A Boston Pops Miscellany

Arthur Fiedler, c. 1935

Summer is here - traditionally the time when orchestras do their "pops" seasons, and none is more celebrated than those of Boston (though in latter days, rivaled by those in Cincinnati). The Boston "Pops" began making recordings 82 summers ago, and purveyed everything from standard repertoire to traditional and contemporary light music. All three are represented here in this batch:

Wagner: Rienzi - Overture and Tannhäuser - Fest-Marsch
Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fiedler
Recorded June 28-29, 1937
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-569, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 45.17 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 29.84 MB)

Album of Strauss Waltzes
(Wein, Weib und Gesang; Wiener Blut; Künstlerleben; Kaiser; Frühlingsstimmen)
Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fiedler
Recorded 1936-37
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-445, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 103.12 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 67.24 MB)

Piston: The Incredible Flutist - Ballet Suite
Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fiedler
Recorded June 29, 1939
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-621, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 41.67 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 29.91 MB)

Not being a Viennese waltz aficionado, I can't say how authentic Fiedler's interpretations of Johann Strauss may be, but I certainly enjoyed them - he plays them with all the zest and gusto one could want. The Piston recording is wholly delightful, but the solo flutist is unfortunately not credited. On Fiedler's later (1953) recording, James Pappoutsakis did the honors, and since that gentleman became the BSO's assistant principal flute the year this recording was made, it's quite possible he did the honors on this occasion also.

Rare Baroque Music from Fiedler's Sinfonietta

Those of you seeing my title for this post, and then seeing the label picture above, must be thinking, "he's joking, right?" Because the Pachelbel Canon is so familiar to us nowadays, that it's hard to imagine a time, not so long ago, that the piece, and its composer, was almost as unknown as two of the other composers whose works Arthur Fiedler's little orchestra (composed of Boston Symphony players) recorded during the same week. (Doubtless many people, particularly cellists, wish this were still the case! I myself always had fun with it, as a continuo harpsichordist, because I could slip in tunes like "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas" with the right hand and see if anybody noticed. Nobody ever did.) The other two composers represented here are, even today, hardly household names: the lutenist Esajas Reusner (1636-1679) and Rev. William Felton (1713-1769):

William Felton: Organ Concerto No. 3 in B-Flat Major
E. Power Biggs with Arthur Fiedler's Sinfonietta
Recorded March 17, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-866, two 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 33.74 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 21.69 MB)

Esajas Reusner: Suite No. 1 (arr. J. G. Stanley) and
Pachelbel: Canon in D Major
Arthur Fiedler's Sinfonietta
Recorded March 21, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-969, two 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 35.35 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 24.25 MB)

It's taken six years, but between 8 and 9 o'clock this morning this blog passed a milestone: one million pageviews! It now stands at 1,000,301. My thanks to you, my loyal fans, for making this possible.

Handel: Cuckoo and the Nightingale (Biggs, Fiedler)

E. Power Biggs, 1937

As I was growing up, E. Power Biggs (1906-1977) was a one-man institution in organ-playing, at least in my awareness, through his many, many Columbia LPs spanning a wide range of repertoire, performed on historic organs all over the world. His career at Columbia spanned some thirty years, but before this, he had been at Victor from 1939 to 1946, where most of his work was done on the 1937 Aeolian-Skinner organ built to Baroque specifications (pictured above) and located in Harvard's Germanic Museum. His recordings included collaborations with Arthur Fiedler and his Sinfonietta composed of Boston Symphony players; in fact Biggs' first Victor release was of a Handel concerto with Fiedler, which Larry Austin has made available here. A year later, they recorded this most popular of the Handel concertos:

Handel: Concerto No. 13 in F Major ("The Cuckoo and the Nightingale")
E. Power Biggs, organ, with Arthur Fiedler's Sinfonietta
Recorded March 17, 1940
RCA Victor set M-733, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 40.36 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 28.11 MB)

Both Biggs and Fiedler would later make complete recordings of the Handel organ concertos in stereo - but not together: Biggs' set was with Boult and the London Philharmonic, for Columbia, and Fiedler's was with Carl Weinrich for RCA.

Paderewski: Piano Concerto (Sanromá, Fiedler)

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Puerto Rican-born Jesús Maria Sanromá (1902-1984) was the official pianist of the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops orchestras for over 20 years, and while there, made several recordings of piano concertos with them, including the first complete recording of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and concertos by Mendelssohn and MacDowell. Perhaps the rarest collaboration is this one of Paderewski's youthful A Minor Concerto of 1888, not only a first recording of the piece, but seemingly the first recording of any work by Paderewski requiring more than two 78-rpm sides:

Paderewski: Concerto in A Minor, Op. 17
Jesús Maria Sanromá, piano
Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fiedler
Recorded June 30, 1939
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-614, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 79.45 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 56.99 MB)

The Paderewski concerto may not be an earth-shattering masterpiece, but it is great fun, and Sanromá plays it for all it is worth. (The piece, incidentally, was tapped for the very first issue in Hyperion Records' acclaimed series "The Romantic Piano Concerto".) Paderewski played it at his American debut in 1891, and that wildly successful American tour quickly became a media circus, giving rise to such cartoons as the one shown above.

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (Sanromá, Fiedler)

Cover design by Peter Arno (?)

For the Fourth of July holiday weekend, I offer that most quintessentially American concert work in its first recording with pretensions to completeness - and a smashing performance, at that. Jesús Maria Sanromá's way with this music is so full of panache and improvisational flair that it is almost like hearing it for the first time, and most subsequent recordings seem to me staid by comparison. Sanromá was the official pianist of the Boston Pops at the time that organization's first recordings were made, and, in fact, this version of the Rhapsody comes from the Pops' very first day of sessions:

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
Jesús Maria Sanromá, piano, with the
Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fiedler
Recorded July 1, 1935
and
Gershwin: Strike Up the Band
Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fiedler
Recorded July 3, 1935
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-358, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 52.44 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 33.70 MB)

As I said, this is the first recording of the Rhapsody with pretensions to completeness, with only two minor cuts made. The piece had, of course, been recorded many times before, in a dizzying array of arrangements (including Larry Adler on the harmonica, Jesse Crawford on the Wurlitzer organ, and the Eight Piano Ensemble, whose version can be heard at the CHARM website), but all of these, including Gershwin's own recording with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, abridged the piece to fit onto two sides.

Ken Halperin's blog shows an alternate cover design for this set, which he believes might be by Steinweiss. My copy of the set has the one pictured above, but lacking its front cover, as the previous owner wished to keep it for framing! Fortunately, the back cover is identical, except for having the spine binding on the right instead of the left. This was Victor's practice during the early 1940s with its pictorial album covers.

Kodály: Dances from Galanta (Fiedler, Boston Pops)

Zoltán Kodály

If the most popular work by Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) is the Suite from the opera "Háry János", then perhaps the second most popular is his brilliant answer to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, the Dances from Galanta, written, as the Victor labels for its first American recording proclaim, "for the 80th Anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society, 1934". Here is that recording:

Kodály: Dances from Galanta (1934)

Boston "Pops" Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fiedler

Recorded June 28, 1939

Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-834, two 78-rpm records

Link (FLAC file, 36.15 MB)

Link (MP3 file, 26.29 MB)

Fiedler's excellent recording missed being the very first of this work by less than three months; Victor de Sabata beat him to the punch by recording it for Polydor with the Berlin Philharmonic in April, 1939. For all practical purposes, Fiedler's set would be the only way Americans would be able to experience this piece on record during the 1940s. (Fritz Reiner recorded it for Columbia in Pittsburgh in 1945, but that version was unreleased until Sony tapped it for a Masterworks Heritage CD in 1996.)

The first side of my copy is a bit noisy, I'm sorry to say - especially at the beginning and end of the side. It was a wartime pressing, after all.

Massenet: Le Cid - Ballet (Fiedler)

Cover design by Herschel Levit

Vive l'Espagne! It seems as though, prior to the arrival on the international music scene of native Spanish composers like Albeniz, Granados and Manuel de Falla, the French had a monopoly on musical representations of their southern neighbor.  This point was driven home by Andrew Kazdin and Thomas Z. Shepard in the liner notes for their 1971 album "Everything You Always Wanted to Hear on the Moog" (which featured "semi-conducted" versions of Chabrier's España, Lecuona's Malagueña, a suite from Bizet's Carmen and Ravel's Bolero), which stated with irony that "the consistency of our Spanish program is marred only by the fact that Lecuona was not a French composer."  Well, here's some more zestful Spanish music by a Frenchman, zestfully performed by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops:

Massenet: Le Cid - Ballet Suite
Arthur Fiedler and the Boston "Pops" Orchestra
Recorded July 10-11, 1945
RCA Victor set DM-1058, three 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 47.18 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 32.25 MB)

Sanromá and the Boston Pops

Puerto Rico-born Jesús Maria Sanromá (1902-1984) was for 20 years the official pianist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  While in this capacity, he recorded six concerted works for piano and orchestra with the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler, one each year between 1935 and 1940.  This is the offering from 1938, the Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, taken from a slightly worn copy of Victor set AM-780.  The concerto takes 5 sides of the three records; on the last side is a solo recording by Sanromá of two of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words":

Link (FLAC files, 52.04 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 26.98 MB)

This might be my last post for a couple of weeks, as I have been asked to perform the solo harpsichord part of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with a local community orchestra on Oct. 24, and preparing this will be taking up most of my free time between now and then.  So to tide everybody over, here are links to all the Arthur Fiedler-Boston Pops recordings I had transferred and posted previously to RMCR, one of them another of the Sanromá piano concertos:

Gluck-Mottl: Ballet Suite No. 1
Recorded March 24, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-787 (2 records)
Link (FLAC file, 39.29 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 21.07 MB)

Khatchaturian: Masquerade Suite (Waltz, Nocturne, Mazurka, Romance, Galop)
Recorded June 18, 1947
RCA Victor set DM-1166 (2 records)
Link (FLAC file, 43.13 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 20.92 MB)

MacDowell: Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 23 (with Jesús Maria Sanromá)
and
Ibert: Divertissement
Recorded July 1, 1936
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-324 (5 records)
Link (FLAC files, 89.35 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 46.28 MB)

Rossini-Britten: Matinées Musicales (March, Nocturne, Waltz, Pantomime, Moto perpetuo)
and
Rossini-Britten: Soirées Musicales - Tarantella
Recorded June 21, 1947
RCA Victor set DM-1204 (3 10-inch records)
Link (FLAC files, 38.9 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 19.2 MB)

And, one with the Fiedler Sinfonietta (a chamber orchestra composed of Boston Symphony players);

Telemann: Don Quichotte Suite
Recorded March 21, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-945 (2 records)
Link (FLAC file, 40.43 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 16.86 MB)