Oscar Levant in a Recital of Modern Music

Oscar Levant

The Pittsburgh-born pianist, composer, author, actor, and (in later years) professional neurotic Oscar Levant (1906-1972) probably doesn't need any introduction to my readers, but perhaps this particular album does, for with the exception of the oft-reissued Gershwin preludes, it is comparatively rare. It actually was his first, issued in mid-1942, when he was already famous for his role as a panelist on the radio quiz show "Information Please" and as the author of the best-selling "A Smattering of Ignorance", and, in some respects, the most satisfying of the dozen or so albums he would make for Columbia:

Oscar Levant in a Recital of Modern Music:

Gershwin: Three Preludes

Debussy: Les Collines d'Anacapri

Debussy: Jardins sous la pluie

Jelobinsky: Etudes, Op. 19, Nos. 1 and 2 

Shostakovich: Prelude in A Minor, Op. 34, No. 2

Shostakovich: Polka from "The Golden Age"

Ravel: Sonatine - Menuet

Levant: Sonatina - First movement (Con ritmo)

Oscar Levant, piano

Recorded December 17, 1941, and January 20, 1942

Columbia Masterworks set M-508, four 10-inch 78-rpm records

Link (FLAC files, 54.67 MB)

Link (MP3 files, 40.61 MB)

Gershwin, Debussy, Ravel and Shostakovich are of course very well-known, but Levant the composer and Valery Viktorovich Jelobinsky (1913-1946) are far less so. The latter (whose name has also been transliterated "Zhelobinsky") was quite prolific in his short career, with six symphonies, three piano concertos and four operas to his credit. Shostakovich evidently thought highly of him, but posterity seems to have completely ignored him. This is the only recording ever made of the second of these two Etudes (from a set of six, which Horowitz championed for a time); Raymond Lewenthal later included the first one on a Westminster LP.

Larry Adler and His Harmonica

Cover by Al Hirschfeld
(restored by Peter Joelson)

The greatest harmonica player of them all, Larry Adler, would have been 100 years old last February had he lived.  (He died in August, 2001, aged 87.)  Around the time that anniversary would have been celebrated, I was lucky enough to find this Decca set in a used record shop.  Adler recorded copiously, but the vast majority of his recordings were British, for it was in Britain that he achieved his greatest fame.  There were sixteen issued American Decca sides made during the 1940s, the last two of them on the very day before the 1948 Petrillo recording ban took effect.  After that ban was over, he had been blacklisted for alleged Communist sympathies, and he moved to England permanently.  Here are one-half of those sixteen sides:

Larry Adler and His Harmonica, Vol. 2:
Katscher: When Day is Done
Olshanetzky: My Little Town Belz
Londonderry Air
Adler: Beguine
Debussy: Clair de Lune
Dinicu-Heifetz: Hora Staccato
Enesco: Roumanian Rhapsody No. 1
Recorded 1945-47
Decca set DA-653, 4 10-inch 78-rpm records

Link (FLAC files, 81.97 MB)

Link (MP3 files, 46.53 MB)

Strictly speaking, the Debussy/Dinicu record doesn't belong to DA-653; the previous owner had substituted it, but I was glad to get it anyway.  The Hora Staccato is a tour de force, as is the Enesco Roumanian Rhapsody.  The latter was featured in the 1948 MGM musical "Three Daring Daughters" starring Jeannette MacDonald, José Iturbi and Jane Powell.  In his entertaining 1984 memoirs, "It Ain't Necessarily So," Adler recounts how Iturbi almost cheated him out of the chance to work on the film:

"[In the film] I was to play Enesco's Roumanian Rhapsody in a Carnegie Hall setting, with Iturbi conducting a symphony orchestra. Before shooting I flew to Chicago for an engagement at the Chicago Theatre. When I returned I had a call from Abe Lastfogel [Adler's agent]. He told me that due to a set-designer's strike, they couldn't get the Carnegie Hall set built. Would I let [the film's producer Joe] Pasternak out of our deal? He'd put me in another film some other time. I could have insisted that I be paid - I had held the time free and signed a contract - but it didn't seem important enough to make it an issue, creating bad feeling and certainly ensuring that I'd never work at MGM again. So I agreed, the deal was off.

"That night Johnny Green rang me. Johnny, an old friend, was most famous as the composer of Body and Soul. He was in charge of music at MGM.
"'Larry', he said, it means my job if word of this gets out.' I promised secrecy.
"He told me that the set-designer story was phony. The set was up, they were shooting the number but without me. Instead of conducting the orchestra while I played, Iturbi would conduct from the piano while he played. And what would he be playing? Enesco's Roumanian Rhapsody. What a coincidence!
"'And Larry', said Johnny, 'he's using your arrangement!'
"Even for Hollywood this seemed to be carrying chutzpah to extremes. I phoned Lastfogel and, keeping Johnny's name out of it, told him what I'd learned. I said find out if the set is up; if it is, then is Iturbi doing a number and, if so, what number?
"Lastfogel called back.
"'You're back on the picture', he said. 'You don't know anything, you keep schtumm.'
"Next day Pasternak phoned. He was delighted, he said, that all the difficulties were ironed out, that I would be in the film after all.
"'Larry', he said, 'I've got a script problem and I need your advice. Could you come out to the studio today?
"I'm in the picture as a mouth-organist and suddenly I'm advising the producer on script problems. I drove out to the MGM studio.
"'Larry', said Pasternak, 'I've got to establish that José and Jeannette MacDonald are in love; there's only one logical place to establish it and that's during your number. Jeannette will be sitting in the audience and I want to show, with one look between them, that they're in love.'

"I had an idea what was coming.

"'Now, Larry', said Pasternak, and this time I could have written the script, 'if José is conducting the orchestra, his back is to the audience, right? And if his back is to the audience, he can't look at Jeannette. Ya with me?'

"Joe, I was way ahead of you.

"'And if he can't look at her, she can't look at him, right?'

"Right.

"'So, the way I worked it out, if José is at the piano, see, like he's playing a duet with you and conducting the orchestra at the same time, this way I can establish the look, the audience knows they love each other, you got it?'

"I got it. I also know I'm screwed.

"That's what we did, except that José had one more trick; he worked his sister, for God's sake, into the act. José Iturbi, Amparo Iturbi, and Friend. I was the friend. The number was lousy."

I've never seen the movie, so I can't agree or disagree with Adler's opinion, but the record certainly isn't lousy.  Of course the Iturbis were Victor artists so they aren't on it - fortunately!

Debussy: En blanc et noir (Bartlett & Robertson)

Rae Robertson and Ethel Bartlett

In honor of D-Day, sixty-nine years ago today, I present a work by a Frenchman who was profoundly depressed by the events of a previous war - Claude Debussy, who actually abandoned composition for several months at the outset of World War I in 1914.  His return to it came in the form of this three-movement suite for two pianos, "En blanc et noir" - a masterpiece, whose second movement clearly evokes the war.  This recording by Bartlett and Robertson appears to have been only the second one made of the work; an earlier version, on French HMV by Marcelle Ruff and Dominique Jeanes, from 1929, had long been deleted when this one appeared, coincidentally, about the time of D-Day! - three years after it was recorded:

Debussy: En blanc et noir, for two pianos (1915)

Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, duo-pianists

Recorded April 29, 1941

Columbia Masterworks set MX-241, two 78-rpm records

Link (FLAC files, 43.67 MB)

Link (MP3 files, 24.97 MB)

Debussy and Ravel by Newell and Wummer (and others)

Laura Newell, John Wummer, Milton Katims

Two sets this week, the common denominator of both being not only French impressionism, but the same harpist and flutist.  These are Laura Newell, active in the 1940s and 1950s as a freelance harpist (she was Robert Shaw's choice for both recordings by his Robert Shaw Chorale of Britten's Ceremony of Carols), and John Wummer, principal flute of the New York Philharmonic from 1942 to 1965.  They're both joined by Milton Katims, who played second viola on a number of Budapest Quartet recordings of Mozart and Beethoven quintets, and later conducted the Seattle Symphony, for this Debussy trio:

Debussy: Sonata No. 2, for flute, viola and harp
John Wummer, Milton Katims, Laura Newell
Recorded April 24, 1945
Columbia Masterworks set MX-282, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 49.8 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 27.1 MB)

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss
(restored by Peter Joelson)

Laura Newell was also associated with the brothers Sylvan and Alan Shulman, all three being members of the group "New Friends of Rhythm" for which Alan Shulman wrote jazz-influenced arrangements and compositions.  So it's natural that she should have recorded Ravel's Introduction and Allegro with the Shulmans' Stuyvesant String Quartet:

Ravel: Introduction and Allegro
Laura Newell, harp; John Wummer, flute; Ralph McLane, clarinet
Stuyvesant String Quartet (Shulman-Dembeck-Kievman-Shulman)
and
Debussy: The Maid with the Flaxen Hair (arr. Grandjany)
Laura Newell, harp
Recorded March 22, 1940
Columbia Masterworks set MX-167, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 34.1 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 21.6 MB)

As I mentioned in an earlier post about the Stuyvesant Quartet, the two inner parts changed hands several times during their first few years of existence.  This appears to have been the only recording that John Dembeck, who that same year moved to Toronto and eventually became a Canadian citizen, made as their second violinist.

All my old files are now up and running; and the links from my blog have been changed to the new ones.

Zino Francescatti Violin Recital

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss
(restored by Peter Joelson)

A modest offering for my first upload following the Mediafire debacle, but one very dear to my heart.  I first owned this set in 1974, when I was 11, having purchased it from Clark Music, the mom-and-pop store that I spoke about in this post.  As I recall, the cost was $3.94, and it was something of a revelation to me that classical music could be found on ten-inch discs in album sets!  I associated the smaller format with popular and children's records.  Here are the details:

Violin Recital
1. Tartini: Variations on a Theme of Corelli
2. Shostakovich: Polka from "The Age of Gold"
3. Debussy: La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin
4. Debussy: Minstrels
5. Schumann: The Prophet Bird
6. Wieniawski: Caprice in A minor
Zino Francescatti, violin; Max Lanner, piano
Recorded April 12 and 25, 1946
Columbia Masterworks set M-660, three 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 43.6 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 26.7 MB)

I believe this album contained the first piece I had ever heard by Shostakovich (at the time, I thought it sounded pretty weird!), as well as by Tartini and Wieniawski.

All files going back to May 2012 are now up and running.

Albert Coates' 1923 Beethoven Ninth

This was one of my most popular uploads when I offered it before, back in November 2007, with over 300 hits.  It's the fabled acoustical recording of the Beethoven Ninth, by that great recording pioneer, Albert Coates (1882-1953).  I must say at the outset that the sound quality is not optimal - my source is a second-, possibly third-generation cassette dub sent to me by Frank Forman in 2003, but it's quite listenable, and gives some idea of what the recorders in 1923 were able to accomplish with an orchestra of 39 players and a mighty chorus of eight!  Frank's tape had, as a filler, short pieces by Liadov and Debussy that I also transferred, as a separate upload.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Albert Coates
Recorded in October and November, 1923
HMV D 842 through 849, eight 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 140.4 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 69.13 MB)

Liadov: Kikimora - Orchestral Fairy Tale, Op. 63
Debussy: Golliwog's Cakewalk (from "Children's Corner")
Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates
Recorded October 28, 1921, and April 25, 1922
HMV D 620, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC files, 16.74 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 8.24 MB)

A month after posting these, I posted the following additional early recording by Albert Coates:

Strauss: Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24
Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates
Recorded April 27 and May 11, 1923
HMV D 743 and 744, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 49.45 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 18.92 MB)

This posting represented the first in a long series of transfers of acoustically-recorded major symphonic and chamber works.  I had amassed quite a collection of these - some 150 discs - by 2003, mostly through various dealers (among them Raymond Glaspole, Dave Canfield, Peter Fülöp and others), when I was forced to dispose of most of my 78 collection.  Fortunately, a friend and fellow collector had the foresight to ensure that most of these very rare acoustical sets wound up in his hands, so that I was able to borrow them back for the purpose of making these transfers.

Finally, an electrical recording by Mr. Coates that I first offered in 2009, when his birthday (April 23) was being celebrated by various RMCR denizens:

Bach (orch. Esser): Toccata in F, BWV 540
London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates
Recorded February 18, 1932
Victor 11468, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 24.70 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 9.35 MB)