Bach: Harpsichord Concerto No. 7 (Anna Linde)

Anna Linde

Last year, I presented on this blog what I believed to be the first electrical recording of a Bach concerto, a triple clavier concerto played by three French pianists. Now I present the first complete recording of a Bach clavier concerto played on the harpsichord - I say "complete" because Alice Ehlers had recorded two movements of the BWV 1056 concerto for Homokord in 1926, a recording which achieved nothing like the currency that this one did:

Bach: Harpsichord Concerto No. 7 in G Minor, BWV 1058
Anna Linde, harpsichord, with string orchestra
Recorded October 8, 1928
English Parlophone E 10879 and E 10880, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 40.39 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 22.71 MB)

According to Christian Zwerg's Parlophon discography, the orchestra is that of the Berlin State Opera, and the conductor was Frieder Weissmann, Parlophon's house conductor. And the irony is that, although Weissmann's name is not on the labels, we know far more about his career than we do about the harpsichordist's, for Anna Linde is a figure shrouded in mystery. Here is what we have been able to find out about her (and I am indebted to Nick Morgan and his great sleuthing powers for this information):

She was born Johanna Anna Pincus in Bromberg, Germany (now Bydgoszcz, Poland), in 1880. During the 1910s she studied with Wanda Landowska at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, and sometime after this adopted "Anna Linde" as her professional name. In the late 1920s she recorded a handful of sides for Parlophon, among them several with Paul Grümmer playing the viola da gamba (these can be heard at the CHARM website, as can two of her solo sides). Being Jewish, when the Nazis came to power, she was forced to flee Germany, and she went first to Italy, where she made several recordings for the anthology "Musiche Antiche Italiane" (producers of this first recording of Monteverdi's "Orfeo"). After Italy became unsafe for Jews, she emigrated to the USA, took citizenship and appears to have settled in Denver, Colorado, dying there in 1968.

The picture above is the only one I have been able to find of her, and appears to derive from Parlophon publicity material; my apologies for its awful quality but it was little better in my source, which was a reproduction in Frank Andrews and Michael Smith's discography of English Parlophone's 12-inch "E" series, published by the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society.

Symphonies on American Odeon

Today I present two samples from the earliest album set series to be offered to the American record buyer, that of Otto Heineman's General Phonograph Corporation, drawing on masters recorded by Parlophon in Germany, and released on the Odeon label.  (For an excellent article about the American Odeon label, click here.)  The first of these may well, in fact, be the very first complete symphony issued in an album in the USA - ironically, of an "unfinished" symphony - Schubert's:

Schubert: Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 ("Unfinished")
Orchestra of the German Opera House, Berlin, conducted by Eduard Mörike
Recorded November 22, 1921
American Odeon 5008 through 5010, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 55.88 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 22.92 MB)

The Schubert "Unfinished" has the distinction of being the symphony recorded the most times during the acoustic era - eighteen - but only nine of these recordings were intended as unabridged, and this is the first one of those.  I say "intended" because this recording actually omits four bars between sides 1 and 2.

Next is a sample of one of the earliest Beethoven symphony cycles on record.  Perhaps "cycle" is a misnomer, since different conductors were used, but in the twilight of the acoustic era, two companies in Germany vied with each other for the honor of having all the Beethoven symphonies recorded and on sale.  The first to start its series, in 1923, was Deutsche Grammophon (using five different conductors, among them Fried, Klemperer and Pfitzner), but before they could finish (Nov. 1925), Parlophon (using two conductors -Mörike and Frieder Weissmann) had started and finished their series.  All of the Parlophon series were released in albums by American Odeon.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 ("Pastorale")
Berlin Opera House Orchestra conducted by Frieder Weissmann
Recorded November 21 and 24, 1924, and January 21, 1925
American Odeon 5086 through 5090, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 111.44 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 41.71 MB)

When I had both of these sets in my possession three to four years ago, I did not, alas, have a scanner.  The Schubert album even had liner notes printed on the inside front cover, which I did transcribe into a text file that I include with the download.  But I have no way of showing what the lovely purple labels looked like, other than to show this photo of a Richard Tauber record from the same series, that I lifted from an eBay auction: