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Eloq uence
TCHAIKOVSKY
1812 Overture
Capriccio italien
Marche slave
Swan Lake: suite
London Symphony Orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Kenneth Alwyn
PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
1
1812 Overture, Op. 49
14’55
Band of the Grenadier Guards
Director: Major F.J. Harris M.B.E.
2
Capriccio italien, Op. 45
3
Marche slave, Op. 31
13’55
9’52
London Symphony Orchestra
4
5
6
Swan Lake: Suite
Scène (Act II)
Danse des cygnes (Act II)
Scène – Pas d’action (Act II)
2’37
1’24
6’07
Henry Datyner, violin ∙ Oliver Vella, cello
7
8
Czardas (Act III)
Valse (Act II)
2’51
7’14
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Kenneth Alwyn
Total timing: 59’29
By 1958, Decca has been recording in stereo
for four years, regularly sending out two
production teams, one to make the stereo
master, the other the mono master. Each
team of producer and engineer worked
independently of the other to produce the
optimum sound for their system. In 1958, to
launch their new stereo series (with an SXL
prefix for the catalogue number) it was
decided that a new and spectacular
recording was required for the very first
record (SXL 2001). Tchaikovsky’s 1812
Overture, a popular orchestral showpiece
that could show off the stereo imagery, was
a natural choice. The cannon shots made a
particularly strong impression at the time;
the well-kept secret at the time is that they
were, in fact, over-dubbed, speeded-down
gun shots! The Gramophone reviewer in
October 1958 pointed out, ‘In every respect,
in fact, this is a first-class record’.
Kenneth Alwyn was a principal conductor
of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden where
he shared the rostrum with such luminaries
working with the company at that time as
Malcolm Sargent, Ernest Ansermet, Arthur
Bliss, William Walton, Hans Werner Henze
and Benjamin Britten; the latter nominated
him as conductor of the original production
of The Prince of the Pagodas. Below, he
recounts his experience at the recording
sessions for Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture,
which, issued in 1958, was to become the
first stereo recording of this work and
Decca’s first official stereo recording.
Looking through the 1958 Annual Report of the
Royal Opera House, I find that I conducted more
performances there than the House’s Musical
Director Rafael Kubelik. Life with the ballet was
glamorous and the music was very rewarding:
Verdi’s Lady and the Fool and Britten’s Prince
of the Pagodas with Svetlana Beriosova,
Stravinsky’s Firebird and Petrushka with Margot
Fonteyn, Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet with Robert
Helpmann, taking over Vaughan Williams’ Job
from Sir Adrian Boult, and Giselle with Fonteyn,
Nadia Nerina and Beriosova.
McBean was commissioned to produce my
official photograph, and Juliet Pannett, whose
portraits included Edward Heath and Yehudi
Menuhin, a modest charcoal drawing. I seemed
to be on my way – certainly in the theatre – but
my career took a giant leap forward when, on
Tuesday, 29 April 1958, during a rehearsal of a
ballet divertimento for an ITV programme called
Chelsea at Eight, I received a call from John
Culshaw of The Decca Record Company.
Culshaw told me that he’d had good reports of
me from the Royal Opera House and wondered
if I might be interested in conducting Decca’s
first stereophonic record – Tchaikovsky’s 1812. If
so, what was I doing this coming Friday – three
days hence!
But it was when I conducted Frederick Ashton’s
full length version of Sylvia danced by Fonteyn,
that I received a notice from Noel Goodwin in
the Daily Express: ‘Where has Sir David Webster
been keeping Kenneth Alwyn? This young
conductor, sparing of gesture, produced the
sort of colour and rhythms heard too rarely now
from the Opera House Orchestra.’
Although I knew not a note of 1812 I was sure
that this was not the right time to mention it.
However, as it happened, I wasn’t free that
Friday as I was conducting Nadia Nerina’s
Sleeping Beauty. ‘Don’t worry,’ said John, ‘we’ll
call the London Symphony Orchestra and the
Grenadier Guards Band between three and six,
so you’ll be able to get to the Garden for 7.30.’
I said I’d confirm in the morning and went back
to Chelsea at Eight.
Now the publicity department of the Royal
Opera House began to take some notice. Angus
When I got back from the studio late that night
I located a recording of 1812 and for the only
time in my career stayed up all night playing it
over and over again. In a contemporary
Gramophone magazine, Charles Mackerras,
then at the beginning of his long career, shook
the purists by admitting to using recordings as
being a perfectly sensible way of making a quick
study of the increasingly wide repertoire
demanded of conductors.
The next morning, red-eyed and with the sound
of the Franco-Russian war still ringing in my
ears, I phoned John to confirm: but then he
moved the goal posts. The Grenadier Guards
Band wasn’t available after all on the Friday so
we were to record the flip side of this allTchaikovsky disc – Capriccio italien and Marche
slave. Again, I knew neither but I wasn’t going
to miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So I
took a chance and asked for the conductor’s
scores. They arrived by motor-cycle messenger
within the hour. (The Decca offices on Millbank
were less than a mile away from my flat in St
George’s Square.) Then, after a quick visit to the
record department of the Army and Navy Stores
in nearby Victoria Street, I got down to learning
two of Tchaikovsky’s most popular works.
Recordings help a quick study of the notes but
no two conductors ever interpret them in the
same way and by the time, two days later, I
walked up the steps from Kingsway into the
PHOTO: ROBIN ADLER F.R.S.A
Methodist Church Hall, I had very clear ideas of
how I wanted to present Tchaikovsky’s music.
So here I was, about to conduct one of the
world’s finest orchestras in the first-ever
stereophonic recording by the leading recording
company of the day – mighty Decca. Life
doesn’t come much sweeter!
Before the session John warned me about the
‘Kingsway Rumble’ caused by underground
trains on the Piccadilly line running directly
beneath the Hall and then introduced me to the
London Symphony Orchestra. John went back
to the recording desk and I mounted the
dangerously small and high box which passed
for a rostrum. It had no rail and a careless step
back could mean a bad fall.
I announced March slave. I would have chosen
not to make my recording debut with a funeral
march but from the first notes of the Serbian
folk-song which Tchaikovsky chose to represent
the oppressed Serbian Christians (‘Come my
dearest, why so sad this morning’), the
orchestra showed its mettle and I was
transported from a church hall in Kingsway to
the bloodstained Balkans and the horrors of the
Serbian Turkish war.
It was long held that British orchestras unlike
Russians couldn’t – or didn’t – like to play fast
Kenneth Alwyn
music. I’m not a slave to speed for its own sake
but a Tchaikovsky presto must be just about as
fast as one can go without losing clarity. The
LSO showed me that afternoon that they could
match any orchestra in the world for both.
There were a few friends in the orchestra: a
fellow student from the Royal Academy, the
leader Hugh Maguire, and from my BBC TV
orchestra, the principal oboe Roger Lord and
first clarinet Gervase de Peyer. They all came to
talk to me afterwards – always a good sign!
It had gone well and I walked out on air from
Serbia into the comparative peace of Kingsway
with just enough time to get to the Opera
House for a shower, sandwich and to make a
complete change of mood to the fairy-tale
world of Sleeping Beauty. To conduct the
London Symphony Orchestra in the afternoon
and the Royal Opera House Orchestra in the
evening is a pleasure given to few conductors!
The next afternoon I was with the LSO again –
this time to record Tchaikovsky’s souvenir of his
visit in 1880 to the Carnival in Rome, Capriccio
italien. Tchaikovsky loved his holidays and the
Capriccio is a delightful and brilliantly
orchestrated record of brooding gypsy music,
lively tarantellas (said to be the only way of
countering the fatal bite of the tarantula) and
folk dances – all pure entertainment free of any
political significance.
That night at the Garden and back in front of
the Opera House Orchestra the Sleeping Beauty
was Rowena Jackson. During the next few days
I conducted Les Sylphides, Robert Helpmann’s
Petrushka, The Lady and the Fool, until – at last
– it was back to war and 1812. The recording
session started at six and to my horror, as a
rather weary looking LSO arrived with only a
few minutes to go, John told me that they had
been recording since ten that morning; but not
to worry as, ‘They always play better when
they’re tired!’ It was a case of the old orchestral
complaint about overwork that I first heard
during my Theatre Ballet days – ‘same old
horse-different jockey!’ The horse was tired but
I was in the saddle and this wasn’t the time to
spare the whip.
The original LP cover for SXL 2001
Tchaikovsky wrote 1812 in a week for an
open-air performance in Moscow – but that
turned out to be too difficult to organise and it
was moved into the Cathedral. The critics hated
it and Tchaikovsky himself didn’t view it highly;
nevertheless, its popularity and style made it a
perfect choice for Decca’s new stereo. They
spared no expense and the Hall was brimming
with musicians. On the floor level were the
hundred and twenty strong LSO, in the gallery
the fifty Grenadier Guards bandsmen, and
scattered around extra players with tubular
bells, tam-tams, bass drums and cymbals – close
on two hundred musicians. Culshaw was right.
They all played with great intensity and
enthusiasm, mixed perhaps with a little
desperation. It was a wonderful noise and if the
Piccadilly Line was rumbling I didn’t hear it!
Percy Scholes defined conducting as
‘generalship on the battlefield of music’. Under
the High Command of John Culshaw, the
producer Michael Williamson, Culshaw’s aide
de camp the legendary sound engineer,
Kenneth Wilkinson, and my attacking Field
Marshall’s baton, the recording proved a
resounding victory for Tchaikovsky, the Russians
and, above all, Decca.
In his autobiography Putting the Record Straight,
John Culshaw confirmed that the reason for my
last minute invitation to conduct 1812 was
because Decca wanted to beat EMI to the first
stereophonic record release. I was part of a lastminute race against the clock! Decca released
1812 within three months of the recording (in
August 1958), a couple of weeks before EMI –
a marketing victory! My recording of 1812 has
been on sale continuously for over 50 years and
is still used by many hi-fi enthusiasts to evaluate
their equipment.
In May the next year, I returned to Kingsway Hall
to make another record for Decca, this time
with the London Philharmonic. The repertoire
included more Tchaikovsky – a suite from Swan
Lake, now coupled on this CD release with the
original items on the 1812 record. It reminds me
now of how I often seemed to live dangerously.
It happened at a mixed bill evening at the Royal
Opera House which included the second act of
Swan Lake. At the entrance of the Swan
Queen, instead of one of our regular ballerinas
there was a complete stranger! No one had told
me that the Queen was to be danced that night
by a French ballerina.
LP cover of Kenneth Alwyn's Tchaikovsky recording on
Decca's Ace of Diamonds imprint
The Swan Queen’s first step after her leap onto
the stage is an arabesque. In the Royal Ballet
version the ballerina makes the first move – a
pose arabesque – the conductor starting the
music when her toe touches the ground... Not,
it seems, in Paris, where the conductor begins
and the Swan Queen waits for the first note of
the music to move. I waited for her. She waited
for me. After one of those theatrical silences
which seem interminable, for the first time at
Covent Garden, the Swan Queen hissed in a
voice easily heard by the first ten rows of the
stalls, ‘Jouez!’
The press was not all that kind to her, but it was
Michael Wood, our Company Manager who,
when I asked his opinion of her performance,
replied in his cool cut-glass voice (he was, after
all a relative of the Queen), ‘Not too bad
considering that she gave up dancing twenty
years ago!’
Kenneth Alwyn
Reprinted by kind permission of Kenneth Alwyn
from his autobiography ‘A Baton at the Ballet’
Recording producers: Michael Williamson
(1812, Capriccio italien, Marche slave);
Christopher Raeburn (Swan Lake)
Recording engineer: Kenneth Wilkinson
Recording location: Kingsway Hall, May 1958
(1812, Capriccio italien, Marche slave), March
1959 (Swan Lake)
Eloquence series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji
Art direction: Chilu · www.chilu.com
480 5048