My profession is such that I spend quite a bit of time listening to recorded music. (Such a tough life I lead.) My listening ranges from purely functional (i.e., as part of preparing a presentation or a class) all the way to purely frivolous (just to entertain myself or fill the air space.) But most of the time I listen for a combination of enlightenment, information, entertainment, and curiosity. I love hearing the changes a performer can bring to a familiar work. I also love hearing the changes of recording technology over the years. But all in all, I just dig the whole enchilada; the players, the conductors, the interpretations, the sonics, the recording tech itself. It’s fun. No doubt I buy far more recordings than I should. They’re deductible, but still. Call it a weakness.
For no particular reason except that it’s Sunday and I’m dawdling about, putting off doing anything more meaningful (vacuuming, perhaps, or cleaning the bathroom) I might as well talk about some of the more interesting albums from the past few days and whatever they bring to mind.
Alfred Hertz, San Francisco Symphony Recordings
Yesterday I listened through the entire set of recordings that Hertz made with the San Francisco Symphony back in the mid-1920s. The first, Auber’s Overture to Fra Diavolo, recorded in January 1925, was an acoustic (i.e., no microphones) affair, followed by an ambitious three-disc set of the Prelude and Good Friday Spell from Wagner’s Parsifal, also acoustic. But electric recording was at hand, so starting with sessions in 1926 Hertz and the SFS went electric. Most of the Hertz/SFS recordings are encore-type trifles—Delibes, Massenet, Kreisler, Moszkowski. But a few more substantial pieces worked their way into the mix, particularly the 1927 album of selections from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the final 1928 sessions that yielded an excellent Beethoven Leonore Overture No. 3 and a hellzapoppin’ Liszt Les Preludes. All in all it’s about 3 1/2 CD’s worth of stuff, neatly tracing the recording industry’s shift from acoustic to electric recording. By 1928 they had a lot of the bugs worked out, and they had discovered in Oakland’s Masonic Hall a superb recording venue.
Again I’m struck by how good an orchestra the SFS was in the 1920s; big fat strings, excellent brass, lovely woodwinds, all blended together in a fetching Germanic-sounding mix. The orchestra boasted two supreme violinists as its concertmaster; Louis Persinger up to 1925—he has a short solo on the Auber Fra Diavolo disc—followed by Michel Piastro (later to be concertmaster of Toscanini’s New York Philharmonic) whose Mischa Elman-ish sweetness lights up the Kreisler Caprice Viennoise.
The Hertz/SFS recordings were tantalizingly out of reach for a long time. I had heard about them, but since RCA never saw fit to re-release them during the LP era, nor later in the digital era, they remained out of bounds for most modern-day folks. Record stores ceased to stock 78s sometime in the early 1950s, so dealers of antique records were the only viable source, apart from a few local collectors. I first started hearing them via the generosity of some folks who digitized their own copies for me, and then I got to know them all when Mark Obert-Thorn produced a gorgeously remastered complete set for Pristine Classical. My work on the 2011 SFS Centennial led me to the ambition of acquiring original copies for myself. At this point I have at least one original of every Hertz/SFS album save one (the 1925 acoustic recording of Massenet’s Phèdre Overture, remade electrically in 1928 and scarcer than hen’s teeth as a result.) In most cases I have multiple copies, some American, some English reprints, some later American reprints. I even have an Australian reprint of one, and how’s that for cool? I also invested substantially in a high-quality playback system for 78s—Rega Planar 78 turntable with a Grado 78E cartridge, powered by a Nova Phonomena phono pre-amp. Since modern equipment won’t wear out the discs the way the old-timey stuff did, I can play my originals as I wish, or enjoy modern digital remasterings, not only Obert-Thorn’s but my own, made from those very copies I so carefully collected.
Rafael Kubelik, Berlin Philharmonic: Schumann 4 Symphonies
I’ve been a Kubelik fan for years; there was something so bracingly non-neurotic about his conducting. He focused clearly on the music and the orchestra, always aiming at drawing the performance from them without undue interpretative histrionics. In a way Kubelik was the ultimate in modern interpreters in that he seems to have achieved that goal of transparency; just the music without the performer getting in the way.
Except that’s utter hogwash; Kubelik’s very “transparency” is in itself an interpretative decision and, in fact, in his own way he stamps his personality all over the orchestra. The Berlin Philharmonic of 1963 was very much Herbert von Karajan’s band, noted for its plush, perhaps overly homogenous sound. But when Kubelik led them through this Schumann set, they sounded entirely different; more winds, more brass, much less silky-smooth and much more alive and compelling.
I would put the Kubelik/Berlin set up near my reference, which is the Sawallisch/Dresden set from some years later. The Schumann symphonies are sometimes charged with structural and orchestral deficiencies, but that hasn’t stopped them from attracting a lot of really first-class recordings, including the revelatory HIP set by John Eliot Gardiner and his Revolution-and-Romantic band. I’m not a big fan of the Szell/Cleveland set, by the way; despite its fine reputation, I find Szell’s overall bitch-slap approach to the works distressing. My own preferences run towards the warm and not overly driven, thus my propensity towards the spun-gold Dresden sound or the Berliners in Kubelik’s loving hands.
Gilbert and Sullivan: Ruddigore, Yeomen of the Guard, Mikado, The Gondoliers
Some months ago the hard disk that houses my digital music library, loving assembled for years via CD rips, developed problems that, unknown to me, had also affected the backup drive, and I lost about a quarter of the collection due to disk trouble. Having salvaged what I could to new hard drives, slowly but surely I’ve been reassembling the missing recordings, re-ripping from my CD originals.
My entire boxed Decca set of D’Oyly Carte stereo recordings of the complete G&S was a casualty of the hard drive crash, but since I have the originals, it was a matter of an hour or so to re-rip the lot. That led me to listen to some of those marvelous performances, all of them glowing with that full-bodied 1960s Decca Sound. I listened to a few shows complete, and part of others. Delightful, just delightful. I’ll never grow tired of G&S.
The Art of the Savoyard (Pearl Recordings)
My repair of the Gilbert & Sullivan directory on my drive led to the discovery that an intriguing Pearl CD called The Art of the Savoyard had also gone missing. So I fetched the CD and re-ripped it. It contains dubs of the earliest known recordings of D’Oyly Carte company members, many of them veterans of the original productions, trained by G&S themselves. Thus you get to hear Richard Temple, the original Mikado, sing the Mikado’s song. (It’s a lot slower than performers take it today.) Even through those mostly scratchy old audio incunabula, some dating from the turn of the 20th century, you can hear the vitality of the original Savoyards and the beginning of what would prove to be an unbroken tradition until the company closed in the 1980s. (And yes I know there was a brief revival thereafter, but it just wasn’t the same.)
Heinrich Schütz: Psalmen Davids (Conrad Junghanel, Cantus Colln, Ensemble Palatino)
Poor Schütz. Trained by the big guns of the early Venetian Baroque—Gabrieli, Monteverdi, et al.,—his career was hamstrung by the outbreak of the 30 Years War in Germany. His earlier works hum and thrum with the glittering effulgence of Venetian nouveau-rich early Baroque, trombones and strings and massed double choirs. But later on, in Germany, he wrote for courts impoverished by the war’s depredations, and for a mindset that had replaced an optimistic and downright hedonistic view of Christianity with the dour, holier-than-thou self-righteousness of burgeoning Lutheranism.
So his later works tend to be starchy affairs, OK in very small doses but downright depressing for the most part despite their undeniable clear beauty and immaculate construction. But the early works—now, there’s a different matter. The Psalmen Davids reveal Schütz as the Venetian-inspired composer par excellence, all brilliance and glittering sonority. They’re downright irresistible, wonderful gaudy showpieces à la Gabrieli at his showiest.
Elgar: Symphony No. 2 and Enigma Variations (Sir John Barbirolli, Hallé Orchestra, 1954 and 1956 respectively)
I downloaded this one from Pristine Classical as a gift for a friend of mine, a Barbirolli devotée and therefore a man of impeccable taste in conductors. These can be thought of as the “other” Barbirolli/Hallé recordings of the pieces in question, as opposed to the better-known stereo EMI versions from the 1960s. The Elgar 2nd comes from 1954, in mono, but is a rip-roaring and passionate performance, while the 1956 Enigma was recorded by Mercury Living Presence and has all the hallmarks of that fabled label’s crystal-clear, bright sonics.
It is said that Elgar-folk tend to evince strong preferences for either the 1st or 2nd symphony, but not both. I’ll admit that I’m more of a 1st symphony guy on the whole, but I find the 2nd fascinating and always worth hearing. When it’s played as well as it is on this undeservedly obscure recording, it’s downright mesmerizing.
And the Enigma just might be the best ever, so there.
John Adams: Harmonielehre (Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony 2012)
The SFS commissioned Harmonielehre and gave it a superb premiere recording with Edo de Waart back in 1985. So it was altogether fitting that MTT and the SFS would re-record the work in 2012; this is the SFS’s piece in the same sense that the St. Petersburg Philharmonic owns the Rachmaninoff 2nd Symphony.
Even better, Harmonielehre was recorded in high-definition audio, which is actually most easily experienced nowadays via download rather than dealing with the difficulties of SACD: Not only is an SACD player required, but SACD’s damn copy protection prohibits ripping an SACD to a hard drive. But you can download the Harmonielehre recording in hi-def from HDTracks.com and avoid the whole SACD imbroglio.
The 2012 Harmonielehre is the best rendering of the piece to date, even given the substantial competition. And the gorgeous hi-def sound gives it a distinct advantage. I was giving the pre-concert lectures the week the recording was being made and so I heard the performance several times. While no recording, not even hi-def digital, can match the wholeness and presence of live music, this one comes pretty dang close. Its Grammy award was slam-dunk appropriate.
Viva Verdi! Overtures and Preludes (Riccardo Chailly, Filarmonica della Scala)
Italy might have been the cradle of orchestral music but it has lagged behind most of the world when it comes to establishing top-tier symphony orchestras. We have no mighty Filarmonica di Roma, no Sinfonia Veneziana, no Orchestra di Firenze to gush over. You’d think Italy would be crawling with the things, considering the nation’s history, but it worked out otherwise. The Italians went resolutely operatic in the 19th century, and symphonic music got swept under the rug, despite some truly first-rate orchestral composers (Busoni, Respighi, Malipiero, Casella, etc.,) and a lot of fantastic conductors (Toscanini, Giulini, Abbado, Chailly, etc.)
But I’ve noticed a change. Italian orchestras are coming alive. Rome’s distinguished Accademia della St. Cecilia orchestra is housed in a glorious new performance space, the Parco della Musica, while Milan has fielded not one, but two fine orchestras—the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, better known as LaVerdi for short, and the Filarmonica della Scala, drawn from members of the Teatro alla Scala orchestra but devoted to symphonic music.
The Filarmonica is a particularly polished orchestra, and in this album under Riccardo Chailly’s expert direction, they’re playing music that they know forwards and backwards. This one’s also available in hi-def (check HDTracks.com) and abundantly worth purchasing and hearing. The Italians may be coming late to the symphonic party, but they’re making up for lost time.