Some years ago I wrote an article for SF Classical Music Examiner in which I bewailed and lamented the inaccessibility of Alfred Hertz’s recordings with the San Francisco Symphony. There are 24 pieces altogether, immortalized on shellac over a period of three years: January 1925, April 1926 (at the beginning of the electric recording age), April 1927, and February 1928. The first two sessions took place in the cramped Victor pressing plant and studio at 1100 78th Street in Oakland—then a respectable commercial neighborhood, now an impassable gang territory. The Columbia Theater (nowdays the American Conservatory Theater) hosted the 1927 sessions, and then in 1928 the lovely Scottish Rite Temple on Madison Avenue in Oakland (now the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California) lent its ringing, resonant acoustic to a series of exceptionally fine orchestral recordings.
But you couldn’t hear them to save your life, not if you were just a regular Joe and not a collector. The Hertz recordings never made it out of the 78 RPM era, save a fluke here or there. RCA never brought them out on LP, cassette, or CD. I had heard only one of them at the time I wrote the article, and I thought it was quite fine, but I was dying of curiosity about the others. Several collectors sprang to my rescue and generously sent me digital dubs of the copies they had, and with those I could explore the exceptional sonorities and warmth of a bygone San Francisco Symphony.
It never rains but pours: the invaluable Pristine Classical brought out the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle in stellar remasterings by Mark Obert-Thorn. So every last Hertz recording has become available to regular Joes such as myself, and in as good of audio as is possible for octogenerian recordings. With those, I could explore the Alfred Hertz legacy in full.
As it happens, over the past year or so I have become quite the assiduous gatherer of early San Francisco Symphony recordings, and whenever a likely Alfred Hertz 78 RPM disc has come my way, I’ve rarely worried about the price—usually not all that high—to get a real live one for myself. Recently I had the good fortune to purchase an entire library of SF Symphony recordings from a Chicago collector, a library which includes a nearly-complete Hertz run in American pressings. Save one extremely rare item (the 1925 acoustic recording of Massenet’s Phèdre Overture, superseded by the SFS’s electric 1928 remake) I have Hertz complete in originals, sometimes multiple copies, to add to my voyage of discovery.
When you get right down to it, no digital remastering, no matter how skillfully or artistically done (and those Obert-Thorn remasterings are as good as they come) can replace the fundamental pleasure of an original disc. In the case of this library purchase, a fair number of the discs are in tiptop condition. To be sure, they have the usual rainstorm of surface noise that’s endemic to most Victor “Orthophonic” scroll discs from the 1920s. Digital processing can ameliorate it, but you can’t do away with the surface noise without taking an axe to the audio signal as well. So you get used to it or you just don’t bother with 78s. And if you just play your records without all the digital manipulation, you’re going to be hearing everything that’s in those grooves, warts (some big) and all. Given the sophistication of my Rega Planar 78 with its Grado 78E cartridge, I really don’t have to worry about repeated playings of my precious discs, so I’m not restricted to stashing away the originals forever once I’ve gotten a good dub. I can give those babies a spin and let them strut their stuff.
That swing of a live 78 RPM, just watching the disc whoosh along under the tonearm and stylus, brings the music home in a way that the enforced remove of a digital file cannot hope to duplicate. It might be something simple: the record works by vibrating something, and vibration is the heart and soul of sound. One can argue that digital audio also makes something vibrate—i.e., the speaker—but it’s not the same when the vibration happens at such a cautious electronic and metaphysical distance. In digital audio, the vibration is the last thing that happens; when you play a record, vibration is both first and last. A 78 RPM disc is an organic thing that works on solely mechanical principles, just like a violin or a clarinet or a singer. Hell, it’s even made of insect secretions. So to hear Hertz’s San Francisco Symphony via one of those Victor discs imparts a concrete reality to the experience that no other medium can match. To put it another way, the beautifully remastered Le Cid Ballet Suite that I downloaded from Pristine Classical is a one-off from the original; but the three 10″ shellac 78 rpm discs making up Victor Album M-56 are the real thing.
What is clearer than ever to me after drenching myself anew in Hertz’s Olympian SFS legacy is that this man had a heart the size of a continent. He was a feeling, physical musician; no dry cerebralism here. The Hertz performances hum with energy, breathe with life, and soar along in tempi that always seem utterly perfect. He blows hot when he needs to, cold when he needs to, and never seems to lose his focus. The orchestra follows him handsomely, being as it was a collection of surprisingly first-rate musicians, all the more notable given the restrictions imposed by a short season and San Francisco’s precarious position on the very edge of the wrong side of the continent, the side farthest away from all those cool and employable players who were hanging out in New York and Boston.
As they say, looks can be deceiving: Alfred Hertz looked like Gimli in The Lord of the Rings. But that was just his external persona, a low-riding spheroid that bobbled along on a gimpy leg. Inside that rotund little gnome was a shining, beautiful Prince Charming whose passion for music, and his consummate skill in shepherding an orchestra, leaps out of those elderly grooves and into the hearts of his listeners. Well, into the heart of this listener, anyway.