Take a good look at the picture below. I'll admit that it doesn't look all that prepossessing.
To a person in the know about San Francisco Symphony recordings (we few, we valiant few) this is opulent treasure indeed. For this is an object of bright desire, an album that was released for only a brief shining moment, only on 78s, and only in the United States. That puts it at sharp variance with most of the Monteux/SFS recordings, which enjoyed not only healthy international releases but which tended to pop up on 45 rpm albums as well as being included on all manner of various re-releases, such as the el-cheapo Camden pressings that RCA sprinkled throughout the 1950s like so much tail-finned confetti.
RCA Red Seal DM-1270. Roll it around on the tongue for a moment. DM-1270. 1270 haunted my dreams for a while. 1270 couldn't be found for love or money, save from the Library of Congress. I could get a dub from the LoC, but the process was lengthy and multi-staged. I passed the first three stages: a talk with an utterly charming chap at the LoC recordings division, followed by an application and a phone call from another perfectly nice chap who would authorize the dub provided that I carried out step 3, which was to obtain permission from copyright holder Sony Classical. I received a friendly, downright warm-hearted letter of permission from yet another nice chap at Sony. So I was within a hair's breadth of being ready to roll on getting my LoC dub of a scarce-as-hen's-teeth record.
But I wanted my very own 1270. Gawdalmighty, I wanted my very own 1270. Not just some one-off digital dub, but a real live 1270 made out of shellac and cardboard substrate with a hole in the middle surrounded by a plum-red label with gold letters that said "DM-1270." Two 12" discs with four sides and wiggly grooves. A 1270 I could hold and look at and play and watch spinning around and put back into its slipcover and keep snug on a shelf. I would have settled for some cracked, chipped, fungus-pestered sad sack of a 1270 that had been moldering away in Uncle Vlad's attic for 60 years. But how to get one? Any 1270? I leapfrogged the LoC by appealing to a local collector friend of mine who is blessed beyond measure with his very own 1270. We dubbed it on his home equipment, definitely good gear but perhaps not absolutely tip-top, utterly up-to-snuff stuff. But that's pettifogging and nitpicking and faultfinding: he gave me a digital copy of 1270, and he's an utter sweetie-pie for that. Finally I could actually hear 1270, that oh-so elusive recording of Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy that made up just one of what must have been an exhausting series of recording sessions for the musicians of the SFS in December 1947. Over a period of two nights they put down Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, Chabrier's Fête Polonaise, the Mendelssohn Ruy Blas Overture, Ravel's Alborado del gracioso, the ballet music from Gounod's Faust, and 1270's Poème d'extase. RCA made like a diva and haughtily refrained from releasing either the Strauss and Gounod, while the Chabrier came out on both a vinyl 78 rpm record (amazing!) and a 45; the Mendelssohn was released on regular shellac 78 and eventually 45, and the Ravel lasted on the market for about 10 minutes, judging from the scarcity of copies nowadays. (I snagged one in mint condition, nyah nyah nyah.)
It's clear enough that 1270 came within a hair's breadth of being consigned to the Great Silence along with those hapless Gounod and Strauss recordings. RCA didn't bother to put it in a pretty album dressed up with the spectacular artwork so common for that era. Instead they just stuck it into a plain paper wrapping with the official RCA logo on the front and the liner notes on the back. Before too many years passed Pierre Monteux re-recorded the Scriabin with the Boston Symphony. That became RCA's "official" release. The San Francisco Poème d'extase passed into the Darkness it had so narrowly, so recently, sidestepped. Now it is the ultimate Monteux mystery, the elusive will-o'-the-wisp of legendary San Francisco Symphony records, the Album That Got Away, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and Area 51 all rolled into one. At least for avid collectors of antique San Francisco Symphony records. All one of us.
I have a certain bovine persistence when it comes to an object that I have determined to own, whether it be a record or a score or a book or a variety of eggplant. I keep at it, never loosening my grip, bite, or toehold once the intention to acquire has arisen. Thus after uncountable acres of stubborn cud-chewing I have indeed scored a 1270, and not some wussy compromise of a 1270, either. My jim-dandy 1270 is about one baby step removed from brand new. It's still in its original packaging with its original slipcovers. The disc surface is silky-smooth and without much in the way of snap, crackle, and pop. Groove wear is minimal. It plays gangbusters. Only a total moron dork retard would have parted with it for less than a king's ransom. I acquired it through a classy antiquarian record dealer. My 1270 cost a bundle. I don't care. I would have paid twice, three times the amount. My 1270 just might be the most pristine copy there is. It's priceless, utterly without assignable value. There is no dollar amount that could express what that pound-some-odd of shellac and cardboard substrate, surrounded by magenta type on heavy gray paper, means to me. I got a 1270 that eclipsed even my greediest fantasies. I got the 1270 that dreams are made on.
RCA Red Seal DM-1270 preserves a vivid performance, sonically lavish for its period and venue. That it can't hold a candle technologically to a spiffy modern digital recording goes without saying. But so what? It's a priceless artifact of a long-vanished orchestra that was capable of turning on a dime and following a conductor almost anywhere, a seasoned and grayhound-lean ensemble that might have lacked glossy refinement but more than made up for it in sheer guts and DNA-level musicianship. And to hear that crackerjack ensemble sailing through the Scriabin, in a copy that is for all practical intents and purposes new, played on high-quality modern equipment and dubbed in high-definition digital audio?
Bliss. Heaven. Completion. Maybe a little vindication? (Shazam, I can track down anything.)
Well. DM-1270 is my latest pampered child. I gave its two discs a gentle but thorough bath, dubbed both into high-def digital via my oh-so-refined Rega Planar 78 turntable with its musically satisfying Grado 78E cartridge and conical diamond stylus, then deposited the discs into brand-spanking-new acid-free paper sleeves, each disc in its own sparkling-new snow white cardboard jacket. I folded the whole into a plastic outer jacket together with the original packaging, braced with a cardboard spacer on the outside to ward off any bumps or bruises. DM-1270 can probably soldier on for another century at least, safe from the icky reprobates that plague shellac discs—moisture, heat, fungus, mold, scratches and dings and whacks and knocks. My digital dub is crystal-clear, untrammeled by shellac shenanigans or pestered by the peccadilloes of age. It needed only the most minimal of digital processing by way of light click removal, and frankly could have done just fine even without that. I exult in Charlie Bubb just friggin' wailing through the trumpet solos, backed as he is by Monteux's virtuoso manipulation of an orchestra that by 1947 was mostly his own hand-picked band of brothers. (And sisters…)
Having yielded up its musical riches, DM-1270 rests now, snugly surrounded by its 1947 brothers: a Chabrier Fête Polonaise on vinyl, a Mendelssohn Ruy Blas Overture on pristine shellac, and a Ravel Alborado del gracioso that gives 1270 a run for the money in the über-rare department and is just as meticulously pampered. Over to the left are those hefty, beautiful, high-profile 1945 productions: Berlioz Symphonie fantastique, Stravinsky Sacre du printemps, Brahms 2nd Symphony, D'Indy Istar Symphonic Variations, Rimsky-Korsakov Sadko. Jascha Heifetz. Marian Anderson and Yehudi Menuhin, Lalo and Brahms and Milhaud and Gruenberg. To the immediate right, the 1949 effusion of newfangled records mastered on magnetic tape: Beethoven 2nd Symphony, Brahms Song of Destiny, Bach-Respighi Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. DM-1270 has journeyed from its longterm Midwestern digs and is now back in San Francisco, where it belongs. I can only hope it's as happy to be here as I am delighted to receive it.
Who says you can't go home again?