Mozart Serenades by E. F.

Two albums containing Mozart serenades this week, the common denominator to both being that a conductor with the initials "E. F." leads a (presumably) hand-picked ensemble. Here are the details:

Mozart: "Salzburg Serenades"
(Concertante and Rondo from Serenade No. 9 in D, K. 320;
Serenata Notturna in D, K. 239)
Edvard Fendler conducting the Vox Chamber Orchestra
Recorded c. 1945-46
Vox Album 161, four 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 63.91 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 41.28 MB)

Mozart: Serenade No. 10 in B-Flat, K. 361, for thirteen wind instruments
Edwin Fischer conducting his Chamber Orchestra
Recorded September 1939
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-743, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 68.76 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 43.88 MB)

Leipzig-born Fendler (1902-1987), who would appear to have left Germany with the rise of Nazism, ended up with conducting jobs in places as diverse as the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Mobile (Alabama) and Beaumont (Texas). He had made recordings in France before the war - among them, another version of this same Serenata Notturna. The "Vox Chamber Orchestra" was, I suspect, an ad hoc body of New York players.

Edwin Fischer (1886-1960) was, of course, much better known as a pianist, but was a fine conductor as well, and he often combined the two roles, most notably with Bach. This recording, made in Berlin, manages to get Mozart's great Gran Partita onto three discs by omitting two movements and excising one of two trios of a minuet, and by scrupulously avoiding repeats. What remains, however, is very well played and conducted indeed.

Herman D. Koppel

Herman D. Koppel

Nineteen years ago this month, the world of Danish music lost one of its last living links with Carl Nielsen in the passing of pianist and composer Herman David Koppel (1908-1998). (His brother was the violinist Julius Koppel.) Of Jewish heritage, Koppel, who had to flee Denmark in 1943 when the Nazis placed the country under direct military occupation, had considered Nielsen a mentor and had played the composer's piano works in his presence. Koppel made multiple recordings of Nielsen's piano music, of which these appear to be among the first:

Nielsen: Theme and Variations, Op. 40 and Chaconne, Op. 32
Herman D. Koppel, piano
Recorded December 13, 1940
HMV DB 5252 through DB 5254, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 65.99 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 40.48 MB)

Koppel died on Bastille Day, and here he is playing French music - only the second recording ever made of Poulenc's delightful Trio (after the composer's own, for Columbia, in 1928):

Poulenc: Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano (1926)
Waldemar Wolsing, oboe; Carl Bloch, bassoon; Herman D. Koppel, piano
Recorded c. 1950
Metronome CL 3000 and CL 3001, two 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 32.22 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 18.71 MB)

Metrnonome Records was an independent Swedish label founded in 1949 by two jazz enthusiasts, brothers Anders and Lars Burman. This was one of their few classical issues.

Mozart: Wind Divertimenti (Danish Radio members)

Resuming my uploads of records from Denmark (actually, the one pictured above is from the reclaimed record pile), I present two Mozart divertimenti for wind sextet. These were recorded five years apart, yet share three of the players between them, including the leader of the ensemble, oboist Waldemar Wolsing (1910-1993). Here are the details:

Mozart: Divertimento No. 12 in E-Flat Major, K. 252
Members of the Danish State Radio Orchestra:
Waldemar Wolsing and Erik Hovaldt, oboes
Ingbert Mikkelsen and Knud E. Olsen, horns
Carl Bloch and Leif Carlsen, bassoons
Recorded October 16, 1952
English Columbia DX 1872, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 19.57 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 12.48 MB)

Mozart: Divertimento No. 14 in B-Flat Major, K. 270
Waldemar Wolsing and Hans Woldbye, oboes
Ingbert Mikkelsen and Wang Breidahl, horns
Kjell Roikjer and Carl Bloch, bassoons
Recorded October 19, 1947
HMV DA 5260 and DA 5261, two 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 26.36 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 16.01 MB)

The HMV records do not identify the players as members of the Danish State Radio Orchestra, but I imagine they were. Two days prior to recording K. 270, Wolsing, Mikkelsen and Roikjer, as members of the Wind Quintet of 1932, participated in this recording of Vagn Holmboe's Notturno.

Danish Music for Winds

Jørgen Bentzon

Perhaps it was inevitable after the success of Carl Nielsen's great Wind Quintet of 1922, but Danish composers since then seem to have excelled at enriching the repertory of chamber music for woodwinds. I have already offered two examples of this at this post; now I offer two more:

Jørgen Bentzon: Racconto No. 3, Op. 31 (1937)
Waldemar Wolsing, oboe
P. Allin Erichsen, clarinet
Kjell Roikjer, bassoon
Recorded September 30, 1943
HMV DB 5285, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 24.42 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 14.09 MB)

Vagn Holmboe: Notturno, Op. 19, for wind quintet (1940)
Wind Quintet of 1932
Recorded October 17, 1947
HMV DA 5258 and DA 5259, two 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 34.08 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 20.84 MB)

These appear to be the first recordings of any work by either composer. Of Holmboe, I have spoken at the post referenced above; this delightful four-movement Notturno has remained one of his most popular works. The fame of Jørgen Bentzon (1897-1951) has been eclipsed by that of his younger cousin, Niels Viggo Bentzon. Jørgen, whose 120th birthday incidentally is approaching (Valentine's Day), was a student of Nielsen, whose influence on his work is strong. The piece recorded here is one of a series of six one-movement works he called Racconti (tales), each scored for a different chamber ensemble.

It should be noted that the members of the trio in the Bentzon work are also members of the "Wind Quintet of 1932" - whose flutist was Johan Bentzon, another cousin.

The New Art Wind Quintet

The New Art Wind Quintet (Murray Panitz, Melvin Kaplan,
Aldo Simonelli, Tina di Dario, Merrill Wilson)

Last month, when I posted the First String Quartet by Nicolai Berezowsky, Nick of Grumpy's Classics Cave commented that we can now hear all commercial 78s of his work, given that Symposium Records made available the other candidate, a New Music Quarterly issue of two movements of Berezowsky's 1928 Suite for Woodwinds. That exchange led me to seek out the third and last commercial recording of Berezowsky's music made during his too-short lifetime. This was an early LP containing the same Suite for Woodwinds, this time complete:

Milhaud: Two Sketches for woodwind quintet, Op. 227b
Berezowsky: Suite for Woodwinds, Op. 11
Irving Fine: Partita for Woodwind Quintet (1948)
The New Art Woodwind Quintet
Issued July, 1951
Link (FLAC files, 77.61 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 60.21 MB)

The Milhaud (derived from piano pieces) and Berezowsky works are enjoyable enough, but the real masterpiece here is the Stravinsky-influenced Partita by the even shorter-lived Irving Fine (1914-1962), who died of heart disease at age 47.

Murray Panitz, the flutist on this recording, went on to become the principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, succeeding William Kincaid in 1961 and serving until his death in 1989 at age 63.

Hindemith from the Recording Horn

Happy May Day! Some fifteen months ago, when I uploaded the Los Angeles Wind Quintet's recording of Hindemith's delightful Kleine Kammermusik, I expressed the hope that I might someday be able to hear the work's first recording, an acoustical version by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Quintet, anachronistic as that may seem. (It was one of Polydor's very last acoustical recordings.) Well, my wish has been granted, for a copy has recently come my way, and you, my loyal audience, get to hear it too:

Hindemith: Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 2
The Leipzig Gewandhaus Wind Quintet
Recorded c. 1925
Polydor 66376 and 66377, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 43.10 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 26.09 MB)

The performance is very good, especially considering that the work was written (and published) a mere three years before this recording was made, and its idiom would have been equally new to the Leipzig players - who, Jolyon tells us (in connection with his very welcome upload of their recording of August Klughardt's Quintet), were Carl Bartuzat, flute; Walter Heinze, oboe; Willi Schreinicke, clarinet; Gunther Weigelt, bassoon; and Richard Schaller, horn. Only Bartuzat's year of birth is known for sure, and he was thirteen years older than the composer. This was the first recording of a work by Hindemith in which the composer himself didn't actually perform, and the playing, like Hindemith's own, is spirited and in certain spots a bit rough-and-ready. Enjoy!

Nielsen: Early Chamber Music Recordings

The Royal Danish Orchestra Wind Quintet:
Gilbert Jespersen, Aage Oxenvad, Hans Sørensen,
Knud Lassen, Svend Christian Felumb

The year 1922 saw the composition of two towering masterpieces of the wind quintet genre, utterly dissimilar from each other: Hindemith's Kleine Kammermusik, and Carl Nielsen's Quintet, Op. 43, written for four of the five players pictured above. The exception, Gilbert Jespersen, didn't join the group until 1929; in the meantime, Nielsen had written his Flute Concerto for him. Nielsen actually intended to write a concerto for each wind instrument, but only the ones for flute and clarinet had been written before he died in 1931 - surely one of the most tantalizing projects in music history, along with Debussy's set of six sonatas for diverse instruments, to be cut short by its composer's death. To return to the Quintet, however, this recording of it by the work's dedicatees became the major vehicle for Nielsen's fame outside Denmark, long before his symphonies were known:

Nielsen: Quintet for winds, Op. 43
The Royal Danish Orchestra Wind Quintet
Recorded January 24, 1936
and
Nielsen: Taagen letter (The Fog is Lifting)
(from the incidental music for "Moderen", Op. 41)
Gilbert Jespersen (flute) & Mrs. Valborg Paulsen (harp)
Recorded January 31, 1936
HMV DB 5200 through DB 5203, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 75.51 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 45.33 MB)

This recording was the first entry in HMV's Scandinavian Red Label series; the next was another Nielsen recording, featuring three of the same players, of this amusing piece depicting a group of strolling musicians who, after two fruitless attempts to serenade a lady, give it up as a lost cause:

Nielsen: Serenata in Vano (1914)
Aage Oxenvad (clarinet), Knud Lassen (bassoon), Hans Sørensen (horn),
Louis Jensen (cello), Louis Hegner (bass)
Recorded February 2, 1937
HMV DB 5204, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 22.23 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 13.59 MB)

More Danish Chamber Music

Vagn Holmboe

During the Second World War, the Danish musicologist and critic Jürgen Balzer (1906-1976), acting in an advisory capacity to the Copenhagen branch of the Gramophone Company, established a recorded anthology of Danish music of all historical periods.  Under the aegis of this "Edition Balzer" some 50 works were recorded on 78-rpm records, including many small-scale gems of chamber music that could be accommodated complete on one record, as with the three examples I offer here:

Finn Høffding: Dialogues, Op, 10 (1927)
Waldemar Wolsing, oboe; P. Allin Erichsen, clarinet
Recorded c. January, 1951
HMV DB 5274, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC files, 50.17 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 27.43 MB)

Flemming Weis: Serenade Without Serious Intentions (1938)
Wind Quintet of 1932
Recorded Sept. 30, 1949
HMV DB 5293, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 24.56 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 15.20 MB)

Vagn Holmboe: Serenata for flute, violin, cello and piano, Op. 18 (1940)
The Danish Quartet (Erling Bloch, violin)
Recorded c. Spring 1950
HMV DB 5297, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 19.54 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 13.50 MB)

Of these three composers, Holmboe (1909-1996), pictured above in characteristic pose with his pipe, is by far the best known; his music, including 13 symphonies and 20 string quartets, has been disseminated fairly widely since the advent of CD, but this unpublished three-movement Serenata does not appear to have been recorded since.  Høffding (1899-1997), who was Holmboe's teacher at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, specialized in music for amateur performers, and excerpts from his "Dialogues" have been presented by several students on Youtube videos.  There are five movements, which are presented in a different order on the record than in the published score; accordingly, I present two files containing the complete work in both orderings, and you can be the judge which sequence you prefer.  For me, the real find here is the delightful piece by Weis (1898-1981), a composer about whom I can find out very little, save that he trained as an organist and has two symphonies to his credit.  This one-movement serenade for wind quintet is in several contrasting sections, by turns wistful and dance-like, beginning and ending with a polka.

Hindemith by the Los Angeles Wind Quintet

Good things come in small packages, goes the old cliché, and it's certainly true in this case.  Hindemith's delightful wind quintet, "Kleine Kammermusik" - the second part of an opus that also includes the first of his seven chamber concertos under the collective title of "Kammermusik" - may be small in size but it's big in entertainment value.  It's played here by a quintet of Hollywood studio musicians consisting of Haakon Bergh, flute; Gordon Pope, oboe; D. H. McKenney, clarinet; Don Christlieb, bassoon; and Jack Cave, horn.  The two players whose dates I have been able to trace online (Bergh and Christlieb) were both young men in their twenties when this recording was made, and I imagine the others were similarly young, for they are fully in sympathy with Hindemith's idiom:

Hindemith: Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 2
The Los Angeles Wind Quintet
Recorded c. 1939
Columbia Masterworks set MX-149, two 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 32.88 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 22.40 MB)

Incredibly, this is not the first recording of the piece; an earlier one was made acoustically by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Wind Quintet for Deutsche Grammophon-Polydor.  This, I expect, is ultra rare, and I hope to hear it someday before I die, although I cannot imagine it would be as fine as this Los Angeles performance.

Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky for Band

Cover painting by Russell Connor

As I mentioned earlier, I spent much of the summer enjoying the fruits of the new Mercury Living Presence CD box, and gained thereby an idea or two for future transfers.  Well, here's one of them realized.  The box contained nine discs conducted by Frederick Fennell (1914-2004), who, arguably, did more to raise awareness of the serious literature for wind band than anyone else (much as his colleague at the Eastman School of Music, Howard Hanson, did for American music).  Included among Fennell's recordings in the series of Mercury CD reissues of the 1990s (from which the box set were derived) are fine works for band by the likes of Holst, Vaughan Williams, Grainger, Khatchaturian, Milhaud, Persichetti and Morton Gould, but inexplicably ignored was this issue:

Hindemith: Symphony in B-Flat (1951)
Schoenberg: Theme and Variations, Op. 43a (1943)
Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920, rev. 1947)
Eastman Wind Ensemble conducted by Frederick Fennell
Recorded March 24, 1957
Mercury Golden Imports SRI-75057, one stereo LP record
Link (FLAC files, 160.95 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 54.10 MB)

In the case of the Schoenberg work (which also exists in a version for full orchestra, Op. 43b), this was a first recording.

Beethoven from L'Oiseau Lyre

The French music publisher, Éditions de L'Oiseau Lyre (named after the Australian lyrebird), was founded in 1932 by Louise Hanson Dyer (1884-1964) the Australian-born pianist and patron of the arts.  About 1937 the firm expanded its operations to recording, becoming well-known almost immediately for its excursions into off-the-beaten-path repertoire, especially from the Baroque and Classical eras, a reputation it still enjoys as the early-music subsidiary of Decca, which it became in the 1950's.  On 78s there were over 200 issues, and in my heyday as a 78 collector I had some three dozen of them, made by some of the finest musicians in France at the time, including violinist Henri Merckel, harpsichordist Isabelle Nef, cellist André Navarra, and a wind trio, the Trio d'Anches de Paris, which consisted of oboist Myrtile Morel and the two gentlemen who play on this record - the only L'Oiseau Lyre 78 I still possess:

Beethoven: Duo No. 3 in B-Flat Major, WoO 27, No. 3
Pierre Lefebvre, clarinet; Fernand Oubradous, bassoon
Recorded c. 1938-39
L'Oiseau Lyre OL 78, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC files, 25.48 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 9.55 MB)

Mozart by Koussevitzky

In a recent issue of Classical Recordings Quarterly, in an article entitled "Why Don't the Record Companies..." (the same article that inspired this post), Donald Manildi laments the lack of a systematic approach to CD reissues of recordings by Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951), the great Russian conductor, such as that given to comparable figures like Toscanini and Stokowski.  He notes that many CD reissues of Koussevitzky's considerable legacy have been allowed to go out of print, and that his Mozart recordings, in particular, have largely been untapped.  Well, in an attempt to rectify that situation, I present three major Mozart works, all recorded at Tanglewood in the late 1940s:

Mozart: Serenade No. 10 in B-Flat, K. 361, for 13 wind instruments
Members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky
Recorded August 15, 1947
RCA Victor WDM-1303, four 45-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 74.73 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 38.04 MB)

Mozart: Symphony No. 33 in B-Flat Major, K. 319 and
Mozart: Overture to "Idomeneo, Re di Creta", K. 366
Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky
Recorded August 15, 1946, and August 17, 1949
RCA Victor WDM-1369, three 45-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 69.14 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 36.58 MB)

Mozart: Symphony No. 36 in C Major, K. 425 ("Linz")
Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky
Recorded August 16, 1949
RCA Victor WDM-1354, three 45-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 64.86 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 31.61 MB)

Some may find Koussevitzky's approach to Mozart a little hard-driven, particularly in the symphonies; he is much closer to Toscanini than to Beecham or Walter.  Perhaps this is why his Mozart recordings have been ignored - they are unfashionable.  No such reservations about the Serenade!  This is a wonderfully relaxed and unbuttoned reading from the Boston wind players, and the only regret here is that two of the movements (as well as one of the Menuetto's trios) were omitted.

Mitch and the 20th Century Harpsichord

Back to mining early LPs we go, with two quite dissimilar works, the common thread being that they are both 20th century works featuring the harpsichord, and that Mitch Miller plays oboe on both.  Even the harpsichordists are different! This Mercury LP is a reissue of two 78-rpm sets of c. 1947, and by the time it appeared, in late 1949 or early 1950, Mitch Miller was the head of A & R for Mercury's pop division.  He would move to a similar position with Columbia in 1950.

First up is what I and many others consider the greatest 20th century work for harpsichord, Manuel de Falla's Concerto.  This is only its second recording, after the famous one that Falla himself made for French Columbia in 1930.  Ralph Kirkpatrick is the soloist, and he is accompanied by an ensemble consisting of Alexander Schneider, violin; Bernard Greenhouse, cello; Samuel Baron, flute; the aforementioned Mitchell Miller, oboe; and Harold Freeman, clarinet.  This was originally recorded by Keynote, a company that was subsumed by Mercury in 1947:

Falla: Harpsichord Concerto (1926)
Ralph Kirkpatrick, harpsichord, and ensemble
Recorded c. 1947
Side A of Mercury MG 10012, one 12-inch LP record
Link (FLAC files, 46.37 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 23.44 MB)

Also on this LP is the delightful Partita by Vittorio Rieti (1898-1994), a composer who should be far better known.  I like to think of him as a sort of Italian Poulenc; his music has the same sort of witty charm as the French master.  He wrote quite a lot for harpsichord: three works for Sylvia Marlowe, of which this Partita was the first.  (The others were a "Sonata all'Antica" of 1946, and a Harpsichord Concerto of 1955, both of which Miss Marlowe recorded for Decca.)  This is Sylvia Marlowe's first recording of it (she did another for Capitol in the 1950s, and a stereo version for Decca), made with the players who gave the work its première in the spring of 1946:

Rieti: Partita for Harpsichord, Flute, Oboe and Strings (1945)
Sylvia Marlowe, harpsichord; Julius Baker, flute;
Mitchell Miller, oboe; The Kroll Quartet
Recorded c. 1946
Side B of Mercury MG 10012, one 12-inch LP record
Link (FLAC files, 52.44 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 27.62 MB)

The National Gramophonic Society, Part 2

Paul Juon

Here's the second of two posts to deal with the re-uploads of my National Gramophonic Society sets, featuring two electrical recordings of chamber works in which woodwinds are prominent.  By far the lesser known of these works is the Chamber Symphony by Paul Juon (1872-1940).  This delightful work, which despite its title is really an octet for piano, woodwinds and strings, was published as such in 1905 with a dedication to Julius Block, the agent of Edison who recorded so many Russian musicians on cylinders, including Juon himself.  When I first uploaded this recording in 2007, I had done the side join in the first movement incorrectly, owing to the lack of either a score or a modern continuous-play recording.  Since then I have had access to a score (which can be had here at the Internationam Music Score Library Project), and this error has now been corrected.  Unfortunately the score also revealed that cuts had been made in the last two movements.  Despite this, it's a fine performance, featuring Rae Robertson (one-half of Bartlett and Robertson) on piano, and Leon Goossens on oboe:

Paul Juon: Chamber Symphony in B-Flat, Op. 27
New Chamber Orchestra conducted by Charles Kreshover
Recorded December 31, 1929, by Columbia
National Gramophonic Society 144 through 146, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 61.54 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 28.53 MB)

Leon Goossens also performs on the other work presented here, that of the Mozart Quintet for Piano and Winds, which features Kathleen Long as the pianist.  The ensemble is rounded out by Frederick Thurston (clarinet), John Alexandra (bassoon), and Aubrey Brain (horn):

Mozart: Quintet in E-Flat, K. 452, for piano and winds
Kathleen Long (piano) and ensemble
Recorded March 19, 1928, by Columbia
National Gramophonic Society 121 through 123, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 45.69 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 20.83 MB)