoards”, as a concluding
appeal for contributions to Russian War Relief
put it at the end of the broadcast. Also noted in
the broadcast commentary (none of it included
in this release) was Toscanini’s pronouncement
of “magnificent” after reading through the score.
Years later, to be sure, he changed his mind,
asking, “Did I conduct this junk?”. Years later,
too, Shostakovich may have changed his mind
about Toscanini. According to the composer’s
son, Maxim, when he asked his father what
conductor he should model himself upon, the
response was “Toscanini”. And regardless of how
one feels about the performance, as a premiere of
one of a major composer’s major scores inspired
by a pivotal event in the twentieth century’s
most horrific war and led by a man many
considered the pre-eminent conductor of his
day, its significance is indisputable.
The Guild release is confounding. All of its
nine offerings derive from NBC broadcasts,
but four have had previous releases, some from
“official” sources. Most notable in the latter
category are the Hebrides Overture and Scottish
and Italian Symphonies. But the account of the
Italian Symphony differs from some previous
RCA releases of the performance that credited
all of it to the broadcast of 28 February 1954.
Every RCA transfer contained patches from the
rehearsal for that broadcast. Most striking in
this regard is the transition passage in the first
movement, where in the complete airing featured
here, the pace slackens – a feature Toscanini
did not want circulated. The insertion from
the earlier rehearsal is eminently suitable, but
the unretouched live account is worth hearing.
Sonically, it is the finest item in this set.
Three items comprise Toscanini-only US
performances of the work in question: those of
reviews
the Hebrides Overture and Scottish Symphony,
though certainly more than listenable, lack the
brightness on top and overall presence accorded
them in Testament’s fine edition (C SBT1337).
Both performances show him at his best in
these taut but never unduly rushed and always
texturally transparent readings. He is also at his
best in the “Adagio e lento” from the Op. 87
string quartet where he projects a tender delicacy
without sounding sentimental.
Die schöne Melusine Overture is the first of
two NBC performances that Toscanini gave
of the work. Both have a driving agitation
that some, depending on taste, may find either
compelling or excessive. The few Midsummer
Night’s Dream excerpts drawn from an allMendelssohn broadcast add nothing positive
to the conductor’s profile – the overture, in
particular, being quite intense and almost fierce.
Similarly this account of the Violin Concerto will
strike many as unyielding and slick. Even such
an astonishing virtuoso as Heifetz seems hard
pressed in a few passages to keep up with a pace
that (presumably) Toscanini set. The account of
the Reformation Symphony, the second of four
that Toscanini gave at NBC, is interesting only
to the extent that it hardly differs from its 1938
predecessor and 1947 successor, all three being
unlike the still-available performance from his
final season (RCA C 74321 594480). That
account comprises one of his great achievements,
its finale having an unprecedented breadth that
leads to a conclusion in which the Ein feste Burg
chorale emerges with a shattering grandeur and
climactic force that Toscanini never previously
achieved.
A final word about Guild’s overall
production. In some respects it is sloppy. The
following dates of performances are corrections
of erroneous attributions: Hebrides Overture,
4 November 1945; Die schöne Melusine Overture,
1 November 1947; String Quintet Adagio,
1 November 1947; Violin Concerto, 9 April
1944. Also pitch in a few instances is slightly
off centre. Drawbacks notwithstanding, this
release should prove highly attractive for those
interested in Toscanini and unfamiliar with the
material it offers.
Mortimer H. Frank
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Mozart Symphony No. 36 in C, K425, Linza.
Don Giovanni – Overtureb; Le nozze di Figaro –
Overturec; Così fan tutte – Overtured.
R. Strauss Don Juan, Op. 20e; Till
Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28f.
afBBC Symphony Orchestra;
bcdGlyndebourne Festival Orchestra;
eLondon Philharmonic Orchestra / Fritz
Busch.
Guild Historical mono M C GHCD2356 (68mins;
ADD); rec. Studio No. 1, Abbey Road, London,
a5/3/34; f5-6/3 34; e6-8/7/36; Glyndebourne
Opera House, Sussex, cd28/6/35; b29-30/6/36.
Mozart Serenade No. 7 in D, K250 Haffnera.
Schubert Symphony No. 5 in B flat, D485.
aPeter Rybar (vn); Winterthur Symphony
Orchestra / Fritz Busch.
Guild Historical mono M C GHCD2352
(70mins; ADD); rec. Stadhaus, Winterthur, 8 or
9/49.
It might well be argued that among all the
conductors who gained major prominence during
the first half of the twentieth century, Fritz Busch
was the most poorly represented on disc. Of the
three Mozart operas he recorded in the 1930s, Don
Giovanni and Così fan tutte still tower as major
phonographic achievements. So, too, would his
direction of Le nozze di Figaro had its recording
not excluded all recitatives. Certainly the three
overtures featured here from those recordings attest
to his Mozartian sympathies, as does this account
of the Linz Symphony. It is particularly interesting
to consider it in the context of Beecham’s longadmired 1940 version, a model of grace and
elegance. By contrast, Busch is intense, festive, and
forward pressing and in many ways closer to more
modern approaches to Mozart. Yet, although taken
of itself it is superb, I wish Guild had drawn upon
his HMV remake of 14 years later with the Danish
State Radio Orchestra, a tauter, sonically superior
reading (a poor 1989 CD transfer from AS Disc
did not do justice to the performance).
Both Strauss items are impressive, ranking
among the prizes of Busch’s discography. This Don
Juan is surely one of the fleetest ever recorded,
the only performance I know that is as fast is the
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composer’s own. Such later eminences as Toscanini,
Furtwängler and Karajan all favoured tempi that
ranged from two to three minutes slower. Busch’s
Till Eulenspiegel is a controlled romp, boasting
horn playing at once virtuosic and witty. Again the
pacing, while fleet, remains flexible.
The disc devoted to Schubert and Mozart is
less successful. To be sure, both performances
are eminently stylish. In each work the orchestra
sounds appropriately modest in size, and, with one
exception, Busch’s tempos are superbly judged.
That exception is the second movement of the
Schubert, an Andante con moto, where Busch is
slower than Beecham (his Royal Philharmonic
account) and Toscanini. Among conductors of the
period that I’ve heard, only Bruno Walter favoured
a slower tempo than Busch’s. Granted it works at
his pace, but the period-instrument movement has
suggested that the tempo indication would seem
to imply something faster. However, this a minor
point. The major problem with this release is
sound. In the case of the Mozart, it is exemplified
by an unpleasant, edgy string tone that becomes
increasingly grating. The Schubert has that flaw
to a certain degree as well, but also suffers from
a prevailing graininess. Comparison with an
original Musical Masterpiece LP edition revealed
the same defect, one that quite possibly could not
be eliminated. Certainly those interested in Busch
should not be put off by this shortcoming. And
it should be noted that this release is free of the
sharpened pitch that infected part of an earlier
Guild/Busch release devoted to Haydn and
Mozart. Aside from one detectable side-join in the
Linz, the restorations on this Mozart/Strauss disc
are state-of-the-art.
Mortimer H. Frank
Vaughan Williams Symphonies – No. 2, A
London Symphonya; No. 8 in D minorb.
Hallé Orchestra / Sir John Barbirolli.
The Barbirolli Society M C CDSJB1021
(73mins; ADD); rec. Free Trade Hall, Manchester,
b19/6/56; a28-29/12/57 (www.barbirolli.com).
The Barbirolli Society does well to keep this
disc available: it contains two of the finest
performances of the symphonies ever made as
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well as showing Barbirolli at his absolute best. As
soon as the London Symphony appeared on CD
(in sound that completely eclipsed the original LP
formats) the performance’s inspirational qualities,
its eloquence and intensity of feeling, became
immediately apparent; these qualities remain
remarkable. The Eighth Symphony Vaughan
Williams dedicated to “Glorious John”, as he
called him, and the authority of the Pye recording
made of it shortly after the 1956 premiere (by a
Mercury team) is not in doubt. As a work it is
still underrated, though Barbirolli’s love for it
shines through everywhere, particularly in the
Cavatina third movement for strings alone. The
booklet note by Michael Kennedy, who knew
both composer and conductor at the time of
these performances, adds a further dimension to
the disc’s value, and I have no qualms about the
sound. Lyndon Jenkins
Sir John Barbirolli. Beethoven Symphony
No. 7 in A, Op. 92a. Debussy La mera. Holst
The Planets, H125 – Suiteb. Vaughan Williams
Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallisa. Wagner
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – Overturea.
aGeorge Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra;
bTurin RAI Orchestra / Sir John Barbirolli.
The Barbirolli Society mono M C SJB104243 (two discs; 117mins; ADD); rec. bRAI
Auditorium, 15/11/57; aRomanian Artheneum,
Bucharest, 13/9/58 (www.barbirolli.com).
As a follow-up to the Hallé 1958 Centenary
Concert (released on C SJB1033/34) the
Barbirolli Society has taken another dip into its
archive and come up with more unheard material,
this time from Barbirolli concerts in Romania
and Italy in 1958-59. Admirers of his wizardry
as guest conductor with foreign ensembles are
already aware of some of the riches lying dormant
in radio archives throughout Europe in the years
since his death in 1970: since these began to appear
on various labels they have contributed vitally
to reassessing his reputation, especially among
listeners aware only of his work in the UK.
Barbirolli’s globe-trotting began in earnest in
the late 1950s, and continued significantly during
reviews
his last decade. In 1958 in Bucharest a recording
of his concert there with the Enescu orchestra was
preserved by Lady Barbirolli (Evelyn Rothwell):
this is heard complete in this new release. Despite
moments when the radio engineers take fright at
the volume being produced and audibly adjust
the sound Barbirolli’s music-making comes over
at white heat. The opening Meistersinger prelude
perhaps takes a little time to settle, but in La Mer
and the Tallis Fantasia (the latter especially) it
is astonishing how he manages to persuade the
players to give off an intensity that he didn’t
always achieve in the UK, even with his own
players.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 was an echtBarbirolli interpretation, direct and truthful,
that varied hardly at all over the years: if you
compare this account with the live Hallé version
in London a whole decade later (BBC Legends
C 4076-2) all four movements are within a few
seconds of each other. Holst’s Planets made only
occasional appearances in Barbirolli programmes
in complete form, but he sometimes conducted a
“suite” consisting of five of the seven movements.
It is interesting to hear these, though the Turin
Orchestra can be forgiven for being a trifle
cautious (probably through unfamiliarity) and
the recording rather muddies the result. All the
same, this glimpse of Barbirolli “caught on the
wing” is highly rewarding too. Lyndon Jenkins
Carlo Maria Giulini.
Debussy La mer. Franck Psyché – No. 4,
Psyché et Eros. Rossini Semiramide – Overture.
Schubert Symphony No. 4 in C minor, D417,
Tragic.
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Carlo Maria
Giulini.
Testament M C SBT1438 (74mins; ADD); rec.
Philharmonie, Berlin, 13/2/69.
Debussy La mer. Ravel Piano Concerto for the
left handa; Ma mère l’oye – suite.
aMichel Block (pf ); Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra / Carlo Maria Giulini.
Testament M C SBT1434 (65mins; ADD); rec.
Philharmonie, Berlin, 10/1/78.
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Testament have elected to compete with themselves
by publishing two recordings of La mer with
Giulini and the Berlin Philharmonic. The choice
between the two is not clear-cut. The 1978
recording has the advantage of sounding more
positive mainly because the woodwind detail
is captured with greater clarity, and in general
the sound is more forward, yet the slightly more
spacious 1969 version preserves a performance of
subtlety, even if the climaxes lack the impact of
the later recording. This is no great disadvantage
in music of such pastel colouring in its quieter
episodes.
In the earlier recording, Franck’s rarely-heard
“Psyché and Eros” precedes the Debussy. Here the
conductor presents the voluptuous melodies with
highly eloquent phrasing and this richly Romantic
fully-scored work is an apt foil to the delicate
colouring of the earlier part of the Debussy. The
1969 La mer is interpreted with great care and
expressiveness. Giulini paints Debussy’s seascape
imaginatively but without being wilful. The
concert begins with a precise, lively Semiramide,
here given slightly understated dynamics yet with
greater detail than usual. The Schubert is a little
disappointing however – Giulini’s serious approach
justifies the title, but the sound is solid and rather
string-heavy. No outer movement repeats are made
and the tempo for the minuet is uncomfortably
fast for its Allegretto marking and this is underlined
when the trio section fails to keep to the same
speed.
Nine years later Giulini gave more impulse
and a slightly firmer shape to La mer although his
tempi were actually five per cent slower overall.
The 1978 audience is rather noisier and I do feel
that engineers should take a more interventionist
line when refurbishing public performances
– there is an awful double cough exactly five
minutes into the work at a point where there
should be a breathless hush. Despite the greater
presence of the overall sound the delicately scored
high percussion is not nearly so clear although
the sonorous weight of the big climaxes is more
exciting than in the 1969 version. Sturdiness is not
perhaps the most usual complimentary term to use
when describing a Debussy performance but with
Giulini the firmer line taken in the later recording
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results in an admirable sense of progress. This is
picturesque music and his approach vividly depicts
the relentlessness of ocean waves. Ravel’s gentle Ma
mère l’oye makes a suitable prelude to the concert
and Giulini elects to understate even further this
set of calm miniatures. All is delicacy and the
intertwining woodwind writing is balanced with
great care. The darker drama of the concerto seems
all the more purposeful as a result. Later in that
year the 31-year-old Michel Block gave up his
successful concert career and joined the music
faculty of Indiana University, so this recording is
a rare representation of his precise technique and
musical sensitivity. The piano is balanced slightly
forwardly which is ideal for representing the
highly original nature of the work. Block achieves
complete mastery over this hugely demanding
concerto – calm, firm, lucid and with immaculately
even runs through the octaves.
There is acceptable recorded quality throughout
these concerts though the 1978 presentation is
slightly more convincing, but both discs are spoilt
by the applause being left in after every work. It
really is time that recording companies made a rule
always to remove it from concert recordings unless
there is particular justification for leaving it in
(I cannot actually think of any). Antony Hodgson
David Nadien.
Violin Concertos by Beethoven, Bruch,
Glazunov, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky,
Vieuxtemps, Vivaldi. Works with orchestra by
Ravel, Sarasate. Chamber music by Beethoven,
Mozart, Schumann. Pieces by Bach, Debussy,
Dvořák, Elgar, Fauré, Kreisler, Massenet,
Paganini, Sarasate, Schubert, Wieniawski etc.
David Nadien (vn) with various artists.
Cembal d’amour mono/stereo M C CD111,
CD117, CD125, CD/DVD130, CD137, CD140
(74, 70, 75, 140, 68, 74 mins; ADD); rec. 195275; bonus DVD has interview with Nadien;
website: www.cembaldamour.com.
Born in New York in 1926 of Russian and Dutch
parentage, David Nadien studied the violin with
Adolpho Betti, Adolf Busch and Ivan Galamian
and won the 1946 Leventritt Award. He has a
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legendary status in the profession but I suspect
his name will be new to British readers who are
not violin aficionados. Three factors have told
against his gaining a wider reputation: he is of the
generation of American violinists who suffered
from the constant invasion of foreign virtuosos,
especially Russians; most of his studio records have
been made for the Kapp label, little known outside
the States; and he has spent much of his time in the
lucrative commercial pool, although he has had a
fair solo career, appearing more than 30 times with
the New York Philharmonic – which he led from
1966 to 1971 after Leonard Bernstein, recording
at Columbia’s 30th Street Studios, heard a Tony
Bennett recording being played back during a
break and was taken with Nadien’s tone.
Despite his impeccably classical pedigree
(Betti led the Flonzaley Quartet, Busch was
classicism personified and Galamian was a Capet
pupil), Nadien makes no secret of his admiration
for Heifetz and he seems to have tried to play in a
more Russian fashion than the Russians. Perhaps
it was a cultural thing, or perhaps he realised
that this blatant sort of virtuosity was what
American audiences wanted. When he is playing
within himself he can sound fabulous, but when
he piles on the bow pressure and licenses his
left hand to oscillate wildly, the listener has the
sensation of a vibrato that is fighting rather than
fitting the microphone. This is especially true
when, as here, many of the recordings are less
than state-of-the-art.
I can be entirely positive about CD111, which
comprises short pieces accompanied by Boris
Barere and taken from Kapp LPs recorded in
1961. The playing is always beautiful and often
exquisite; and the disc will delight anyone who
loves the familiar encore pieces by Raff, Elgar,
Drdla and so on. Several demand all Nadien’s
virtuosity – Paganini’s Moto perpetuo, Sarasate’s
Zapateado and Introduction and Tarantella,
Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro – but many
just require him to lavish lovely tone on them;
and there is one relative rarity, Vieuxtemps’s
Regrets. The sound breaks up very slightly on one
or two pieces but otherwise is excellent. CD117
has nine more of these encores with Barere, plus
one with David Hancock from a Monitor LP,
reviews
one with Samuel Sanders from a live recital and
Kreisler’s unaccompanied Recitative and Scherzo.
So far so good, but the disc is filled out with two
live recordings with the Hungarian State Opera
Orchestra. Zigeunerweisen is all right but Bruch’s
G minor Concerto is the kind of blowsy,
overblown Bruch I hate: only at the very end
of the Adagio does Nadien make any attempt
at the inward quality that even his hero Heifetz
could achieve in this work. CD125 is pretty
recommendable if you fancy the repertoire.
In Mozart’s great E flat Divertimento, K563,
Nadien is joined by two other legendary string
players, viola player Emanuel Vardi and cellist
Jascha Silberstein. It is quite a robust reading,
which comes off best in the second Minuet;
the live 1960 recording is a little recessed; and
Nadien’s intonation falters a few times. Then
we have a 1961 studio recording of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons, with Vardi conducting the Kapp
Sinfonietta. It is delightful and must have been
one of the best versions at the time.
The other CDs are mixed bags, as regards
both performance – with a motley collection
of orchestras and conductors – and recording
quality. CD130 has Ravel’s Tzigane, quite virtuosic
but out of tune in places, with a scrappy NYPO;
Glazunov’s Concerto, which should be Nadien’s
piece but again features some dodgy tuning, with
a poor orchestra; and Saint-Saëns’s Havanaise,
nicely done but with the same band. Best is the
Tchaikovsky Concerto with Bernstein and the
NYPO, well played by all concerned and in good
sound, apart from a few tiny tape dropouts. The
bonus DVD has Nadien talking to camera in
response to unimaginative questioning: we learn a
little about his life but virtually nothing about his
great teachers – Busch was “a learned musician”
and “extremely nice”. CD137 has a highly
competent 1952 Beethoven Concerto with Léon
Barzin, but the Carnegie Hall audience reserves
its heaviest coughing for the Larghetto, the
National Orchestral Association is below its best
form and although Nadien knows exactly how
the work should go, he is professional rather than
inspired. Mendelssohn’s E minor from 1975, with
the excellent Chappaqua Chamber Orchestra, is
enjoyable although the style is a bit broad-brush
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for my taste. The cadenza is very good but the
Andante is not really touching.
Last of all, on CD140 we have a 1973 Town
Hall recital with the well-known accompanist
Samuel Sanders. The Tartini-Kreisler Fugue is
enjoyable, as is Beethoven’s Op. 12 No. 1, apart
from touches of over-vibrancy. Viextemps’s Fifth
Concerto (amazing that someone was still playing a
concerto with piano in 1973!) is best when Nadien
is deploying his velvety mezza voce or pianissimo.
Bach’s “Chaconne” is well played although a little
aggressive in places. Schumann’s Fantasy, a Busch
favourite, finds the violinist trying too hard,
resulting in roughness of tone and intonation.
The three encores (one already aired on CD117)
are lovely. The presentation tends to be repetitive
across the six discs and musicologically dated – one
of Kreisler’s Baroque fakes is attributed to Tartini
and the arrangers or transcribers of the other short
pieces are not given. I heartily recommend Vol. 1
and if you like it, you may want to make the further
acquaintance of this violinist.
Tully Potter
David Oistrakh.
Bliss Fanfarea; Shostakovich Violin Concerto
No. 2 in C sharp minor, Op. 129b; Tchaikovsky
Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35c.
bcDavid Oistrakh (vn); London Symphony
Orchestra / abEugene Ormandy; cMaxim
Shostakovich.
BBC Legends M C BBCL4267-2 (63mins; ADD);
rec. abRoyal Festival Hall, London, 19/11/67;
cRoyal Albert Hall, London, 26/11/72.
This most valuable issue contains the European
premiere of Shostakovich’s Second Violin
Concerto in a simply magnificent performance
by its soloist dedicatee. This work is not so well
known as its predecessor (as with Shostakovich’s
cello concertos) but it is, I would suggest, a greater
work of art, albeit less immediately compelling.
For some reason, violinists tend to prefer the First
Concerto (the key of the Second lies less easily on
the instrument – the work, like Hindemith’s in the
same key, ends in D flat), but soloist, conductor
and orchestra give their all here and the result
is dumbfounding, a superior account to that on
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Oistrakh’s contemporaneous Soviet recording, and
rather better balanced.
It comes from an LSO Trust gala concert, which
opened with a new fanfare by the then Master of
the Queen’s Music, Sir Arthur Bliss. Although
short, this is not an instantly forgettable piece of
civic rodomontade but has genuine merit of its
own: Ormandy judges it perfectly.
An LPO concert five years later provides
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto under Maxim
Shostakovich. This is another great Oistrakh
performance which tangibly inspires Maxim and
the LPO, proving yet again that a fine live
performance often has the edge over a studio paste
job. It is not entirely note perfect, and nor is the
balance quite perfect, but this is the real thing. Tully
Potter’s notes are admirable, but he is in error in
claiming that the Tchaikovsky is played complete:
Oistrakh makes the customary six cuts (52 bars)
and alters the cadenza at 455 in the finale. As he also
plays bars 77-85 in the second movement an octave
higher, it is not “just as Tchaikovsky had written it”.
Otherwise, all is well: the Shostakovich Concerto is
an absolute must.
Robert Matthew-Walker
Klaus Tennstedt. Glinka Ruslan and Ludmilla
– Overturea. Mahler Symphony No. 1 in Db.
Klaus Tennstedt interviewed by John Amisc.
London Philharmonic Orchestra / Klaus
Tennstedt.
BBC Legends M C BBCL4266-2 (70mins; ADD);
rec. aUsher Hall, Edinburgh, 28/8/81; bRoyal
Festival Hall, London, 28/1/90; cLondon, 1990.
For me, Tennstedt’s live performances were nearly
always preferable to his studio recordings, and on
this CD comes a most impressive live Mahler First
with the LPO, manifestly superior to their EMI
studio account of a dozen years earlier. It seems
Tennstedt himself agreed, according to Colin
Anderson’s absorbing booklet notes, and this
performance comes as a timely reminder of what
we have lost: from the opening bars Tennstedt
creates an utterly magical atmosphere which is
always germane to the unfolding musical narrative.
Throughout this first movement, and the second as
well, there is playing and conducting of the highest
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standard; the third movement is not quite in the
same class, and I found the finale a shade – but no
more than that – disappointing: the tension, so
difficult to maintain here, just occasionally eases
off when it should be kept on a tight rein. I cannot
accept Tennstedt’s cutting of the last bar and pause
in (iii) – he also discards the pauses in the finale
around figure 13 (perhaps the Festival Hall acoustic
led him astray) – and the contentious addition
of cymbals later at figure 44 is unnecessary. But
overall this is a truly memorable account by a great
conductor. The 20-year-old recording is more than
acceptable, although I should have liked a more
powerful brass section, as recorded, at times.
Like me, Anderson finds “Tennstedt conducts
Glinka” a potentially odd proposition, but the
result at the Edinburgh Festival eight or so years
earlier is dazzling – a terrific performance with the
LPO on top form – they clearly loved this man. To
conclude, we have a very short interview between
Tennstedt and John Amis – the effects of the
conductor’s lifetime of chain-smoking are all-tooreadily apparent, but it makes a moving memento
of a superb musician. Robert Matthew-Walker
CDs CHAMBER & INSTRUMENTAL
Bach Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor,
BWV1052a; Partitas – No. 5 in G, BWV829; No.
6, BWV830; Das wohltemperierte Klavier, Book
II – Fugue in F sharp minor, BWV883; Fugue in
E, BWV878.
Glenn Gould (pf ); aColumbia Symphony
Orchestra / Leonard Bernstein.
Naxos B C 8.112049 (65mins; ADD); rec.
Columbia Studios, New York, a11 & 30/4/57;
29-31/7 and 1/8/57.
The original CBS LP coupling for the Bach
concerto was Gould’s Beethoven Second Concerto
(now on Naxos C 8.111341). His characteristics
are all here – the finger strength, the perfect
knowledge and presentation of Bach’s lines and a
full understanding of the composer’s processes.
Bernstein, who had been at the helm at Gould’s
Carnegie Hall debut in January 1957 was
reputedly keen to accompany but, unsurprisingly
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perhaps, his Bach was less than idiomatic. So it
is that the opening ritornello is remarkably heavy
(“determined” would be a kinder description).
There are also times when the orchestra constructs
a cocoon of cotton wool around Gould.
Bernstein’s opening to the concerto’s second
movement is analagous in effect to the first; and,
as then, it is the entrance of Gould that transforms
the experience. His lines sing in a way that is almost
extemporised, and yet remains completely within
Bach’s aesthetic. Gould it is that whisks one away
with his energy in the finale.
The shift to solo piano for the partitas is a harsh
one. Suddenly Gould is extremely close (heard
in isolation, the effect is one of pure clarity). The
two works presented here remind one of Gould’s
youthful vivacity – together with the two fugues
they were originally issued on a 1957 LP (US
Columbia L ML5186). There is some stunning
articulation here (the “Corrente” of the G major, for
example); the robust “Passepied”, again BWV829,
is pure Gould. The extended (9’56”) Toccata that
opens the Sixth Partita is mesmeric (just as much
so as in the later CBS recording). Gould’s reflective
tone continues into the “Allemande”, reaching its
apotheosis in the stately “Sarabande”.
The fillers are magnificently considered
readings. In his notes Jonathan Summers points
out the discrepancy in tempo between here and the
recording some 12 years later. As always, Gould’s
searching mind was continually exploring and
reinventing. The calm repose of BWV878 makes a
fitting close to this fine disc.
Colin Clarke
J. S. Bach/W. F Bach (arr. Mozart) Four
preludes and fugues for string trio, K404a.
Mozart Divertimento for string trio in E flat,
K563.
Pasquier Trio (Jean Pasquier, vn; Pierre
Pasquier, va; Etienne Pasquier, vlc).
Music & Arts mono M C CD-1233 (66mins;
ADD); from Les Discophiles Français L45; rec.
Paris, 1951.
The brothers Pasquier made up one of the few
famous string trios in recording history and many
works were written for them. Etienne played in
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the prisoner of war camp premiere of Messiaen’s
Quatuor pour le fin de temps; and later he and Jean
gave many performances of it with the composer,
also making the best recording with him. The
Trio Pasquier made two recordings of Mozart’s
great divertimento, the first on 78rpm (Columbia
m DX742/6, Pathé m PAT38/42); and the only
serious criticism that can be made of either is that
no repeats are played. Even with the luxury of tape
for this second recording, everyone had to bear in
mind that early LP sides were short.
The Bach arrangements come first and although
they may not have anything to do with Mozart –
the booklet notes summarise the latest research –
they are beautifully, simply played and make good
listening. The first movement of the Mozart, where
one notices at once that Etienne Pasquier can play
his part without the lurches in which other cellists
indulge, brings a note of controversy regarding the
transfer, taken by Albert Frantz from the Haydn
Society tape. When I turn to a CDR made from
my original LP, the players have more presence, the
sound is more forward and has more body, so that
the semi-quavers all register. The M&A transfer
imparts a faintly shrieky, edgy quality to the sound,
over-emphasising the violin and pushing the other
two instruments vaguely into the background. My
CDR, of course, has pops, clicks, surface noise and
wear distortion, but it still represents the basic
sound – and the interpretation – better.
Thereafter the new transfer affects the
performance less. We hear a few slightly
dodgy notes from Jean Pasquier, but otherwise
everything is lovely. I do recommend that every
collection contains at least one good modern
recording with the majority of Mozart’s repeats,
but anyone who loves the work will enjoy this
truly historic recording. The beauty of tone, easy
ensemble and brotherly love of the Pasquiers
mostly survive intact. Could anyone listen to
them skip through the carefree finale without
feeling uplifted?
Tully Potter
Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 15 in D, Op. 28a.
Schubert Piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat, D960b.
Tatiana Nikolayeva (pf ).
BBC Legends M C BBCL4268-2 (74mins: ADD);
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rec. BBC Studios, Glasgow, b9/12/91; BBC
Studios, London, a18/1/93.
Tatiana Nikolayeva (1924-1993) was a pupil of
Alexander Goldenweiser and Evgeny Golubev
and had an impressive career, primarily as a
teacher and pianist, but also as composer. Her
early career was spent almost entirely in Russia,
during which time she won the Leipzig Bach
Competition (1950) where she impressed
Shostakovich sufficiently for him to write his 24
Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87 for her. It was not
until the early 1980s that she began to perform
regularly outside the USSR, when she began a
busy career touring some 35 countries.
The performances here are individual and
on my first hearing I was so conscious of regular
note slips, technical frailties, misreadings of
the text, omitted bars, rhythmic waywardness,
poorly voiced chords and an over-dominant left
hand, that I wondered why the CD had been
issued. However, on a second listening to these
readings, undeterred, forewarned and bearing in
mind her pianist-composer credentials, I found
there were qualities to admire. In the Beethoven
sonata, Nikolayeva clearly understands that
the name “Pastoral” was not his, as her view
is certainly no walk through the countryside.
Her overall conception has a melancholy air,
though each movement has distinct atmosphere
and a steadfast consistency of approach. She is
particularly alert to harmonic structure and
detail, which provides a clear sense of overall
shape, in addition to the many felicities of
phrasing.
Nikolayeva has a personal view of the
Schubert sonata and it is perhaps her
compositional attributes rather than pianistic
ones that come to the fore in this performance.
The first movement has an unexpectedly dark
mood, where there is much more emphasis on
the middle and lower textures and much less on
a cantabile top line. The second subject has an
unusually restless, impetuous pulse, providing
a greater contrast than normal, while the
development and recapitulation provide a real
sense of journey. The slow movement is warmtoned and heartfelt, though at the expense of a
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true three-in-the-bar momentum. The scherzo is
heavy and brusque but the contrasts in the final
movement are drawn distinctly.
There is much to appreciate and also to annoy
in these performances and they are most certainly
not “run-of-the mill”. The recorded sound serves
the performances well.
Donald Ellman
Chopin Andante spianato and Grande
polonaise brillante, Op. 22a. Polonaises – No,
1 in C sharp minor, Op. 26 No. 1b; No. 2 in E
flat minor, Op. 26 No. 2c; No. 3 in A, Op. 40
No. 1, Militaryd; No. 4 in C minor, Op. 40 No.
2e; No. 5 in F sharp minor, Op. 44f; No. 6 in A
flat, Op. 53g; No. 7 in A flat, Op. 61, Polonaisefantaisieh.
Artur Rubinstein (pf ).
Naxos B C 8.111346 (73mins; ADD); rec.
RCA Studios, Hollywood, USA, ce27/9/50;
dg28/9/50; h13/12/50/; a14/12/50; b21/5/51;
f23/5/51; a25/5/51.
This is the central group of Rubinstein’s
recordings of the Chopin polonaises. Naxos have
already issued the 1934-35 HMV Abbey Road
performances of these works (C 8.110661);
later came the 1964 RCA version. The Andante
spianato and Grande polonaise brillante appears at
the end of the running order of the present disc, in
a performance of some grandeur. More than most
pianists, Rubinstein brings out the brightness of
the brillante in the polonaise. The characteristic
RCA sound (itself bright and a little airless)
probably helps in this case.
The seven polonaises presented here have
been lovingly restored by Mark Obert-Thorn.
Rubinstein’s fire and fervour seems innately true to
the spirit of these pieces, perhaps most obviously
heard in the so-called Military Polonaise and in
the F sharp minor, Op. 44, the latter painted on a
huge canvas. He is equally responsive to the dark,
shifting colours of the C minor, Op. 40 No. 2.
The steely chords that lead into the bass octavedriven trio of Op. 53 offer maximal contrast;
Rubinstein’s pianistic palette seems infinite. The
Polonaise-fantaisie brings out the artist’s finest
performance here. He is infinitely alive to the
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music’s elusive nature, and defines the polonaise
rhythms just enough to accord them a ghostly
resonance in the listener’s psyche.
If the later RCA recordings have more of the
patrician about them, the 1934-35 versions are
more fervent and impulsive still – there is more of
a sense of the exploratory about them. These 195051 versions offer valuable documentary evidence of
the pianist’s interpretative journey.
Colin Clarke
Chopin 24 Preludes, Op. 28a; Liszt Grandes
Etudes de Paganini, S141b; Scriabin Piano
Sonata No. 5, Op. 53c.
Viktor Merzhanov (pf ).
Appian mono M C APR5671 (76mins; ADD);
rec. Moscow b1951 & 1955; ac1955; cc1956.
APR’s excellent “Russian Piano Tradition”
series continues with Viktor Merzhanov, a
pupil of Samuil Feinberg (himself a pupil of
Goldenweiser). In 1945, Merzhanov won the AllUnion Competition in Moscow, sharing the top
prize with Richter.
These Melodiya recordings from the early to
mid-1950s confirm Merzhanov’s reputation as an
individualist, whose insights are ever fascinating.
The recorded sound is excellently rounded, and
the transfers by Bryan Crimp are astonishing –
witness the silent surfaces for the A major Prelude,
Op. 28 No. 7. The preludes receive a reading of the
utmost variety (this was Melodiya’s first complete
recording). Fluidity is Merzhanov’s watchword in
the faster pieces, while the slower ones regularly
invoke a sense of the monumental. The B minor, No.
11 sounds almost improvised; the F sharp major,
No. 13 also – here Merzhanov’s tone is unbearably
sweet. With this pianist, a presto really is a presto,
as the remarkable scurryings of No. 16 in B flat
minor attest. There is a touch of pitch fluctuation
in the famous Raindrop Prelude. Structurally, the
reading is more of a succession of ever-fascinating
miniatures than one great structural arch, so the
final D minor does not quite hold its full climactic
effect.
The acoustic for the first of the Liszt Paganini
Etudes is identifiably drier (note that Nos. 2 and
6 date from 1951, the rest from 1955), something
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which suits Merzhanov’s pedal-eschewing
approach. His technique seems perfectly attuned
to Liszt’s demands, although some passages may
be found too dry and airless. Lightweight touch
contrasts with Herculean moments: perhaps it is
the lighter pieces that are the most memorable –
“La campanella” and “La chasse” in particular.
Contrast forms a vital part of Scriabin’s Fifth
Sonata, too. Merzhanov pits the modernism of
the opening gesture against the ensuing perfumed
meanderings, setting up a tension that informs the
rest of the reading. The fluidity that was so much
a part of Merzhanov’s Chopin here comes into its
own. The climax is simply ecstatic.
Colin Clarke
Debussy Préludes, Book I – Nos. 1a, 3b, 9a &
11a; Book IIc; Suite bergamasqued.
Sviatoslav Richter (pf ).
Melodiya MEL M C CD10 01622 (66mins;
ADD); rec. Great Hall of the Moscow
Conservatoire, a1961; c25/6/57; b10/10/76;
d5/6/79.
Usually I prefer Richter issues which include
a complete recital. In this instance, though, a
selection from four different concerts in different
years has resulted in a superb Debussy collection.
The distinguishing factor, although the recordings
span an 18-year period, is the consistent beauty of
the sound. Not many Richter live performance
recordings hint convincingly at the quality and
range of his tonal command, but this disc does.
It opens with a particularly beautiful-sounding
Suite bergamasque, the most recent recording
included. “Clair de lune” is as tonally lush and as
unsentimental as you’ll ever hear the piece. The
Préludes, all the ones of Debussy that Richter
played, are a feast of delights, concluding with
a typically spectacular performance of “Feux
d’artifice”. All this repertoire is available in other
Richter recordings, but these, apparently all first
publications, are definitely worth having. It’s
a pity that the remaining available space on the
disc couldn’t be used for more Debussy; a version
of L’isle joyeuse in this level of sound quality
would have been very welcome. But what’s here is
magical.
Leslie Gerber
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Hindemith Der Schwanendrehera;
Trauermusikb; Sonata for piano, four handsc;
Viola Sonata No. 3d.
Paul Hindemith abd(va) c(pf ); cdJésus
Maria Sanromá (pf ); aArthur Fiedler’s
Sinfonietta / Arthur Fiedler; bunnamed
orchestra / Bruno Reibold.
Ismeron mono M C JMSCD9 (67mins; ADD);
rec. New York, a12/4/39; b21/4/39; cd24/4/39
(www.ismeron.co.uk).
This is a straight reissue of Biddulph C LAB087,
released in 1993. The rights to the disc have
been acquired by J. Martin Stafford for release
on his Ismeron label. I reviewed the Biddulph
release in another place, and can report that
the sound quality on the new issue, conveyed as
before through Mark Obert-Thorn’s transfers, is
equally good. Stafford has written informative
notes, but those by Tully Potter for the Biddulph
issue were even better.
Hindemith’s performing career had two
phases. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1922
and was its viola player until 1929, when he
formed a string trio with Josef Wolfsthal and
Emanuel Feuermann. Wolfsthal died prematurely
in 1931 and was replaced by Szymon Goldberg.
After 1934, when Hindemith was compelled to
leave Germany, he turned more to conducting.
The items on this disc represent Hindemith’s
last recordings as a viola player. They show his
technique to be still in reasonable order, but
his tone quality, never exactly seductive, is less
attractive than in his earlier recordings – for
instance in the Solo Viola Sonata, Op. 25 No.
1, recorded by Columbia in 1934 (reissued in
EMI’s “Composers in Person” series). Close
recording balances don’t help.
A very practical musician, Hindemith could
play most orchestral instruments, and in the 1938
duet sonata, where he plays secondo to Sanromá,
a close musical colleague, he shows himself to
be a nimble-fingered pianist in this attractive,
outgoing work. In Der Schwanendreher of
1935, a viola concerto in essence which uses old
German folk songs for its thematic material,
Hindemith’s efficient account of the solo part
is well-supported by an ensemble conducted
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by Arthur Fiedler, better-known for lighter
repertoire as conductor of the Boston “Pops”
Orchestra. As is well-known, Hindemith was to
have played Der Schwanendreher for the BBC
in January 1936, but King George V’s death
occurred and its jolly character was deemed to
be inappropriate: overnight the composer wrote
his moving Trauermusik, and this new piece was
substituted in performance.
The disc is completed by Hindemith’s Third
Viola Sonata, which the composer and Sanromá
premiered four days before the recording. This is
much tougher Hindemith, written in his driest
manner, but the committed performance repays
repeated hearings. The recordings on this disc are
obviously authoritative: they should be studied
by all who play Hindemith’s music, especially
for viola, but somehow I doubt whether this will
happen.
Alan Sanders
Mozart The complete string quartets; 3
Divertimenti, K136-38.
Amadeus Quartet (Norbert Brainin,
Siegmund Nissel, vns, Peter Schidlof, va,
Martin Lovett, vlc).
DG M C 477 8680 (six discs; ADD); rec.
Hanover, Berlin, Vienna & Munich, 1963-76.
The most valuable and distinguished part of this
issue is the miraculous group of ten great quartets,
K387-590, that Mozart wrote in Vienna between
1782 and 1790. This collection has appeared
several times since the recordings were made in
the 1960s. Here are the Amadeus Quartet’s last,
stereo versions of the works concerned and they
come from the peak years of the ensemble’s form
and fame. Interested enthusiasts can find earlier
recordings of most of these ten works in DG’s
five-disc “Original Masters” box (C 474 000-2).
The 16 much earlier quartets, K80-173 (177073) formed no part of the Amadeus’s concert
repertoire. It seems likely that they were recorded
to make up the complete set. There is great
disparity between the performances of the two
groups of works.
Almost every movement in all this music,
however, is played at a tempo which seems just
reviews
and natural for its character. This is surely one
of the most fundamental needs for these works
but it is very rarely achieved convincingly. There
has always been controversy about the actual
sound of the Amadeus Quartet. While some
have heard in its performances a blended texture,
the impression given here by DG’s recordings
conforms with their sound as it was heard ‘live’;
an ensemble of four highly individual musicians
rather than a seamlessly integrated quartet.
Since they were originally produced for issue
on ten LP sides, only K575 in D and K590 in
F among the big works have first movement
exposition repeats. Repeats are often absent in
the earlier pieces too. The wide vibrato of the
three upper players may bring expressive solo
playing – famously so with the leader – but it can
cloud inner detail, especially in forte music. DG’s
recordings, as often in chamber music, tend to
closeness and have little sense of ambient.
Among the later works nearly all the
performances give memorable insights that are
rare, even unique. The slow movement of K387
receives an ecstatic performance in which every
nuance is minutely studied, but the effect is of
spontaneity. (Unfortunately in the preceding
Minuet the very first note is faded in already
halfway through.) A real highlight of the
collection is the first movement of K428 in E
flat, which has a splendidly confident swagger,
contrasting strongly with the chromatic warmth
of its slow movement in which the balance of the
four instruments is wonderfully judged. However
many times the Amadeus Quartet had played K
465 in C – the famous Dissonance Quartet – by
1966, the date of this recording, it still sounds
fresh here; brilliant and alive, in a performance
also sensitive to the wistful introspection of its
slow movement.
The long and elusive slow movement of K499
in D is played with the utmost concentration
and gravity but it is the last two works, especially
K590 in F, that seem to me to crown the Amadeus
Quartet’s performances here. This music is a true
product of 1790, when Mozart entered only four
works into his catalogue. The Amadeus Quartet
responds to its affecting understatement and to
the severe counterpoint of its last two movements
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with unfailing insight and technical brilliance.
The only disappointment here among the ‘great’
quartets is K464 in A, where a particularly
cramped recording quality prevents the music
from speaking with the effect that the players
surely intended.
Almost inevitably a number of mannerisms
intrude. Nearly all of them are to be found in
the early quartets. Brainin breaks his four-note
chords at cadences two plus two, producing
unintentional upbeats to the main beats.
Elsewhere he employs portamento (both rising
and falling) thoughtlessly rather than expressively.
An obvious example occurs in K136’s first
movement, in the quiet passage leading to the
recapitulation. Other ‘ready-made’ tendencies
have crept into these 1970s recordings of the early
pieces: Allegro movements are treated with a kind
of general purpose vigour in which semiquaver
passages are sometimes dispatched aggressively
and repeated notes ‘scrubbed’. After so much
intelligent conversation in the 1960s recordings,
it is disconcerting to hear the members of the
Amadeus Quartet occasionally shouting at each
other ten years later.
It is easy to overestimate the amount of music
contained in the early works. The ten great quartets
originally occupied five LP discs. This whole
collection now requires only six CDs. Anyone who
has it in their record library will have at hand some
of the most characterful and committed Mozart
performances of the last century. Graham Silcock
Richard Farrell – the complete
recordings, Vol. 2.
Brahms Variations and Fugue on a theme
of Handel, Op. 24; Rhapsody in G minor, Op.
79 No. 2; Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119. Chopin
Etudes, Op. 10 – No. 3 in E; No. 4 in C sharp;
No. 5 in G flat; No. 10 in A flat; Etudes, Op.
25 – No. 11 in A minor; Mazurkas – No. 10 in
B flat, Op. 17 No. 1; No. 41 in C sharp minor,
Op. 63 No. 3; Nocturne No. 4 in F, Op. 15 No.
1; Polonaise in A flat, Op. 53; Scherzo No. 1
in B minor, Op. 20; Waltz No. 14 in E minor,
Op. posth. Chopin (arr. Liszt) Drinking Song,
S480 No. 4. Debussy Suite bergamasque
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– No. 3, Clair de lune. Granados Goyescas
– No. 4, Quejas o la maja y el ruiseñor. Liszt
Rigoletto Paraphrase, S434; Liebeslied, S566a.
Mendelssohn Songs without words – Duetto,
Op. 38 No. 6. Rachmaninov Preludes – C
sharp minor, Op. 3 No. 2; D, Op. 23 No. 4; G
minor, Op. 23 No. 5; E flat, Op. 23 No. 6; G, Op.
32 No. 5; G sharp, Op. 32 No. 12. Variations
on a theme of Corelli, Op. 42. Schumann
Arabeske, Op. 18.
Richard Farrell (pf ).
Atoll M C ACD909 (two discs; 168mins;
ADD); from original Pye recordings, c1957-60
(atollcd.com).
“There are three pianists in the world – William
Kapell, Richard Farrell and myself ”, Artur
Rubinstein is alleged once to have said. Farrell
(b.1926) was a New Zealander who was making a
successful career in Europe when he died in a 1958
car crash. This is the second volume in a series,
projected to include all his recordings, to be issued
by the New Zealand-based company Atoll Records
(the first volume was reviewed by the Editor in
the CRC Summer 2009 issue – page 86). The
recordings issued so far were made for the English
company Pye (whose copyright is now owned
by EMI). The third volume will include some
broadcast performances, including the Schumann
Piano Quartet, played by a chamber music group
organised by Farrell himself.
Whether or not Rubinstein made the
remark attributed to him, it is clear from these
performances that Farrell was a superb pianist.
Particularly impressive is his ability to make even
hackneyed warhorses like the Schumann-Liszt
Liebeslied and Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp
minor sound original and fresh. The major item in
the present volume is Brahms’s Handel Variations
and here Farrell yields nothing to previous
interpreters of this work. He has complete control
of its technical difficulties, he observes Brahms’s
dynamic directions meticulously, his tempi are just
and, while his playing is magnificently sonorous,
he never resorts to mere banging. His legato
octave playing in both hands seems effortless.
The Variations are, or course, amongst Brahms’s
most direct works, but anyone who has tried to
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play the pieces comprising his Op. 119 knows
how difficult it is to interpret and to discover the
musical meaning in these elusive compositions.
Farrell’s insight is complete and he plays them most
convincingly.
It might have been Farrell’s playing of Chopin,
which is virtually ideal, that led Rubinstein to
praise him. It is never rushed; there is little rubato
and no affectation. Particularly beautiful is the tone
he manages to produce from the piano (I wonder
which make it was). Equally Chopinesque are both
the sense of poetry that pervades his interpretations
and his sheer technique. The Etudes seem to pose
no problem for him.
Farrell showed considerable enterprise in
recording Rachmaninov’s Corelli Variations so
early in his career as the piece was not then widely
known. There is nothing remotely Russian about
this music – Rachmaninov’s last composition for
solo piano. Farrell may have been drawn to it by its
affinity with the music of Chopin and even Brahms.
In view of the excellence of this performance, it is
difficult to understand why, according to the notes
accompanying the records, the English critics in the
1950s were critical of Farrell’s playing of Brahms
and Rachmaninov.
A special word is due to the Pye engineers of
over 50 years ago and to those who undertook the
remastering for the present issue. The piano tone
is amazingly clear and lifelike. Only in the Chopin
Scherzo did I feel a comparative lack of presence
and clarity.
Richard Gate
Finnish composers play their own works.
Merikanto Scherzo in C, Op. 6 No. 4a;
Impromptu in G, Op. 44 No. 2b. Palmgren
Barcarollec; May Nightd; Päivänpaistetta
kyynelten läpie. Hannikainen Evening, Op.
4 No. 3f; Gavotte, Op. 25 No. 2g; À la fontaine,
Op. 12 No. 2h. Linko Valse gracieusei; Tangoj;
Sonatina No. 1, Op. 23 No. 1k; Hommage
à Domenico Scarlatti, Op. 12l. Kokkonen
Sonatina (1953)m. Englund Sonatina (1966)n.
abOskar Merikanto (pf ); cdeSelim Palmgren
(pf ); fghIlmari Hannikainen (pf ); ijklErnst
Linko (pf ); mJoonas Kokkonen (pf ); nEinar
Englund (pf ).
reviews
Fuga mono/stereo M C 9154 (63mins; ADD);
rec. Helsinki, b1906, a1908, ij1929, cd1938,
e7/4/50; fghl1954; k22/3/56; m12/5/57;
n15/3/67 ([email protected]).
With the second track, this fascinating survey takes
us right back to 1906, Oskar Merikanto playing
his Impromptu in G. The crackle may be plentiful
and the sound of the piano somewhat emaciated,
but the performance, not exactly subtle, is lively
in music that has the flavour of the fairground to
it. Then flip back a track for Merikanto playing
his Scherzo in C in 1908 with brio and poise;
whatever the novelty of recording back then,
he seems to have been enjoying himself, a relish
that comes through 100 years later. With Selim
Palmgren’s three contributions, we reach 1938
and 1950; from the earlier of these years both
the Barcarolle and May Night make agreeable
listening, although the sound is rather colourless
and the mechanics of the playback a little too
discernible; from 1950, Päivänpaistetta kyynelten
läpi is cloudily recorded. Evening (which could
pass as a Rachmaninov prelude), which opens the
Ilmari Hannikainen sequence, also brings dull and
restricted sound, certainly for 1954, but improves
for the Gavotte. For all that it is continuous, À la
fontaine – somewhat impressionistic – seems to
have been recorded between 1950 and 1955 or in
parts during these two years.
All nice and enjoyable pieces, so far, and
the salon connections continue with pieces by
Ernst Linko, which includes his three-movement
Sonatina and a four-movement Domenico Scarlatti
tribute. A charming waltz and then something
exotic leads us to the Sonatina, a crisp, cool piece,
and the Scarlatti suite is equally lucid; in this latter,
the pitch to be heard on the 1954 recording seems
slightly awry at times. The most up-to-date sound is
from 1957/1967, a Sonatina by Joonas Kokkonen,
darker and more angular than anything else to be
found on this release, perhaps owing something
to Hindemith, and finely played by its creator.
Another Sonatina, one by Einar Englund, another
very competent pianist, also reminds of Hindemith
and rounds off an interesting issue, one in which
the source material is decidedly inconsistent, if
transferred with minimum fuss. Colin Anderson
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Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall – the
private collection.
Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor, S178a.
Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibitionb.
Vladimir Horowitz (pf ).
RCA Red Seal mono M C 8697 53885-2
(56mins; ADD); rec. Carnegie Hall, New York,
b2/4/48; a21/3/49.
Balakirev Islameya. Chopin Barcarolle in F
sharp, Op. 60b. Liszt Légendes, S175 – No.
2, St Francis de Paule walking on the waterc.
Schumann Fantasy in C, Op. 17d.
Vladimir Horowitz (pf ).
RCA Red Seal mono M C 8697 54812-2
(50mins; ADD); rec. Carnegie Hall, New York,
d8/4/46; c3/2/47; b28/4/47; a23/1/50.
Beethoven Piano Sonatas – No. 14 in C sharp
minor, Op. 27 No. 2, Moonlighta; No. 21 in C, Op.
53, Waldsteinb. Haydn Piano Sonata No. 62 in E
flat, HobXVI/52c.
Vladimir Horowitz (pf ).
RCA Red Seal mono M C 8697 60474-2
(50mins; ADD); rec. Carnegie Hall, New York,
b28/3/45; a28/4/47; c2/2/48.
These three discs of “new” Horowitz – “live”
Horowitz performances never previously published
– are sure to cause a stir. Before his death in 1989
the pianist donated to Yale University’s music
library the Horowitz Archives, which contained a
number of private recordings he had commissioned
of Carnegie Hall recitals between 1945 and 1950.
Harold C. Schonberg’s biography, Horowitz – His
Life and Music (Simon and Schuster, New York,
1992) drew attention to the existence of such a
treasure trove. In 1995, under the sobriquet “The
Private Collection”, RCA issued two enticing
volumes of archive samples, including Bach,
Debussy, Prokofiev, Kabalevsky and Barber items
previously missing in Horowitz’s vast “official”
discography.
But now, as a result of collaboration between
Sony, Carnegie Hall and RCA, a larger selection
of these private recordings has come out on CD.
In the words of Thomas Frost, Horowitz’s loyal
record producer and friend, the best of them reveal
“Horowitz at the height of his Middle period” –
that is, the years immediately preceding his shock
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abandonment of the concert platform, in 1953.
This “middle period” can be described, in crude
summary, as Horowitz’s ne plus ultra era: the pianist
at his most astounding and elemental, combining
electricity, interpretative sweep, Romantic
intensity of gesture and theatrical legerdemain in a
manner and to a degree unparalleled in his century.
Being this Horowitz caused pressures, above all
psychological, that led directly to his sudden
withdrawal: as Schonberg puts it, “For 12 years
the most popular pianist since Paderewski hid,
in effect, behind closed doors”. When in 1965 he
finally emerged from seclusion, it was as a matured
musician of widened range and disposition. The old
“electric” Horowitz had not disappeared; rather, as
recordings from 1965 onwards make gloriously
clear, he had achieved an accommodation with the
new.
But what each of these CDs reveals is the
musical whirlwind that Horowitz could summon
up at the peaks of that “middle period”. Even
for this particular listener, a Horowitz devotee
of long standing, the experience of it has
proved overwhelming. Defects common to the
discs demand tolerance. The inherited surface
noise can be disturbingly intrusive, e.g. in the
Moonlight first movement (the originals had
declined in quality, in parts seriously, by the time
the Yale Sound Archive was able to transfer them
to tape); and in almost every work Horowitz
encounters patches of pianistic inaccuracy, even
wild splashing, forgivable in a concert context
but which could prove hard to live with on
repeated listening. (A lesser but not unimportant
source of dissatisfaction is the undistinguished
booklet essays by David Dubal, author of the
embarrassingly sycophantic Evenings with
Horowitz – Amadeus Press, USA, 2004.)
Happily, such drawbacks, inescapable though
they may be, cannot mar the intoxicating effect
of Horowitz caught, as here he continually is,
in daredevil flight. For me the CD containing
Mussorgsky’s Pictures and Liszt’s B minor Sonata
proves the most intoxicating of the three. Famous
Horowitz recordings of both works have long been
available – his 1932 Sonata, studio-recorded in
London, stands proud among the gramophone’s
most celebrated classics – yet the sheer Dionysiac
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vitality of these 1948 and 1949 “live” accounts
recalls to mind Arrau’s words of praise for Horowitz
(as quoted in Joseph – no relation – Horowitz’s
Arrau on Music and Performance – Alfred A. Knopf,
New York, 1982): “… some of the most volcanic
playing I’ve ever heard”. Horowitz’s fillings-out of
Mussorgsky’s compositional plainness provoked
critical disapproval at the time: now it’s the
teeming inventiveness of his pictorial imagination,
the extraordinarily sophisticated rhythmic
underpinning, that hold the ear spellbound. After
opening Liszt phrases filled with unfathomable
mystery and menace, Horowitz creates in the
Sonata an alternation of thunderstorm and clear
sky that crackles with drama. This arch-Romantic
reading is not necessarily the most revelatory or
desirable way of surveying Liszt’s masterpiece; what
it does produce is Liszt playing of incomparable,
unapproachable splendour. (An oddity: Horowitz
excises roughly a page of score in the hinterland of
the Andante sostenuto section. The booklet gives no
explanation for the cut, which does not occur in his
1932 or 1977 recordings.)
The other discs are more variable, hardly less
compelling or, at moments, dazzling. Horowitz
was always an inspired, engaged, delightful
Haydn interpreter, as he shows here, in 1948.
His Beethoven remains controversial, the 1947
Moonlight richly fascinating in its wealth of
pianistic acumen yet oddly restless, the 1945
Waldstein much more convincingly sustained yet
even so not a complete whole. The 1950 Balakirev
Islamey, a virtuoso showpiece which he kept in his
active repertory only a single season, is perhaps the
collection’s most excitedly anticipated Horowitz
rarity. The first six of its 7’03” minutes are brilliant
and exhilarating; the rest is overdriven – as is the
climax of the 1947 Liszt St Francis de Paule. The
1946 Fantasy and 1947 Barcarolle add handsomely
to our knowledge of, respectively, Horowitz’s
Schumann and Chopin playing without displacing
his other, later recordings of those works.
Individual responses to these CDs will vary. That
said, I cannot believe anyone could possibly come
away from them in a mood to argue with Arrau’s
summation of Horowitz: “… he’s a special case.
Tremendous electricity. Him I would call a great
pianist”.
Max Loppert
reviews
Michael Zadora – The Complete
Recordings.
Works by Brahms, Busoni, Chopin, Debussy,
Delibes, Field, Hummel, Liszt, Prokofiev,
Rubinstein etc.
Michael Zadora (pf ).
Appian mono M C APR6008 (two discs;
138mins; ADD); from Vox, Polydor, Ultraphon,
Electrola and Friends of Recorded Music
originals; rec. c1922-38.
Michael Zadora (1882-1946) studied with
Leschetizky in Vienna and Heinrich Barth in
Berlin. He was associated with Busoni, whom
he met in Berlin, to the extent that he actually
played a Mendelssohn Lied ohne Worte at
Busoni’s deathbed. He also prepared, with Egon
Petri, the piano part of the vocal score to Busoni’s
opera Doktor Faust. Some readers may know him
through his compositional pseudonym of Pietro
Amadis, and indeed there are several “Amadis”
works here: the playful The Prima Ballerina
is a delight; perhaps Vienna Waltz is a lesser
inspiration.
The set is neatly divided into a disc each of
acoustic and electrical recordings (Zadora used
a Blüthner for the former and a Bechstein for
the latter). Almost all his recordings are here
(there is, alas, one disc of works by Amadis and
Stockhoff that could not be traced). Both discs,
neatly, begin with Chopin waltzes. The two heard
first, Op. 69 Nos. 1 and 2, are from German Vox
and only dated as “early 1920s”; ambient hiss is
high, but the piano tone sings through, especially
in the perfectly judged melancholy of the C sharp
minor. A Chopin Prelude, Op. 28 No. 6, reminds
us of the lack of a 78rpm editing option with a
huge miss in the left-hand melody; the piece’s
haunting quality survives, though. Perhaps most
memorable is the perfectly judged Mazurka, Op.
67 No. 4.
The electrical recordings are clearer. There can
have been few fleeter Minute waltzes; his waltz,
Op. 64 No. 2 of c1929 is more langorous than that
of around seven years earlier. Zadora’s sense of the
lyric comes to the fore in the Chopin Etude, Op.
25 No. 1 (the top line is weak but beautiful) and
in four Liszt Consolations (Nos. 1-3, 5). Lack of
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bass in the recording makes Brahms’s Intermezzo,
Op. 117 No. 2 almost unrecognisable, however.
One of the highlights is the once-popular Raff
Fileuse, Op. 157 No. 2, given with pure affection.
The penchant for transcription at the time is
evident in the Scarlatti/Tausig Pastorale (from the
famous Sonata, Kk478), the rare Pergolesi-Zadora
arietta (the tender Se tu m’ami, se sospiri) and the
delicious Jensen-Zadora Whispering Zephyrs. The
arrangement of the Larghetto from the Piano
Concerto, Op. 16 by Henselt is masterly. The
Hummel Rondo (E flat, Op. 11) is delightful,
while Prokofiev’s Prelude Op. 12 No. 7 positively
glitters. If the Bach (an abridged “Sarabande” and
the Partita, BWV990) is rather heavy for present
tastes, Zadora’s Debussy (“Prélude” and “Toccata”
from Pour le piano) is magnificent – heroic,
almost.
The purity of Zadora’s counterpoint in Busoni’s
Third Sonatina is only matched by the rightness of
his conception overall. Busoni only features briefly
on the first disc, in the Beethoven-Busoni Ecossaises.
The most famous of the Busoni Sonatinas, No. 6 is
given a superb performance. Zadora clearly takes
the piece seriously – this is no mere pot-pourri of
Carmen themes. The set closes with outstanding,
almost mystical performances of Sonatinas No.
3, Ad usum infantis and No. 4, In diem nativitatis
Christi, both from Friends of Recorded Music
originals. A most rewarding set.
Colin Clarke
VOCAL AND CHORAL
Jeanne Gerville-Réache. Madame Charles
Cahier.
Operatic arias and songs.
Jeanne Gerville-Réache (con)a; Madame
Charles Cahier (con)b; with various artists.
Preiser mono M C 89737 (77mins; AAD); rec.
a1909-13; b9/28.
Carlo Morelli. Luigi Montesanto.
Operatic songs and arias.
Carlo Morelli (bar)a. Luigi Montesanto (bar)b;
with various artists.
Preiser mono M C 89738 (71mins; AAD); rec.
a1928-40; b1921-33.
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Lola Artôt de Padilla. Bella Alten. Luise
Perard-Petzl.
Operatic arias.
Lola Artôt de Padilla (sop)a. Bella Alten (sop)b.
Luise Perard-Petzl (sop)c; with various artists.
Preiser mono M C 89735 (79mins; AAD); rec.
a1909-22; b1909; c1913.
In an age when the category “Historical Vocal”
seems more often than not to denote Maria Callas
and her contemporaries, it is doubly welcome
to find Preiser looking further back in time and
broadening the horizon. The singers here have not
been favoured overmuch by those who have delved
on behalf of the general public into the archives
of the more remote past, and that is certainly not
because their comparatively few recordings fail to
merit our attention. All on these discs (and each
offers more than its “main attraction”) have some
quality that rewards interest. And, whatever may
be thought and said about the sound obtained, it
is unlikely that these particular issues will become
available from some other source in the near
future.
Lola Artôt de Padilla is best known for her
Mozart. Made in 1915, her versions, in German,
of the principal solos of Cherubino and Zerlina
are among the most vivid and vital of all. She lives
every moment, as impulsive as Conchita Supervia
in the Figaro arias, strong and delicate as Elisabeth
Schumann in the Giovanni. The fine shadings of
her lovely, clear tones are as sensitive to change as
a barometer. She sings in attractive duets with Karl
Jörn and the well-schooled baritone Franz Egeniev.
She was also clearly an exquisite Violetta, Micaëla
and Mimì, but in these roles she is partnered
relentlessly by Björn Talen. At first you think him
gifted but miscast; before long you could strangle
him.
The others heard in this disc are also eminently
collectors’ singers. Bella Alten (warm and
substantial in her upper register, rather wanting
colour in the lower) made these four rare records in
1909. Luise Perard-Petzl also has four, apparently
deriving from a single session in 1913 – and they are
breathtaking. There are arias from Die Zauberflöte,
Ernani, Il trovatore and Aida, and each is a gem.
She places her voice with immaculate precision,
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swells and diminishes her phrases without fussing
them out of shape, and is observant of refinements
(trill, staccato, portamento) that are often ignored
by singers of far greater renown.
The mezzo (or would she then have been
termed contralto?) Jeanne Gerville-Réache also
earns her place in the pantheon, but may I suggest
an approach not via the first track and a straight
play-through but by immediate selection of the
products of the session on 5 May 1911. These tell
you what she was ‘about’ (as everyone seems to say
of everything these days). The flourish and panache
of her excerpt from Massé’s Paul et Virginie are
captivating; so also (I find) is the old-style tragedyqueen’s grandeur in Schumann’s “Ich grolle
nicht”. Then there is a surprisingly imaginative
performance of Reynaldo Hahn’s Verlaine setting,
D’une prison. The earlier tracks have their merits (it
is a sumptuous voice) but they show up mercilessly
her (apparent) constant need to take a breath:
“J’ai perdu (√) mon Eurydice”, “O ma lyre (√)
immortelle”, “Amour, viens aider (√) ma faiblesse”
and so forth.
Gerville-Réache shares her disc with the oncefamous Mme Charles Cahier, early exponent
of Mahler, advisor to the metamorphic Lauritz
Melchior, teacher of Marian Anderson. The six rare
recordings date from 1928, when she was not far
off 60: firm-toned and stylish if not very flatteringly
served by a dry acoustic and scratchy orchestra.
Finally, two baritones, the ‘fill-in’, Luigi
Montesanto most interestingly heard in the
Pathés made shortly after he came to prominence
singing the leading role in the world-premiere of
Il tabarro. Finer, and surely much underrated, is
Carlo Morelli. He comes to notice occasionally
in some off-the-air performances from the Met in
the late 1930s, but here are the elusive Columbias
of 1928, catching him in glorious full Italianate
resonance (he was a native of Chile), glowing
with vocal health, urgent in determination to
bring the characters (Rigoletto, Iago, Cascart)
to full dramatic life. The songs on American
Columbia from 1940 are less satisfactory (horrid
accompaniments for one thing), but the excerpts
from the live Gioconda of 1939 are impressive.
Transfers are (for my liking) too much of the
bright-and-hard type but, played at a generous
reviews
volume-level, they will do. And the voice that
comes out so clearly is thrilling.
John Steane
Pavel Lisitsian in concert.
Songs and arias by Balakirev, Borodin,
Glazunov, Got, Keil, Massenet,
Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rubinstein,
Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Tosti,
Verdi and traditional songs.
Pavel Lisitsian (bar); Matvei Sakharov (pf );
Boris Abramovich (pf ) and other artists.
Preiser mono M C 89243 (two discs; 152mins;
ADD); rec. Great Hall, Moscow Conservatoire,
1948-52.
Precise identification of recordings by Soviet era
artists has never been easy, but I feel fairly certain
that none of the items on this two-CD set has been
previously available although in some cases there
are alternative recordings. Once heard, the voice
of the Armenian baritone Pavel Lisitsian can never
be forgotten. Even for aficionados of the so-called
“Golden Age” when there was a plethora of great
baritones, the sensuous beauty of Lisitsian’s voice
is surely unique. Spend a brief moment listening to
the aria from Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (these
CDs include two different performances): how on
earth could Lisa choose Herman instead of this
Yeletzky?
The Bolshoi was Lisitsian’s home base for his
operatic career; after the mid 1960s he devoted
most of his time to concerts. The brief insert note
points out that he was one of very few Soviet
singers known in the outside world: he sang at
both the Metropolitan and La Scala and made
concert tours in the USA and Western Europe. His
Melodiya recordings were intermittently available
at specialist dealers and often commanded high
prices. Tastes and enthusiasms change. My
impression is that for opera lovers as distinct from
record collectors Lisitsian’s standing and reputation
outside the USSR were at the time rather less than
that accorded to then current favourites from that
part of the world.
These 52 live recordings are with one
exception all taken from three concerts; the
accompaniment by piano joined in three cases
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by violin and cello. The one exception, labelled
as bonus is the “Nile Duet” from Aida sung with
Nina Pokrovskaya and the Bolshoi Orchestra
conducted by Melik-Pasheyev. This too would
appear to be hitherto unpublished – Lisitsian
did record the role of Amonasro in a complete
Aida but the title role was taken by Sokolova.
The first of these two CDs contains a wide
variety of musical styles, whilst the second
is devoted exclusively to songs and arias by
Tchaikovsky. The opening item on the first CD
is one of Borodin’s songs – translated here as For
the shores of thy far native land. Like so many
in the genre it has been recorded by a variety
of voices. What immediately hits the listener
once again is the sheer beguiling beauty of tone.
Lisitsian moves on to other Russian songs before
a lovely aria from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kashchey
the Immortal; again the singing is simply
ravishing. I suspect some purists may baulk at
German Lieder sung in Russian, but the power
and beauty shown in Schubert’s Doppelgänger
must surely sweep aside all objections. Arias
from Roi de Lahore and Ernani would also seem
to be unusual repertoire: but the legato and
the sheer authority shown in the latter put this
interpretation in a very special class.
Apart from a few arias from his operas, the
second CD contains a veritable cornucopia
of Tchaikovsky’s songs. Lisitsian’s ability to
project the range of his vocal timbre is a huge
interpretive help. In the short snippet from
Eugene Onegin, the tones are darkened to reflect
the despair of the eponymous hero; the voice is
darker still in the bonus duet – the harshness a
striking contrast to the soft tones of Yeletsky’s
aria mentioned at the beginning of this review.
Reverting to Tchaikovsky’s songs Lisitsian’s
voice is almost magically lightened in Don
Juan’s Serenade. Perhaps most powerful of all
– certainly one of my favourites – is the lesser
known song, Night.
Listening to this new set probably endorses
my decision a quarter of a century ago to purchase
from one of those specialist dealers and at a huge
price a three-disc boxed LP set entirely devoted
to Lisitsian. The new CDs cost only a fraction of
that price in real terms.
Stanley Henig
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Lauritz Melchior sings Wagner.
Wagner Excerpts from operas and two
Wesendonk Lieder.
Lauritz Melchior (ten) with various artists.
Preiser mono M C 89242 (two discs;
153mins; ADD); from Victor and US
Columbia originals, recorded various
American locations 1938-42.
The great Danish heldentenor Lauritz Melchior
spent the war years in America, where he led
the German wing of the Metropolitan Opera
in unforgettable performances of operas by
Wagner. Many of these were broadcast and
informally recorded, and have been issued on
both LP and CD in numerous editions. These
performances were highlights of the Met’s
Saturday afternoon matinée broadcasts, so
RCA Victor and then US Columbia sought
to exploit Melchior’s fame and popularity
with commercial recordings of him singing
highlights from his Wagnerian repertoire.
These recordings are not held in quite such
high esteem today as the live material.
This new set collects Melchior’s Wagner
studio recordings from this period and so
provides an opportunity for re-evaluation.
Broadly speaking they do little to displace the
prime position of Melchior’s live broadcasts.
Victor’s frequent use of small orchestras and a
generally rather “tight” studio acoustic, and the
inevitable short running time of 78rpm discs,
provide little opportunity for the fire which
could possess Melchior on the operatic stage.
One certainly gains a sense of his formidable
vocal strengths, and the range of repertoire
is excellent, from Rienzi to Parsifal, together
with two beautifully turned songs from the
Wesendonk Lieder. But the sense of drama is
fatally missing, despite the presence of another
key Scandinavian singer of the period, Kirsten
Flagstad, in excerpts from Tristan und Isolde and
Götterdämmerung. Preiser’s production values
are superb, with excellent transfers and detailed
documentation. So here is a useful souvenir of
Melchior in all of his major Wagner tenor roles
rather than the real thing, for which, fortunately,
one can look elsewhere.
David Patmore
CRC Summer 2010
CDs - opera
OPERA
Korngold Violanta.
Walter Berry (bs) Trovai; Eva Marton (sop)
Violanta; Siegfried Jerusalem (ten) Alfonso;
Horst Laubenthal (ten) Bracca; Gertraut
Stoklassa (sop) Bice; Ruth Hesse (mez)
Barbara; Manfred Schmidt (ten) Matteo;
Heinrich Weber (ten) First Soldier; Paul
Hansen (bs) Second Soldier; Bavarian Radio
Chorus; Munich Radio Orchestra / Marek
Janowski.
Sony Opera House B C 86975 7650-2
(73mins; ADD); rec. Bavarian Radio Concert
Hall, c1979.
Nothing illustrates the decline of the classical
music recording industry more vividly than
a comparison of the first issue of this fine
recording with its present reissue. When it was
initially released by CBS Masterworks in 1980,
as the premiere recording of a seminal work in
Korngold’s output (his first opera), the two LPs
came in a finely designed box, with a lavish 12inch square illustrated booklet that contained
a message of congratulation from Karl Böhm, a
lengthy essay on the history and importance of
Violanta by Christopher Palmer, a full synopsis,
followed by the complete libretto in three
languages, all accompanied by many historical
and session photos. All that Sony can manage for
this CD reissue, of what is still the opera’s only
commercial recording, is a bargain basement
leaflet, with no historical information at all and
just a brief synopsis, a track listing and a cast list.
And this from a global organisation that claims
to be one of the world’s major record companies!
Any listener coming new to Violanta will have a
hard time if it.
Nonetheless, for those prepared to make the
effort, the rewards are considerable. The cast is
uniformly excellent with soprano Eva Marton and
tenor Siegfried Jerusalem especially outstanding
as the two doomed lovers, and Walter Berry,
despite advancing years, a significant husband to
Marton. Marek Janowski conducts a stylistically
impeccable account of the fabulous score, and
draws entirely credible playing from Munich’s
reviews
number two radio orchestra. Bavarian Radio’s
original studio recording is very clear, but in this
current remastering it sounds a little clinical with
not much warmth – a quick listen to the original
LPs makes the difference immediately apparent.
No admirer of Korngold’s music or of late central
European Romanticism will want to be without
this important release, if they do not have it already.
It’s a shame that Sony could not be bothered to
make more of an effort.
David Patmore
Mozart Così fan tutte.
Leontyne Price (sop) Fiordiligi; Tatiana
Troyanos (mez) Dorabella; Judith Raskin
(sop) Despina; George Shirley (ten) Ferrando;
Sherrill Milnes (bar) Guglielmo; Ezio Flagello
(bs) Don Alfonso; Ambrosian Opera Chorus;
New Philharmonia Orchestra / Erich
Leinsdorf.
Sony Opera House B C 86975 7901-2 (three
discs; 3hrs 26mins; ADD); rec. Walthamstow
Town Hall, London, 8-9/67.
In historic terms this set dates back to what
was almost a golden age for studio recordings
of opera. This reissue is part of the attractively
priced Sony Opera House series, but the
original recording was by RCA. Traditionally
RCA have looked to the Metropolitan Opera
for potential casting although a good many of
their recordings – like this one – were made in
Europe. Così fan tutte has never been central to
the Met repertoire: Erich Leinsdorf in the course
of his illustrious career as house conductor
never performed it. Of the singers involved
all had important careers at the Met, although
Troyanos did not arrive there until after this
recording was made. However, only Price and
Shirley ever performed their roles at the house.
In the mid-1960s Leontyne Price was at the
height of her career and widely regarded as one
of the truly great sopranos. My suspicion is that
RCA built the recording around her. Looking
back on Price’s career she will probably be best
remembered for performances in Verdi, but she
was a very considerable Mozart performer. The
great Emmy Destinn, who sang many of the
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same roles as Price, is on record for claiming that
Mozart – which she sang fairly rarely – was an
essential bedrock of her career.
In several respects Così fan tutte stands apart
from perhaps any other opera. Improbable
disguise is hardly unique. In this case the disguise
is utterly implausible outside pantomime and
there is no sense in which Così is part of that
genre. Fiordiligi and Dorabella can be regarded
as young female equivalents of the older men
who are frequently the object of derision in
nineteenth-century Italian operas. More than
an element of cruelty, or in this case misogyny
belied by glorious music!
Così fan tutte is a long opera and this is reputed
to have been the first complete recording. The
six characters are perfectly balanced and all have
much to sing – there is no supporting cast. The
concerted numbers are particularly important:
here the role of Leinsdorf in moulding the
performance is a major asset. Leontyne Price
handles the difficulties of “Come scoglio” with
ease; “Per pieta” is one obvious highlight of
the recording. Another is Tatiana Troyanos’s
exquisite rendering of Dorabella’s final act aria.
There is an excellent contrast between Price’s
smoky tones and the mezzo of Troyanos. The
latter is also heard to good effect in her duet
with the Guglielmo of Sherrill Milnes, then in
the early stages of his career. The part of the
other lover, Ferrando is taken by George Shirley.
He was somewhat of a Mozart specialist and
on the strength of “Un’aura amorosa” it is easy
enough to understand why: carefully crafted and
delicate, a lovely piece of singing.
The four lovers are at the centre of the plot
but it is essentially driven by the cynical Don
Alfonso and the rather too knowing and worldlywise Despina. Ezio Flagello enjoyed a huge career
at the Met – his experience is well to the fore
as he leads and guides so much of the ensemble
singing. Judith Raskin’s voice is well contrasted
with those of her mistresses – her interpretation
of “In uomine” is particularly affecting.
All told this is a fine reissue at a very modest
price. The notes concisely summarise the intricacies
of the plot, usefully relating them to the track
points on the three CDs.
Stanley Henig
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CDs - opera
Smetana The Bartered Bride.
Milada Musilová (sop) Mařenka; Štěpánka
Štěpánová (sop) Ludmila; Marie Veselá
(con) Háta; Ivo Žídek (ten) Jeník; Oldřich
Kovář (ten) Vašek; Karel Hruška (ten)
Principal Comedian; Václav Bednář (bar)
Krušina; Karel Kalaš (bs) Kecal; Zdeněk
Otava (bs) Micha; Prague National
Theatre Chorus & Orchestra / Jaroslav
Vogel.
Supraphon mono M C SU3980-2 (two
discs; 128mins; ADD); rec. Prague, 24, 28-29
March 1952.
Rarely can one label an opera set “the best”.
This is one of those blessed occasions. Norman
Austin initiated a 1977 reissue (Rediffusion
L HCNL8009/10); and highlights appeared
in Germany. But this is the first CD issue of
a miraculous performance. It was the second
of three splendid National Theatre sets of the
Czech national comic opera: first came Ostrčil’s
1933 album (HMV m AN801/15; Naxos C
8.110098/99), which still thrills although
two crucial cast members are past their best;
and in 1961 we had Chalabala’s stereo effort
(Supraphon L 50397/98), full of flair but
patchy in all departments. Outside the canon
came Ančerl’s 1947 radio recording (Multisonic
C 310185-2), notable for preserving Beno
Blachut’s Jeník, and Košler’s fine 1981 digital
set with the Czech Philharmonic (Supraphon
C SU3707-2).
Jaroslav Vogel (1894-1970), the conductor
here, has two other claims on our attention: a
superb Jenůfa, which should also be reissued, and
a magnificent book on Janáček. His conducting
of Smetana’s ebullient masterpiece combines
the best qualities of his rivals, the precision
of Ančerl, the flair of Ostrčil and Chalabala,
the lyricism of Košler. The faster music has
irresistible rhythmic buoyancy and the more
reflective moments are given their full bloom
without ever tipping over into sentimentality.
He is able to give the chorus and orchestra their
heads while retaining control.
In the title role, Musilová maintains the
strange tradition that any soprano recording
CRC Summer 2010
CDs - opera
Mařenka should be around 40. Nordenová
(1933) was 42, Červinková (1947) was 39,
Tikalová (1961) was 46 and Beňačková (1981)
was 37. Just turned 40, Musilová sounds half
that age, except that her lower register has
the fullness which bespeaks a mature voice.
Her top register is firm and free. In her first
long scene, the aria is beautifully voiced in a
suitable soliloquy manner; and her Act 3 aria
is heartbreaking, with lovely floated tones in
the quieter moments. Her Jeník, the illustrious
Žídek, is only 25 and at his vocal peak, making
the most of his aria. Let us be honest and admit
that even at its best, the voice is not quite
“beautiful”, but it fits the music and is used
with intelligence, musicality and feeling. The
lovers’ duets are highlights, as they should be.
The Kecal of Kalaš, like all his work on disc, is
in the great line of Czech basses, Heš, Pollert,
Ludikar, Zítek et al. He also sings for Ančerl but
five years later both characterisation and voice
are rounder and riper. Kovář is possibly the
most natural Vašek on disc, affecting but not
annoying ; and like Žídek, he is fresher-voiced
here then when repeating his role for Chalabala.
The supporting line-up is everything one could
wish for, with Otava and the amazingly fluent
Hruška surviving from 1933.
Now that I know two venues were involved,
I can tell that the more intimate scenes were
taped in the Domovina Studio, the bigger setpieces in the Rudolfinum. The mono sound
is excellent, with some distortion inevitably.
A Czech-English libretto can be downloaded
from www.supraphon.com. A good synopsis is
provided in the booklet. Any opera collection
that does not include this set is seriously (or
comically) lacking.
Tully Potter
Verdi Un ballo in maschera.
Carlo Bergonzi (ten) Riccardo; Robert
Merrill (bar) Renato; Leontyne Price
(sop) Amelia; Shirley Verrett (mez) Ulrica;
Reri Grist (sop) Oscar; Mario Basiola
(bar) Silvano; Ezio Flagello (bs) Samuel;
Ferruccio Mazzoli (bs) Tom; Piero De
Palma (ten) Lord Chief Justice; Fernando
reviews
Iacopucci (ten) Servant; RCA Italiana
Opera Chorus & Orchestra / Erich
Leinsdorf.
Sony Opera House B C 86975 8132-2
(two discs, 129mins; ADD); rec. RCA Italiana
Studios, Rome, 6/66.
Verdi’s great middle period opera has fared
particularly well on disc: amongst others we
can listen to Callas, Tebaldi and Milanov as
Amelia, and Björling, Di Stefano and Gigli
as Riccardo. But ever since it appeared, this
particular version has been my favourite. The
recording is not directly related to specific
opera house performances, but it is noteworthy
that in February 1966 the three principal
singers – Bergonzi, Price and Merrill – were
all in a series of performances of the opera at
New York’s Metropolitan. Erich Leinsdorf,
the Met’s house conductor for much of the
Italian repertoire, never conducted the work
there, perhaps surprisingly given the skill and
knowledge with which he holds together and
guides this recorded performance.
Inevitably perhaps, the highlight of this
recording is the very heart of Act 2 – Amelia’s
aria “Ma dall’arido stella divulsa” and the love
duet “Teco io sto… M’ami, m’ami” which
follows. Bergonzi and Price were at the very
height of their careers in the mid-1960s. Both
central roles can be taxing. Amelia is one of
the heaviest soprano parts in the Verdi canon;
very occasionally Price may be showing some
slight strain but she skilfully covers this by
an interpretation which suggests that for her
Amelia the sense of fear is never far away.
Indeed in a conventional sense neither Bergonzi
nor Price were amongst the great singing
actors. This matters little on record where their
interpretation of the music says it all. Riccardo’s
declamations in the central scene verge on
the heroic whilst earlier the voice has to be
lightened to negotiate the trills of “È scherzo
od è follia” which Bergonzi accomplishes with
his refined, delicate singing.
It is inappropriate to suggest in any way
that the rest of the cast is simply “supporting”.
Ulrica is almost a cameo role, her appearance
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limited to a single scene, but she plays a key
role in the unfolding drama. Shirley Verrett
has exactly the right timbre as well as the range.
Robert Merrill holds a worthy place in the long
line of accomplished American baritones – his
warm singing impresses in the first act aria and
he dominates the first scene in the final act.
The light voiced Reri Grist is a sassy page – her
lovely singing voice very evidently feminine!
In some ways it is strange to see the glories
of the RCA LP catalogue repackaged as part
of this exciting Sony Opera House series. In
many ways analogue recording reached a peak
in the 1960s and nowhere more so than in this
version of Un ballo in maschera. The original
LP set was lavishly presented with a 36-page
illustrated booklet – hardly to be expected in a
budget CD reincarnation. That set cost around
£6 – in real terms this equates to something like
seven times the modest price at which the new
CD set is available!
Stanley Henig
COLLECTIONS
Dennis Brain. Beethoven Horn Sonata in F,
Op. 17a. Britten Serenade for tenor, horn and
stringsb. Dukas Villanellec. Mozart Così fan
tutte – Per pietad. Tchaikovsky Symphony
No. 5 – II, Andante cantabilee. E. Williams
Open Housef.
Dennis Brain (hn); aDenis Matthews (pf );
bPeter Pears (ten); bNew Symphony
Orchestra / Sir Eugene Goossens;
cGerald Moore (pf ); dJoan Cross (sop);
dPhilharmonia Orchestra / Lawrance
Collingwood; eNational Symphony
Orchestra / Sidney Beer; fNatalie James
(ob); fBernard Walton (cl); fCecil James (bsn).
Beulah mono M C 1PD35 (72mins; ADD);
rec. eKingsway Hall, London, 8/6/44; Abbey
Road Studios, London, d2/4/47; c19/4/52;
aDenham Studios, 1951; fRiverside Studios,
London, 9/51; bDecca Studios, West London,
25-27/11/53.
As in the case Lipatti, Ferrier, Cantelli, Du Pré and
a few other major artists whose careers were cut
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short by illness or death, Dennis Brain’s mastery
has achieved legendary status on records, as it
should, and this new Beulah issue may initially
mislead the collector, for these performances have
not all been issued before.
Members of the horn-loving fraternity will
rush to this CD, which is also recommended to
general music-lovers. It contains the second Pears/
Brain Decca recording of Britten’s Serenade,
under Goossens, by which early LP collectors
came to know the work, and a 1951 recording of
Beethoven’s Horn Sonata with Denis Matthews
taken from a film soundtrack (they had recorded
it for Columbia on 78s in 1944, which has been
variously reissued). These are the two more
important items, but great interest is added to
this record by the inclusion of excerpts from other
works – the Tchaikovsky Fifth second movement
under Sidney Beer is so good that it is worth
seeking a copy of the complete performance on
Beulah C 1PD11.
The Mozart aria is worth having on CD,
but I was unconvinced by the Edward Williams
piece, put together by Barry Coward from
another film soundtrack – joining various cues
to make a continuous piece. The result is only
for Brain enthusiasts, but the CD is strongly
recommended for the Beethoven (in much
better sound than the 1944 Columbias) and
the Britten – though this is surely the first time
on any disc that the composer is referred to as
“Edward Benjamin Britten”. Throughout, these
are all superb performances, and the claims
for the “one sound” transfers here are genuine:
thanks to a colleague, I have heard them, and
I found single-speaker playback of these tracks
more impressive than on two (or more) speakers.
But there’s little in it.
Robert Matthew-Walker
Great Singers and Musicians in
Copenhagen, 1931-39.
Artists include Adolf Busch, Fritz Busch,
Beniamino Gigli, Paul Hindemith, Georg
Høeberg, Vladimir Horowitz, Tenna Kraft,
Wanda Landowska, Nicolai Malko, Lauritz
Melchior, Helge Roswaenge, Rudolf Serkin,
Igor Stravinsky, Joseph Szigeti, Karol
CRC Summer 2010
CDs - collections
Szymanowski, Egisto Tango, Viorica Tango,
Georges Thill, Mogens Wöldike.
Danacord mono B C DACOCD691/6 (six
discs; 7hrs 40mins; ADD); original recordings
from Danmarks Radio, Copenhagen, 1931-39.
This half-price set, which gathers up the
contents of two acclaimed LP boxes (Danacord
L DACO131/3 & 134/8), should excite
anyone interested in singers, instrumentalists or
conductors of the 1930s. It includes characteristic
performances by artists who made few (if any)
commercial records, as well as supplements to the
discographies of mainstream artists. Although in
most cases we hear just individual movements,
and sometimes we lose some notes, virtually
everything works as an excerpt. The bulk of the
material comes from 1932-35, a period from which
relatively few radio recordings survive in other
countries. Much of Disc 3 previously appeared
on a single CD (C DACOCD303), in noisier
but slightly more immediate sound – Cedar has
been employed for this release. It is sad to think
that the radio chief Emil Holm stopped the
illicit recording by Danish State Radio engineer
Frederik Heegaard, and sadder still to read that
many of the masters are no longer playable – the
LP tapes have been used for this reissue.
I logged three failures: Anni Konetzni
mediocre in Leonore’s scene from Fidelio, Helge
Roswaenge hefty and charmless in a second-rate
film song, Gregor Piatigorsky painfully slow in
the first movement of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto.
Lauritz Melchior in Parsifal and Beniamino
Gigli in Tosca, while excellent, merely confirm
the evidence of their HMV versions. Real
interest starts with Czech soprano Zdenka
Ziková in a fine rendition of Mařenka’s aria from
The Bartered Bride – she should have sung in the
Ostrčil recording. Viorica Tango (née Vasilescu),
an important Romanian soprano who wed the
somewhat older conductor, is heard on six tracks,
including an excellent “Dove sono” from Figaro,
with Bruno Walter, and “Tacea la notte” from
Trovatore, which she did for Columbia with
piano; here her husband conducts. Dramatic
tenor Thyge Thygesen impresses in Guillaume
Tell and four tracks feature the great Danish
reviews
soprano Tenna Kraft – she and bass-baritone
Holger Byrding are splendid in a long scene
from Heise’s King and Marshal. Her incomplete
aria from La serva padrona is wrongly labelled
– it is “A Serpina penserete”. She also features
in excerpts from Don Carlo – her big aria is
the only overlap with the recital disc Danacord
brought out (C DACOCD603) – as do mezzo
Ingeborg Steffenson and baritone Holger
Bruusgaard, both first-rate. Adele Kern and
Julius Patzak triumph over heavy surface noise
in Zigeunerbaron; Enzo De Muro Lomanto
is pleasing but rather too close in Manon;
Georges Thill and André Pernet are thrilling
in La damnation de Faust; Tango, Steffenson,
Jose Riavez and Emanuel List are marvellous in
Verdi’s Requiem; and the two ladies have Patzak
and Josef von Manowarda with them in Rossini’s
Stabat Mater. Steffenson is a good Carmen but
tenor Niels Hansen, like Kraft a Jean de Reszke
pupil, is past his best as Don Jose and Lenski
– his Tosca aria hints at what he once was. The
Finnish soprano Hanna Granfelt is also past her
sell-by date although still able to interpret songs
by Kuula and Ranta. Else Brems is splendid in
Stravinsky’s La bergère. Excerpts from Haydn’s
Schöpfung under Fritz Busch feature Erna Berger,
Patzak and Alexander Kipnis, a truly starry
constellation – the conducting is Elysian.
Among the instrumentalists, Horowitz is on
song in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor
Concerto and Debussy’s “Serenade for a doll”;
Serkin is at his youthful best in the first movement
of Beethoven’s G major, with Fritz Busch, and
two Chopin Études; Milstein glitters through the
surface noise in Paganini Caprices; Szigeti is superb
in Beethoven’s G major Romance, as is Cassadó in
a piece he passed off as by “Schubert”. Landowska
is more convincing in Poulenc’s Concert champêtre
than in a clumpy Bach Italian Concerto, although
as always her rhythm is impressive. Marcel Moyse
is just right for Gaubert’s Nocturne with Paray
conducting; Hindemith is irreproachable in his
Fifth Kammermusik, Stravinsky likewise in his
Capriccio. The Busch brothers combine in the
finale of Bach’s E major Concerto and Adolf is
caught on the wing in three movements of the G
minor solo Sonata, a highlight for me.
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A tragic malfunctioning of equipment
deprived us of parts of Szymanowski’s Sinfonia
concertante under Fitelberg; but the poor
sound of two surviving snippets cannot hide
the fact that the composer was a splendid
pianist. There is top-flight conducting not
only from Fritz Busch – Dvořák’s Carnival
Overture, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Nielsen’s
Helios – but from Nicolai Malko, in Petrushka
and Tsar Saltan among other things. Egisto
Tango was clearly one of the great Italians –
three-quarters of Nielsen’s Hymnus Amoris, a
thrilling performance, would alone establish
his credentials, and he is in firm charge of much
else. We get a virtually complete Nielsen Fifth
from the important Georg Høeberg and bits
of the Third from Launy Grøndahl. Abiding
impressions are of the quality not just of the
celebrated orchestra but its chorus – and in part
of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcello, Mogens
Wöldike obtains astonishing singing, with
magical pianissimi, from his amateur Palestrina
Choir. The Danish opera singers usually match
their international colleagues.
Tacked on to the end are six experimental
recordings wrenched out of two 1931 festival
performances. Gobbets from the Salzburg
Zauberflöte prove that Bruno Walter, unlike
Beecham, could get the famous three chords
unanimous, although Marie Gerhardt is a less than
commanding Queen of the Night. The Bayreuth
Tristan has Larsén-Todsen as a rather motherly
Isolde but Furtwängler is reasonably awake – some
observers thought his conducting “catastrophic”
by comparison with Toscanini’s the previous year.
The booklet incorporates a few minor errors and
is not voluminous but the photos are interesting.
Denmark could be proud of its radio presentations
in the 1930s.
Tully Potter
Compact Disc Round-Up
Munch conducts a Treasury of French
Music.
West Hill Archives mono M C WHRA6027 (6
discs; 6hrs 48mins; ADD); rec. Boston, 1954-58.
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It is well known that Munch tended to change
his concert performances on the inspiration of
the moment, and that his studio recordings were
prepared with more consistency. Duplication
is therefore not necessarily an issue in these
live performances with the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, even in several cases where they were
given in association with studio recordings.
Berlioz is represented by somewhat excitable
renderings of the Corsaire and Béatrice et
Bénédict overtures, also a powerful, expressive
account of Harold en Italie with an efficient
but unassertive BSO principal viola Joseph de
Pasquale, and Nuits d’été, beautifully sung by
Victoria de los Angeles. De los Angeles is also
a soloist in a charmingly wrought performance
of Debussy’s La damoiselle élue. In Debussy’s La
mer, Munch inspires some magnificent virtuoso
playing, though the more delicate aspects of the
score are overwhelmed: the three Images receive
beautifully balanced, evocative interpretations,
but Jeux, a score which Munch didn’t record
commercially, is disappointingly marred by wild
tempo fluctuations and overblown climaxes.
Interestingly, in concert Munch ran
Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales and La
valse together, without a break. It’s a ploy
that works very well, especially in such clear,
elegant performances. It’s interesting too to
hear Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro with a full
complement of strings: it sounds very effective.
Munch and Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer
together provide a scintillating performance
of Ravel’s Piano Concerto and an expressive,
sympathetic account of D’Indy’s Symphonie
sur un chant montagnard français. Is Franck
a French composer? In any event, the first
movement of his Symphony sounds somewhat
Teutonic in Munch’s hands, ponderous and
over-expressive: the other two movements are
more straightforwardly played. Milhaud’s Sixth
Symphony was a BSO commission, vigorously
played, but Roussel’s Suite in F sounds a little
rough and under-rehearsed. The set ends with
Fauré’s Requiem. Munch seldom performed this
work and didn’t record it. He sounds a little
constrained by the composer’s lofty, understated
CRC Summer 2010
Compact disc round-up
reviews
style. Some sections, for example the “Pie Jesu”
and the final “In paradisum” come off well,
but as a whole it is a slightly uncomfortable
performance. Adele Addison sings nicely, but
Donald Gramm’s delivery is a little dry. And
while the recording quality throughout the set
is generally satisfactory, there is in this work a
slightly insecure edge to the sound.
sounds thrilling on CD, with the Bolshoi
players driven ever onward by an ebullient
Rozhdestvensky. Unfortunately this is what we
would call a “one-sided record” in the days of LP,
since the second work is a very conventionally
written ballet score and plainly needs the sight
of dancers to bring it alive.
George Enescu (vn) The US Columbia
recordingsa; Enesco Violin Sonata No. 3b in A
minor, Op. 25.
Opus Kura mono M C OPK2086 (68mins;
ADD); rec. a1929; bc1950 (www.opuskura.
com).
Mendelssohn A Midsummer Night’s Dream
– incidental music, Opp. 21 & 61. Jennifer
Vyvyan (sop); Marion Lowe (sop); Covent
Garden Opera Chorus; London Symphony
Orchestra / Peter Maag.
Grand Slam M C GS2101 (41mins; ADD); rec.
London, 2/57.
As Tully Potter points out in his insert note,
an opportunity for a substantial Enesco legacy
was missed when the great man conducted
concerto accompaniments for the young Yehudi
Menuhin, instead of being the soloist. The four
1924 Columbia acoustics are not included here,
but we have the 1929 electrics, comprising a
most beautiful, deeply felt account of Chausson’s
Poème (spoilt a little by the bare bones of
Sanford Schlussel’s piano-only accompaniment),
Corelli’s La follia Sonata, Handel’s Sonata, Op.
1 No. 13, elegantly performed by Enesco but
with Schlussel here old-fashionedly ham-fisted,
and two trifles by Pugnani and Kreisler. All
these pieces are notably free of virtuoso display,
and ironically it is in Enesco’s own sonata, with
Celine Chailley-Richez, that more technique
is required, and where the older violinist, now
afflicted with arthritis, is left a little wanting.
The transfers in the Enesco are a little cloudy,
but the Columbias sound fine.
Shchedrin Carmen Suitea; The Little
Humpbacked Horse Suiteb. Bolshoi Theatre
Orchestra / aGennady Rozhdestvensky /
bAlgis Zhuraitis.
Melodiya M C MEL CD1001630 (73mins;
ADD); rec. Moscow a1967; b1963.
In its UK LP incarnation (HMV L ASD2448)
this Carmen Suite recording, in Shchedrin’s
arrangement for strings and percussion, became
a sought-after “audiophile” item, and it still
This was (and still is) another “audiophile”
item in its early stereo LP form (Decca L
SXL2060). Grand Slam have used the original
edition for their transfer, but the CD sound,
though it has plenty of presence, doesn’t quite
justify such a high reputation. Maag conducts a
fresh, spontaneous-sounding performance, and
Jennifer Vyvyan sings attractively in her two
numbers. Short playing time.
Brahms Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53a; Haydn
Variations, Op. 56a; Academic Festival
Overture, Op. 80; Tragic Overture, Op. 81.
aLucretia West (con); Vienna Academy
Choir; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra /
Hans Knappertsbusch.
Grand Slam M C GS2043 (57mins; ADD); rec.
Vienna, 6/57.
Could this be one of those occasions when the
great conductor found himself at odds with the
recording medium? The best performance on
this disc comes from the American contralto
Lucretia West, who sings beautifully, if without
the last ounce of expression. Otherwise
performances are pedestrian. The Haydn
Variations suit Knappertsbusch’s measured and
mellow approach quite well, but the overtures
are deficient in energy and spirit. The stereo
sound is rather boomy, and there is quite a lot of
background noise.
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Bach-Stokowski Transcriptions, Vol.
2. Bach Suite No. 2, BWV1067a and nine
short transcriptions. Julius Baker (fl); His
Symphony Orchestra; Philadelphia
Orchestra; All-American Youth Orchestra /
Leopold Stokowski.
Naxos mono B C 8.112019 (77mins; ADD);
rec. 1929-50.
The most interesting performance here is
that of Suite No. 2, magnificently grotesque,
a riot of colour and majesty, and recorded in
extraordinarily vivid sound for its date of 1950.
The string body sounds huge, and it comes as a
great surprise to read David Patmore’s insert note
in which he reveals that Stokowski used a group
of only 24 of the finest string players available
in New York. Several of the other arrangements
are from Bach’s choral works, and don’t make
such a strong impression as Stokowski’s organ
transcriptions. But the disc is worth its modest
price for the Suite.
Dvořák Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95,
From the New Worlda. Mozart Symphony
No. 38 in D, K504b. Chicago Symphony
Orchestra / Rafael Kubelík.
Opus Kura mono M C OPK7051 (62mins;
ADD); rec. Chicago a1951 and b1953.
Kubelík made some notable recordings for
Mercury during his 1950-53 reign in Chicago,
including works by Bartók, Hindemith,
Mussorgsky/Ravel and Schoenberg, but I
don’t feel that the two performances here are
very special. The mono transfers (taken from
HMV LP editions) are clear, but especially in
the Dvořák the strings sound glassy, the brass
is strident and the bass booms. The orchestral
playing is wonderful, and there is a fresh, lively
quality in the New World performance, but the
reading has no great distinction. The Prague
Symphony, given without repeats, sounds pretty
routine.
Beethoven Symphonies – No. 1 in C,
Op. 21a; No. 3 in E flat, Op. 55, Eroicab.
Philharmonia Orchestra / Herbert von
Karajan.
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Compact disc round-up
Naxos mono B C 8.111339 (71mins, ADD);
rec. London, b12/52; a11/53.
Karajan’s first recorded Beethoven symphony
cycle has a high reputation, which is born
out by these two performances. That of the
First Symphony is perhaps less distinctive,
beautifully played though it is, but the Eroica
is magnificently characterised. Anybody who
thinks that Karajan’s performances always lacked
real depth should listen to the slow movement.
The sources of the transfers are not revealed, and
the sound is just a little fuzzy and diffuse.
More Furtwängler
Still they come, more and more Furtwängler
reissues. Top of the list is a Naxos collection of
1952-54 HMV Wagner recordings, mostly with
the Vienna Philharmonic. To the Tannhäuser
Overture, the Lohengrin Act 1 Prelude,
“Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” and Funeral March
from Götterdämmerung is added “Brünnhilde’s
Immolation” from Götterdämmerung, with
Kirsten Flagstad (soprano) and the Philharmonia
Orchestra. The playing and singing is unfailingly
magnificent and the transfers are very good
(Naxos B C 8.111348, 65mins). From Naxos
too comes a coupling of Schubert’s Eighth
and Ninth symphonies, with Furtwängler
conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and Berlin
Philharmonic respectively. DG’s 1951 recording
of the Ninth emerges in fine sound for the period,
but HMV’s 1950 recording of the Unfinished,
seemingly taken from 78s, is less clear and has
a heavy background. Both works receive ideally
beautiful, lyrical, flowing performances (Naxos
B C 8.11134, 79mins). Another version of
the Unfinished Symphony, a little more sharply
defined, comes from a 1948 Berlin Philharmonic
concert which also contained Brahms’s Fourth
Symphony. Some unexpected variations of pulse
occur in the latter performance, but not so much
as to detract from a fine, powerful interpretation.
The source of the Schubert is a Vox LP, with coarse,
slightly distorted sound and a heavy background:
the Brahms, taken from a French HMV issue, is
of much more acceptable quality (Grand Slam M
C GS2044, 64mins). In a collection entitled “The
Early Recordings, Vol. 4”, Naxos have collected
CRC Summer 2010
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Grammophon/Polydor recordings from 193036. They show the Berlin Philharmonic to
have been a fine instrument during that period
in works by Wagner, Brahms’s two Hungarian
Dances, Johann Strauss II’s Fledermaus Overture
and Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel. The
original recordings, not easily reproduced, have
been effectively tamed by Mark Obert-Thorn
(B C 8.111005, 63mins). The pre-war BPO also
plays magnificently in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique
Symphony, taken from the 1938 HMV 78s. Has
this extraordinarily dramatic and passionate
performance ever been surpassed? It seems
jarring, however, to follow the symphony’s tragic
conclusion with another transfer of the jolly Till
mentioned above, and then by Wagner’s “Funeral
Music”. Opus Kura provide good transfers, but
have retained a measure of 78rpm surface noise
(M C OPK2087, 71mins). Finally another Opus
Kura pre-war BPO/DG offering, with works by
Bach, two Rossini overtures, Mozart (including
a beautiful Eine kleine Nachtmusik), the Brahms
Hungarian Dances again and the Fledermaus
Overture again. I must stop before I completely
confuse gentle readers with these duplications
(OPK2088, 70mins).
Alan Sanders
DOWNLOADS
Pristine Audio continue to issue a mixture of
the familiar and the unusual. Almost everything
that Toscanini recorded has provoked some
interest in one form or another and two
releases here do just that. Beethoven’s Missa
solemnis hasn’t exactly been over-represented
in the catalogues during the past 60 years and
therefore this live 1953 version from Carnegie
Hall with the NBC Symphony Orchestra and
the Robert Shaw Chorale is certainly welcome
(Ⓓ PACO034; 80mins). The soloists, in the
form of Lois Marshall, Nan Merriman, Eugene
Conley and Jerome Hines are a decent enough
quartet – without being exceptional – and
although Toscanini isn’t everyone’s favourite
Beethoven conductor, I like his interpretation.
reviews
But he doesn’t overshadow the Böhm, Karajan
or Klemperer issues that followed later. The
recording doesn’t sound its age; it is fairly
bright, and there’s a good balance between
soloists, choir and orchestra, but do I detect
a hint of artificial reverberation? It sounds
better if the mono button is pressed – if your
amplifier has one. Toscanini recorded the
work again with the same forces for RCA, also
in Carnegie Hall a few days later without the
audience (HMV L ALP1182/83), but I prefer
the performance here.
The Verdi Requiem performance is a
slightly different matter. Toscanini recorded
the work more than once, and the main reason
for listening to this one from 1940 is the
partnership of Zinka Milanov and Jussi Björling
– both in glorious voice – but this recording
has been available in various incarnations for
ages and so everyone has probably got their
copy. Having said that, Andrew Rose’s transfer
from new source material sounds pretty good,
considering the age of the recording. Yes, there
is ‘edge’ and harmonic distortion on the voices;
there are level discrepancies; some slight ‘wow’
in places, and a bar missing near the end of
“Domine Jesu” – but as an ensemble piece it
works well, because of such a strong quartet
of soloists and an excellent Verdi conductor.
Milanov is at her best in the final “Libera me”
and even the mezzo Bruna Castagna impresses,
sounding like a young Fiorenza Cossotto in the
upper register. Nicola Moscona is the bass, with
the Westminster Choir and the NBC SO. For
those of you who prefer a Verdi Requiem in
full-blooded stereo sound, this isn’t for you –
but as an historical document it is invaluable
(Ⓓ PACO038; 100mins). A couple of bonus
tracks included with this release are welcome:
an “overture” from Aida taken from an old
Penzance LP and the overture to The Taming of
the Shrew by Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Both are in
good sound and were recorded the same year as
the Requiem in Studio 8H, New York.
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Highlights from Johann Strauss II’s Die
Fledermaus sung in English and conducted by
Fritz Reiner have been made available again
in a new transfer by Mark Obert-Thorn (Ⓓ
PACO037; 60mins). Recorded in 1950 and first
issued on an RCA LP, the cast boasted a starry
line-up of singers including Regina Resnik, Jan
Peerce, Robert Merrill, Risë Stevens and Patrice
Munsel (as Adele), who later went on to take
part in a rather a good rendering of La périchole
– also released by RCA. On the Strauss, there is
a generous selection of the music: in fact almost
every number, but each one is truncated with
internal cuts, except Adele’s Audition Song in
Act 3, which also includes the asides by Ida and
Frank, often omitted in complete recordings of
the work. Moreover, the overture is also played
in full, giving Reiner plenty of opportunity to
sparkle. The sound is very good and there is a
lot to enjoy here. So, if you like your Fledermaus
sung in a deft but rather dated translation, then
this could be for you.
The 1933 abridged recording of Der
Rosenkavalier, with Robert Heger conducting
the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, has
enjoyed the same popularity in LP and CD
form as the RCA Toscanini Verdi Requiem, and
here it is again, in a new transfer by Andrew
Rose (Ⓓ PACO036; 118mins). Much has been
said about the merits of this performance with
Lotte Lehmann and Elisabeth Schumann over
the years, so it doesn’t need me to expand the
criticism! The new transfer however, does stand
up well for its age. The general sound quality
is brighter here than on the Naxos issue of the
recording (C 8.110191-2) with slightly more
presence on the voices, but less bass. There is
slight phasing round the voices and the surface
noise can be heard now and again, but it is not
intrusive. Apart from that, there isn’t a lot of
difference between the two transfers.
The 1953 Clemens Krauss Bayreuth Ring has
a good reputation and this new offering of the
first two operas in the cycle do not disappoint.
Many of the cast, such as Hans Hotter (Wotan),
Gustav Neidlinger (Alberich) and Ramon Vinay
(Siegmund) went on to repeat their roles at
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Bayreuth well into the 1950s under different
conductors. Starting with “Das Rheingold”,
there’s an immediate sense of a theatrical
atmosphere – from the almost inaudible opening
to the Rheinmaiden’s horror at Alberich’s
snatching of the gold – and beyond. The sound is
excellent, with a good balance between voices and
orchestra, but with just a hint of peak distortion
and compression on the climaxes. Yes, the anvils
do sound distant, but they are supposed to be
off-stage (unlike, say, the Decca Solti recording
where they are more prominent) and you can
hear the characteristic Bayreuth acoustic hum in
very quiet passages – but that’s normal! Krauss
conducts his forces with authority; only striking
one or two dull patches. This is the best transfer
of this recording I’ve heard for a long time (Ⓓ
PACO039; 2hrs 25mins). Recommended.
After enjoying the performance and good
sound quality of “Rheingold”, I approached
“Die Walküre” (Ⓓ PACO 040; 3hrs 30mins)
with eager anticipation. My first impression
was that the sound quality had improved.
There is less peak distortion and compression
compared to “Rheingold” and a warmer feel
to the whole ambience. The balance between
voices and orchestra is still top notch. Andrew
Rose’s transfers have obviously been done with
loving care. As to the performance – well,
perhaps Ramon Vinay and Regina Resnik aren’t
everyone’s favourite Siegmund and Sieglinde,
but there’s an excitement during the first act that
holds many a candle to latter-day interpretations.
At Brünnhilde’s entrance in Act 2, Astrid Varnay
scoops up to her top notes – then dots the
quaver – and the result is very exciting! Hotter
continues his authorative portrayal as Wotan,
whilst the Act 3 Valkyries thoroughly enjoy
themselves, although the sound level dips a bit
during their “ride”. Clemens Krauss conducts
with panache once more.
All these discs have been supplied direct from
Pristine Audio in CDR form.
Bruce Latham
CRC Summer 2010
John T. Hughes
Selected vocal issues of the past quarter
E
ven her native Sweden neglected the dramatic
soprano Gunilla af Malmborg (b. 1933) in
the recording-studio. A voice such as hers, with its
forceful but not forced lower middle and gleaming
upper notes, deserved greater recognition. Eight
of her roles, mainly from Stockholm’s Royal
Opera, are collected on Bluebell C ABCD107,
including an exciting Amelia in the Ballo duet
with an intense Gedda; a searing Salome; two
appealing arias from Swedish operas (recorded in
1963) to Isolde’s Liebestod from 1985. A thrilling
account of Abigaille’s grand aria is conducted
by her husband, Lars af Malmborg. It tests her
vocal compass and she emerges triumphant.
Contrastingly, she appears as Alice in the lettercomparing episode in Falstaff, a lighter but also
successful assumption. Most items are in Swedish
translation. Colleagues include Rolf Björling,
firm-voiced as Cavaradossi, Margot Rödin and
Erik Saedén.
The contents of Ducretet-Thomson L DTL
93075 occupy seven tracks on a Mozart CD
of Teresa Stich-Randall (Preiser C 93469),
completed by excerpts from Don Giovanni and
Die Entführung conducted by Hans Rosbaud. She
sings expected items: no unusual Mozart operas.
Many she recorded again. Much well-sculptured
vocalism is here, as in the two Idomeneo arias. With
what grace she begins “Porgi amor” and the first
verse of “Dove sono”, with the da capo’s opening
lines exquisite in their delicacy. “Come scoglio”
shows that she can produce more substantial and
darker sounds and that she hits exposed notes
accurately at both ends of the aria’s wide range
before concluding with a lithesome cabaletta. At
her purest she drew criticisms of coldness from
some, but the disc ends with an agile “Martern
aller Arten” from Aix in 1954.
The more interesting tracks on a Hermann
Uhde CD (Preiser C 93471) are the non-Wagner
ones, because the Wagners are available elsewhere,
especially the extracts from Lohengrin from Decca
LPs. The others are DG recordings of 1952-54.
Rigoletto’s “Cortigiani” and the Giulio Cesare aria
were recorded in both Italian and German, only
the latter here. Both would have been welcome.
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Uhde is a dramatic jester, alone and with Rita
Streich’s crystal-toned Gilda. His Cesare holds to
a good line but lightly aspirates too. The catchy
little piece from Tiefland, my introduction to
Uhde’s voice decades ago, is sprightly if a touch
grey on top notes; the Toreador’s song lusty.
Kaspar’s two arias (Der Freischütz) exude villainy,
commandingly sung without exaggeration. His
Telramund and 1955 Bayreuth Dutchman (under
Knappertsbusch) are among the best on disc. This
clearly transferred CD well represents the singer.
Anybody who would be interested in a CD
of Leonard Warren in songs should consider
the compilation of 1947-51 records on Naxos
C 8.111345, which contains eight sea shanties,
Mother Machree, Love’s Old Sweet Song and eight
Kipling settings among others. In that last group
is my favourite version of Damrosch’s Danny
Deever, an intense interpretation. Warren enters
Peter Dawson territory with Boots (written by
Dawson pseudonymously) and On the Road to
Mandalay. His big voice was capable of subtlety
as well as dramatic power: far more versatile than
he was often given credit for. These songs worthily
stand beside his operatic recordings to give a
rounded portrait of his artistry.
An EMI box of five CDs contains “the
complete solo recordings” of Tito Gobbi.
Presumably that description refers to his 78s and
LP recitals. After them are excerpts from some
complete opera sets. Gobbi did not own the
greatest baritone voice, but few could match it for
colours, shading and subtlety, which helped him
in his creation of an operatic character. Perhaps if
his voice was richer his tonal range would be less
extensive. Among his 78s, “Era la notte” (Otello)
is tonally beautiful and histrionically expressive.
It has been alleged that he sang everything with
a snarl. That is just not true, but when necessary
he conveys evil with vocal relish. Some of his
78s were not re-made for LP, like the Zazà
arias. If you missed his LPs, or not, consider this
inexpensive box (EMI C 4 55378-2).
It’s a mixture of excerpts, notes are in French
only, details are sometimes vague (we are not
told who sings in finales): I refer to a ten-CD
box of French operetta selections, in recordings
mostly from the 1950s (commercial LPs rather
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voice box
than broadcasts). Also here, although not French,
are Lehár, O. Straus and J. Strauss senior and
junior. Offenbach provides pieces from four
works, Messager two, and Varney, Lecocq and
Planquette are among the remainder. We hear a
good blend from singers who are well known and
from the less familiar. Renée Doria appears in
four operettas, and Géori Boué, Claudine Collart
and Lyne Cumia are other sopranos. The elegant
Henri Legay and fuller-voiced Tony Poncet are
tenorial participants, with such fine baritones
as Henri Gui and, especially, Julien Haas.
Jean Giraudeau, Jacques Doucet and Bernard
Demigny are amusing in the delightful patriotic
trio from La belle Hélène. Experienced collectors
will remember many artists who graced French
operetta casts at that time (Decca C 480 2785).
In the 1950s, Philips adventurously issued
Linda di Chamounix. Down to Piero De Palma
in the smallest role, the cast contained a good
selection of Italian singers, under Tullio Serafin.
The delightful opera, reissued on Preiser Paperback
C 20056, benefits from the sweet, stylish Cesare
Valletti, Giuseppe Taddei’s rich baritone, Renato
Capecchi focused in buffo mode, the firm tones
of Giuseppe Modesti down below, Rina Corsi’s
experience in the second mezzo role, even Fedora
Barbieri rather overwhelming en travesti. All then
is well? Not quite. The 1950s saw few productions.
On RAI, Margherita Carosio sang Linda, Rosanna
Carteri did so in Palermo, and in 1958 Naples
had Antonietta Stella, as does this set. Stella was
not a bel canto specialist: vivacity, scintillation and
technique for rapid scalework were not hers; slower
music suits her better. Despite her limitations, this
is a recording worth having.
Two of the best Mozart sopranos confront
George London’s libertine in the Met’s 1959 Don
Giovanni (Walhall C WLCD0275). Eleanor
Steber’s lovely tones and well-honed technique
create a Donna Anna to give much satisfaction,
even if she was better still in the December
1957 broadcast. More silvery in timbre is Lisa
della Casa’s Donna Elvira. Don Ottavio is sung
by Cesare Valletti, possibly Italy’s most elegant
tenor of those years. Among his noteworthy
contributions is a refined “Il mio tesoro”, with
that challenging long phrase covered in one
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breath. Ezio Flagello bestows Leporello with
richer voice than one often hears. Does one regard
London’s Giovanni as ardent or brusque; the
suave charmer or the macho conqueror? I’d prefer
more caressing, in the manner of Karl Böhm’s
conducting. The sound is good.
Together with 20 minutes of orchestral music
by Gabrieli and by Geminiani, Testament issues
Carlo Maria Giulini conducting Rossini’s Stabat
Mater from Berlin in 1978. The concert lasts 83
minutes, necessitating two CDs, but Testament
has the integrity to offer two for the price of one
(C SBT2 1435). It is a commanding reading.
The chorus, to which Giulini gives “Quando
corpus morietur” rather than to the four soloists
suggested in the booklet, has vitality and the
Berlin PO responds with opulent sound. Soprano
Nadia Stefan-Savova (or Savova Stefan, as I have
seen it) makes her presence felt in the opening
number, for her loose vibrato stands out. Julia
Hamari is secure and resonant in “Fac, ut portem”.
Veriano Luchetti, generally satisfactory, pushes
occasionally and foregoes the D flat in “Cuius
animam”. Ruggero Raimondi’s bass is not the
blackest, but his “Pro peccatis” is strong.
In the Summer 2009 issue I reviewed an Opera
Fanatic set of Carmen from Palermo in 1959.
Renato Capecchi and Guido Malfatti had their
roles reversed, and I questioned the naming of
Mirella Freni rather than Giuliana Tavolaccini
as Micaëla. The same performance appears on
IDIS C 6571/2, with the same errors. Unless one
wants another Simionato Carmen or Corelli José,
avoid it.
Reporting from Germany in the Spring issue,
Norbert Hornig mentioned a three-CD set of
Dresden recordings from after the war (Profil
C PH 10007). I support his recommendation.
Sopranos Christel Goltz and Elfride Trötschel
feature strongly, but among singers less well
known are Elfriede Weidlich, Ruth Lange,
Helena Rott, Werner Liebing and the shortlived Werner Faulhaber, who fell from a rock at
the age of 25. Others include Hopf, Aldenhoff,
Schellenberg, Böhme, Frick and Lisa Otto. Some
items have been available on LP. Mild distortion
intrudes occasionally, but this is a fascinating
compilation.
CRC
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101
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HUGE ANNUAL AUCTION LIST
Classical vocal, Instrumental, some Personality and Speech.
Mainly 78s, but cylinders, Pathé and Edison disc, LPs, and
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For an idea as to past offerings and format, last year’s list will
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102
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103
How live is ‘live’?
A
recent Orfeo recording of Richard Strauss’s
Ein Heldenleben, by the City of Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons (C
C803 091A), is stated as having been derived from
three live performances. At the end there’s a swell
of applause: not particularly welcome given the
reflective conclusion of the work. And as a colleague
jocularly asked, “How do we know which concert
the applause came from?”. It could even have
been grafted from another source altogether – as
happened, notoriously, when Backhaus’s old Decca
Brahms B flat Concerto, with Schuricht and the
Vienna Philharmonic (a May 1952 studio recording
produced by Victor Olof ), was reissued as part of
Philips’s Great Pianists series replete with audience
coughs and shuffles spliced in between movements
– in stereo! That same transfer reappeared in 2004
in Decca’s Original Masters Carl Schuricht set (C
475 6074). A pity the engineers made no attempt
instead to compensate for the lack of presence in
the opening five bars of the second movement.
Back in the early stereo era, when repertoire was
endlessly re-done to meet the apparent demand
for two-channel, everything was produced in the
studios. There were a few exceptions – like the
Beecham Sibelius Symphony No. 2, taken from a
1954 BBC broadcast (HMV L ALP1947), with
Sir Thomas shouting his head off. And renewed
interest in Furtwängler led to Berlin radio tapes
being transferred to LP by DG.
Then, in the late 1980s we had a Beethoven
symphony cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic
under Claudio Abbado: the performances alas not
so attractive as the sumptuous LP covers featuring
Klimt reproductions. The tensions seemed to shift
about uneasily, doubtless through editing from
different occasions. And when Günter Wand
suddenly became the subject of great critical
veneration, you could also experience similar lapses
in RCA issues from concert tapes of Beethoven,
Bruckner and Schubert.
At least with the likes of BBC Legends,
Testament or the Orfeo Salzburg series we are
getting actual, unedited performances. But today
a far higher proportion of new concerto and
orchestral CDs are published as “live” – if Deutsche
Grammophon started the trend, economic
pressures now play an obvious part in the process.
104
Do record-buyers find these more satisfying,
in principle? LSO Live have never hidden
the fact that rehearsal tapes provide cover for
material sourced in concert, and interestingly
they have changed their former policy of
including applause, thereby making releases
appear more “studio-like”. Testament, of course,
often recreate expectations of listening to a live
broadcast by inserting the applause prompted
when artists step on to the platform; at least they
track this separately, so that we can skip it at will.
(Probably far more of an irritant is where reissue
producers have failed to edit in some kind of hall
ambience between movements of a work, since
to do so gives a sense of continuity. We need
this no less when digital remastering from 78s
is done.) When Naxos were issuing Toscanini
broadcast concerts with his NBC Symphony
Orchestra – 19 remain in the catalogue – they
even included the original announcements!
Incidentally, there’s an interesting, if subjective,
overview of Arturo Toscanini’s recorded output
at www.classicalnotes.net/features/toscaweb.html.
The saga of the 1941-42 Philadelphia 78rpm
sides is especially worth reviewing.
In the present climate of “instant gratification”
one wonders how many music lovers still set up a
tape recorder, or similar, and preserve broadcast
concerts by way of a supplementary collection.
Private tapes have been a useful source for BBC
Legends, as we know. But perhaps one can be too
purist regarding “a performance”. One of record
producer Andrew Keener’s party tricks, when
he has an audience of enthusiasts, is to challenge
listeners to decide which of two examples is “as
played” and which is heavily edited. Most of
those present, he says, simply cannot tell. And
he relishes the art of digital editing.
Would one know, for instance, which of
the Rachmaninov concerto performances he
produced for Hyperion with Stephen Hough
and the Dallas orchestra was not live? And
because I had not looked at the booklet, when
that surge of applause followed the Nelsons
Strauss recording (where the standard of
orchestral playing had so impressed me), I was
genuinely surprised.
Christopher Breunig
With apologies to Boz
HAROLD
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


 
            

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

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 
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