Today I made a raid on Amoeba Records over on Stanyan and Haight, enjoying the gaudily beautiful San Francisco day—it's the sort of weather we like to pretend we have all the time and know damn well we don't—by shopping inside a big cement-floored warehouse being hammered by loud ugly music. But I had a good time anyway. I found a lot of goodies both on CD and vinyl, scratching various itches all at one go. Shopping fatigue set in, however, together with the nagging of a middle-aged bladder. The Upper Haight being the way it is, I wouldn't go into a public restroom even if the very integrity of my kidneys were at stake. Taxicabs are such lovely inventions.
Among my treasures is a 1955 Scheherazade with William Steinberg conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony, a jim-dandy performance of the work blessed by a first-rate Capitol recording and vinyl pressing. The grooves on those 1950s "Full Dimensional Sound" Capitol records are deep and sturdy; it takes a lot of abuse to disrupt their sonic bravura. My copy is in splendid condition and has rendered up a lovely dub, clear as a bell, rich and warm and with about a mile of apparent depth.
Rimsky's Arabian Nights showpiece usually provides a slam-dunk for almost any competent orchestra. Played by a crackerjack ensemble with a gold-medal conductor at the helm, Scheherazade is guaranteed to thrill, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of times you've heard it. Steinberg's rendition is one of the better ones around, luxuriant and cushioned, never overly driven or overly sentimental. It makes a great halfway point between Monteux's straight-up unsentimentality with San Francisco (a classically tasteful performance with the best violin solos of all time) and Stokowski's Cinerama-ified overbrew on London Stereo Phase 4.
Many of the best performances temper Rimsky's over-the-top lavishness with mature but reasonable restraint, allowing the music's eroticism to make itself felt without transporting the listener to a louche redlight district. However, mature and reasonable restraint flies out of the window once the recording makes its way to the marketing and art department.
I estimate that about 75% of Scheherazade albums sell themselves with blatant cheesecake shots on the cover. Tits tits tits tits and more tits. Mascara and eyeshadow and filmy negligees and come-thither glances through a veil. Somebody ought to show them to Andrea Dworkin and watch her blood pressure go critical. You never saw so much cheap sex being used to sell so much beautiful orchestra playing.
Consider that Steinberg/Pittsburgh album. It's a grownup Scheherazade characterized by long melodic lines, superb pacing, rich sonority, and a commendable lack of tawdry hysteria. Capitol's engineers did a fine job with their end of things. But just get a load of the jacket!
Artur Rodzinski was a complex, emotionally warped man, but he was hardly the emcee of a stripper club. And the Cleveland Orchestra wasn't exactly a pit band. But you wouldn't know that from Columbia's eager-beaver art guys, all of them apparently refugees from a pin-up-girl calendar company.
The Vienna State Opera Orchestra is a kinda fuddy-duddy outfit, made up of Vienna Philharmonic guys recording off-contract. Most VSOO albums are budget affairs, found at the five-and-dime. The art department of Fontana Records (no, I've never heard of them either) was apparently a bit pressed for cash. But somebody had a girlfriend/wife, somebody had a cheap rug, and somebody had a water pipe (probably from the local head store) and so they were able to join the big boys in the Scheherazade Bimbo Sweepstakes.
Not to be undone, the even lower-rent Valiant Records eschewed even the name of the orchestra and conductor—probably some Iron Curtain group—but peeled away from the general market tendency by focusing on legs instead of tits:
There are lots more, but one gets tired of all that female flesh on display. What really breaks my heart is the descent of our wonderful San Francisco Scheherazade. It was originally released with one of the most delectably trippy jackets in record history.
But for the RCA Camden re-release, the folks in the art department just couldn't restrain themselves. Sigh….well, at least the tits are kept in check.
If you're interested, I've cooked up a little picture album of particularly egregious Scheherazade covers, together with a few undeniably cool ones. You can see it here.