Happy Birthday, George Frederick Handel!

The 330th anniversary of the birth of George Frederick Handel is Monday, February 23, and to celebrate, I'm revisiting the reclaimed record pile, which had a number of single 78s of Handel's music.  Here are a couple of the most interesting ones:

Handel: Nel dolce dell'oblio - Cantata, HWV 134
Ethel Luening, soprano; Otto Luening, flute;
Sterling Hunkins, cello; Ernst Victor Wolff, harpsichord
Recorded c. 1936
Musicraft 1010, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 25.30 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 13.53 MB)

Handel: Chaconne in G Major (with 21 variations), HWV 435
Yella Pessl, harpsichord
Recorded June 3, 1936
Columbia 68599-D, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 27.95 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 15.58 MB)

The Musicraft record was one of that company's very first releases.  It features Otto Luening (1900-1996), later to gain fame as an electronic music pioneer, and his then-wife, Ethel (neé Cobb).  The record by Yella (Gabriella) Pessl (1906-1991) is one of about eighteen issued by Columbia in 1936 and 1937; she then defected to Victor, where she concentrated on recording chamber music, while Ernst Victor Wolff (1889-1960), a mainstay of the early Musicraft catalog, replaced her as Columbia's resident harpsichordist.  Both Pessl and Wolff, incidentally, used a Maendler-Schramm harpsichord (a German make in production between 1906 and about 1960), and the recording careers of both seem to have petered out after about 1940.

Leonardo Vinci: Sonata in D

René LeRoy

Today I offer some of the most delectable flute playing you shall ever hear, by the great French flutist René LeRoy (1898-1985), a student of Adolphe Hennebains at the Paris Conservatoire (he subsequently studied with Philippe Gaubert).  Here he plays a charming Baroque sonata by Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730), a Neapolitan composer of operas apparently unrelated to the great painter and inventor with whom he shared a name:

Leonardo Vinci: Sonata in D Major
René LeRoy, flute; Yella Pessl, harpsichord
Recorded February 22, 1939
Victor 18086, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 30.58 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 18.91 MB)

I apologize in advance for the noisiness of this record - its previous owner must have shared my opinion of LeRoy's playing, for it is obviously a much-played copy.

UPDATE (July 26): Christopher Steward, a flutist and collector who maintains a wonderful page of early flute recordings, has very kindly sent me his own transfer from a much superior copy of Victor 18086, with permission to disseminate it, so I have substituted his transfer for mine in the links above.

Mitch Miller plays Handel

 

For this debut entry in my new blog, I wish to pay tribute to Mitch Miller, who passed away on Saturday, July 31, 2010, aged 99.  For Americans over a certain age he will always be associated with his series of "Sing Along With Mitch" LPs (and the television show which these inspired, which ran from 1961 to 1966).  One of my very first records, received with my very first record player (at Christmas 1965), was a 6-eyes Columbia LP of "Still More Sing Along with Mitch" which I am listening to in this photo:

 

Long before his career as a sing-along leader, however, Mitchell Miller (as he was billed on his classical recordings) was well-known for his fine oboe and English horn playing.  No less a conductor than Leopold Stokowski admired his playing, and when Stokowski conducted a recording of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony in 1947, he hired Mitch to play the famous English horn solo in the second movement, and insisted that Mitch be credited on the label, at a time when such credits were rarely given.  From 1935 to 1947 he was oboist in the Columbia Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra, who accompanies him on the first of two Handel recordings below:

Handel: Oboe Concerto No. 3 in G minor

Mitch Miller and the Columbia Broadcasting Symphony under Howard Barlow

Recorded June 19, 1939

Columbia 69660-D, one 78-rpm record

Link (FLAC file, 16.3 MB)

Link (MP3 file, 8.34 MB)

Handel: Oboe Sonata in G minor, Op. 1, No. 6

Mitch Miller, oboe; Yella Pessl, harpsichord

Recorded August 4, 1938 (information courtesy of Don Tait)

Victor 15378, one 78-rpm record

Link (FLAC file, 15.51 MB)

Link (MP3 file, 7.28 MB)

Both of these recordings have been transferred from my own 78-rpm shellac records (although, in the case of the Sonata, from a cassette copy, as I no longer own the record).