One of my areas of interest-cum-expertise is the San Francisco Symphony’s long and distinguished history on record, a catalog that dates back an impressive eighty-five years to late January 1925 in a cramped studio on 78th Street in Oakland, where Alfred Hertz led the orchestra through the Prelude and Good Friday Spell from Wagner’s Parsifal. That’s where it started, and just eighty-five years later the SFS’s stunning Mahler Eighth added three more Grammys to a shelf full of awards and honors.
But there have been some gaping holes in the SFS’s recorded history. Some of those can’t be helped; in the 1930s, for example, the orchestra made no commercial recordings at all, and Standard Hour broadcasts from the decade don’t seem to have been preserved. But other gaps could be filled with some gumshoe-ing about. Slowly but surely, in my capacity as the recordings guy for the SFS’s Centennial project, I’ve been able to track down some of the missing pieces.
Until very recently the Hertz/SFS recordings, from 1925–1928, were almost unobtainable. RCA Victor had never seen fit to release them on LP, much less cassette or CD, so they languished on 78 RPM discs in the hands of various collectors. I had the good fortune to acquire a goodly number of them from several enthusiasts who were so kind as to make me digital copies of their collections. And then audio restoration wizard Mark Obert-Thorn stepped in and gifted the world with a complete set of revitalized recordings, all happily and easily available from France’s Pristine Classical.
But one really troubling gap was giving me fits. During the 1960s the SFS was led by the great Austrian conductor Josef Krips, brought in with a mandate to restore the orchestra’s sadly tarnished reputation after the decade-long tenure of Enrique Jordá, a superb and cultivated musician whose poor rehearsal skills had resulted in Pierre Monteux’s crackerjack San Francisco Symphony becoming noted for its sloppy performances. Krips was something of a martinet and he was convinced that the SFS was nowhere near ready to re-enter the recording studio, despite some extremely good discs made by the orchestra during the 1950s and early 1960s—Artur Rubinstein’s beautiful rendition of De Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Charles Cushing’s tone poem Cereus, and a fine Death and Transfiguration with Monteux returning for a guest-conductor shot, this time in full stereo.
So no commercial recordings document the Krips era. However, he did allow Friday night broadcasts on KKHI. I was unable to track down any master tapes for those broadcasts (I suspect that none were ever made) so the only surviving examples would have to come from listeners who had taped the broadcasts at home. As it turned out, apparently Josef Krips himself had done so, given that his widow Harrietta Krips was able to send me some well-restored examples of the SFS under Krips, including a Mozart concerto featuring concertmaster Jacob Krachmalnik.
I have also come into a stash of open-reel tapes courtesy of a local music critic with a deep and abiding interest in the SFS and its history. Those tapes have been my project for some time now, as I have taken it upon myself to dub and restore these priceless documents of a misunderstood period in the orchestra’s history. Thanks to a friend who was able to supply me with a professional-grade open-reel tape player, I have been thrilled to bring these performances back to life after their long silence.
It isn’t always easy, however. Time isn’t kind to open-reel tape, especially not the lighter-weight variety used by most home recording enthusiasts. The tape tends to warp and stretch, with disastrous impact on pitch. But I have been learning how to correct that—and also learning that proper preparation of the tape can forestall a lot of problems that might arise otherwise. I haven’t been doing much in the way of sound processing to reduce noise; in my opinion, most noise reduction takes too much of the original signal along with it. Maybe it’s my generation, but I don’t mind the sound of tape hiss.
So far I’ve witnessed the re-animation of a jim-dandy Dvorak “New World” symphony, a stellar Walton first, a lovely Brahms fourth, and the first movement of the Brahms first piano concerto with an unidentified soloist who just might be Claudio Arrau. I have more to come, including a Brahms second piano concerto with a very young André Watts.
To hear performances emerge after decades: this is marvelous indeed. With each minute I become more and more familiar with the sound of the San Francisco Symphony of the 1960s, as the dubious orchestral discipline of the Jordá era gives way to a tighter and more focused ensemble, under the precise and passionate leadership of a superb conductor. It wasn’t the French-ish orchestra of the Monteux era with its nasal winds and resolutely separate orchestral sections, but neither was it the glorious and indisputably world-class band of today. It had its own sound, its own personality, its own set of quirks and strengths and weaknesses. But clearly it was a far better orchestra than common opinion would have it. The received wisdom has the SFS going through a golden age under Monteux, falling on hard times, and not really re-emerging until Edo de Waart’s tenure and the move to Davies Symphony Hall, from where it was up all the way. But all along that journey the SFS made a lot of wonderful music, music that deserves a hearing after all these years.
So that’s part of my job: I’m going to be making some of this lost music public during the next year, as we put together materials for the SFS’s far-ranging observances of the orchestra’s centennial. Which performances will make the final cut, I can’t really say as yet. But already I’ve heard plenty of material that I wouldn’t hesitate to present. And I’m not anywhere near finished with the Krips legacy; more performances remain to be explored.