Mozart: Divertimento, K. 563 (Pasquier Trio)

The Pasquier Trio

The string trio repertoire is not large, but it is rich - and made richer by the efforts of the Pasquier Trio, three brothers (Jean, violin; Pierre, viola; Étienne, cello) for whom such composers as Pierné, Roussel, Moeran and Françaix wrote string trios.  The cornerstone of this repertoire is surely Mozart's wonderful Divertimento in E-Flat, K. 563.  Who but Mozart, whose birthday we will be celebrating on January 27, could compose the greatest work ever written for the combination of violin, viola and cello, pouring the most profound of his ideas into it, and then modestly call the result a "divertimento"?  Here is the work's first recording, and the first of three the Pasquier brothers would make:

Mozart: Divertimento in E-Flat, K. 563, for string trio
The Pasquier Trio
Recorded June 26-27, 1935
Columbia Masterworks set AM-351, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 107.13 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 66.49 MB)

This transfer is taken from a very nice early pressing of the American Columbia set, which has sustained a little wear (those early automatic changers did no favors for the spindle holes, I'm afraid), so I was surprised and pleased by how well the result sounds.

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.

Nielsen: Symphony No. 6 (Thomas Jensen)

Cover design by George Maas

The symphonies of Carl Nielsen have, over the past fifty years or so, entered the international concert repertory, thanks in part to the advocacy of conductors with international reputations like Barbirolli, Bernstein and Herbert Blomstedt.  Sixty years ago, however, this wasn't the case; it seems that only Danish conductors and Danish orchestras were recording them.  But what recordings!  There is an intensity and commitment about them that later recordings, for all their relative polish, can't quite match.  The first conductor to record a Nielsen symphony was Thomas Jensen (1898-1963) - the Second, in 1944, for HMV.  Jensen had studied music theory with the composer, and played the cello under his baton.  Here he is leading that Cinderella of the Nielsen symphonic canon, the wonderfully wacky, anything-but-simple Sinfonia Semplice, in its first recording:

Nielsen: Symphony No. 6 ("Sinfonia Semplice")
Danish State Radio Orchestra conducted by Thomas Jensen
Recorded June 17-19, 1952
Mercury MG-10137, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 80.34 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 55.77 MB)

Franck: Quartet in D (Virtuoso String Quartet)

In the next (February 2014) newsletter of the 78rpm Community, I have a discography of the Virtuoso String Quartet slated to appear.  In tandem with this, I present their most ambitious recording, the first ever made of Franck's wonderful String Quartet.  This is already available at CHARM, as I have said before, but interest was expressed in my transfer, and there's one thing you will get from my download that CHARM doesn't have - the original liner notes!  These contain a reasonably good analysis of the piece, written by someone whose initials were "P.M.S.L.", and they also contain, at the end, a pat on the back for HMV's recording department - something Victor often did in their early liner notes, but it's surprising to see this from their staid English counterpart.  This was, in fact, one of HMV's last acoustical recordings, made over five sessions in 1925 just before they signed on to use Western Electric's system of electrical recording in May, and it remained in their catalogue longer than most of their acoustically recorded sets - until 1934, when it was replaced by the Quatour Pro Arte's version of the same work:

Franck: String Quartet in D Major
The Virtuoso String Quartet (Hayward-Virgo-Jeremy-Sharpe)
Recorded January 14 to April 20, 1925
HMV D 1006 through D 1011, six 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 149.02 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 74.09 MB)

This is, for me, as fine a recording of the Franck quartet as any since, although it must be admitted that there aren't that many to choose from, at least from the pre-digital era.  Indeed, during the 1970s, the work was completely absent from the Schwann Long Playing Record Catalog!  I remember how eagerly I snapped up the Fitzwilliam Quartet's L'Oiseau Lyre recording (their first project after their famed Shostakovich cycle) when it was released in the USA in 1980, for it gave me a chance to finally hear the piece.

Franz Reizenstein: Prologue, Variations and Finale

Franz Reizenstein

Franz who? - I hear you say.  And I can't say I would blame you.  My only prior awareness of the Nuremberg-born Franz Reizenstein (1911-1968) was of his participation in the 1956 Hoffnung Music Festival, to which he contributed a highly amusing Concerto Popolare ("A Piano Concerto to End All Piano Concertos").  But the Jewish Reizenstein, who fled Germany for England in 1934, had a much more serious side.  He had studied with Paul Hindemith while still in Germany, and continued studies with Vaughan Williams after his emigration.  (A very useful online biography of the composer can be found here.)  For the brilliant violinist Max Rostal (1905-1991), a fellow emigré, he wrote this set of Hindemith-like variations in 1938:

Reizenstein: Prologue, Variations and Finale, Op. 12
and
Two Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 7 (Lullaby, Marcia Barbara)
Max Rostal, violin; Franz Reizenstein, piano
Recorded March 12 and July 30, 1945
London set LA-155, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 72.80 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 52.24 MB)

I hope I did the side joins in this set correctly; there has never been another recording of the piece, and I had no score to guide me, for it is long out-of-print.  I even tried contacting the erstwhile publishers, Boosey and Hawkes, who were unable to find a copy in their archives, but did offer to send a score of the orchestrated version! (I declined.)

For those wishing to hear Max Rostal in more mainstream repertoire, the CHARM database has his recordings of two Beethoven sonatas with Franz Osborn - Op. 12, No. 2, and Op. 96.

My best wishes to everyone for a happy and prosperous 2014!

Bizet: Jeux d'Enfants (Antal Dorati)

Antal Dorati

As I mentioned at about this time last year, when I put up this post, Christmas is for children, and so children and their games are the focus of this post.  Bizet's delightful set of twelve pieces for piano duet illustrating various kids' antics dates from 1871, and he later orchestrated five of the pieces to form his "Petite Suite."  The latter was recorded several times during the 78 era, but the complete set of pieces in its original duet form had to wait until Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin released a ten-inch LP of them in 1950.  In the meantime, a young Antal Dorati made this recording of a Ballet Russes arrangement, adding to Bizet's "Petite Suite" five additional orchestrations by Pierre Kolpikoff of pieces previously unrecorded:

Bizet: Jeux d'Enfants - Suite, Op. 22
London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Antal Dorati
Recorded September 17 and 27, 1937
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-510, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 41.06 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 29.84 MB)

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Borodin and Tchaikovsky by Mitropoulos

Cover design by Karl Kezer

Dimitri Mitropoulos, like his Minneapolis predecessor Eugene Ormandy, never disappoints in performances of Russian music.  (My first exposure to Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, almost 40 years ago, was through a blazing Mitropoulos reading on a Columbia 78 set - and oh, how I wish I still had it!)  Here is an LP coupling two Russian masterpieces.  The Borodin Second Symphony was a specialty of Mitropoulos, but the CD reissue companies invariably have tapped his 1941 Minneapolis performance for release, never this New York version which, I believe, deserves attention as well.  The Tchaikovsky First Suite is a rarity as well, and this is only the second recording of it (after Walter Goehr's for Concert Hall, which can be heard here).  Unfortunately the third movement (Intermezzo) is omitted, presumably in the interest of getting the Suite on one side.  What remains is delightful, particularly its final galumphing Gavotte which surely influenced Prokofiev when he came to write his own Gavotte for his "Classical Symphony."

Borodin: Symphony No. 2 in B Minor

Recorded November 2, 1953

and

Tchaikovsky: Suite No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 43

Recorded October 18 and November 17, 1954

Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York
conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos

Columbia Masterworks ML-4966, one LP record

Link (FLAC files, 152.15 MB)

Link (MP3 files, 94.15 MB)

Beethoven: Quartet No. 6 (Coolidge Quartet)

Happy Beethoven's Birthday! Here is my latest Coolidge Quartet find, another in their aborted series to record all the Beethoven string quartets (which stopped short halfway through, with No. 8).  This is the last of the "early" quartets (Op. 18), and the Coolidge Beethoven set which had the shortest catalogue life (since it was the last issued of their Op. 18 sets, all of which were deleted during the Second World War, unlike their two successors):

Beethoven: Quartet No. 6 in B-Flat, Op. 18, No. 6
The Coolidge Quartet (Kroll-Berezowsky-Moldavan-Gottlieb)
Recorded December 19, 1939
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-745, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 59.46 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 42.73 MB)

This recording would appear to have been made at the same time as that of the Beethoven quartet which preceded it, if the proximity of its matrix numbers is any indication.  Said matrix numbers can be found here at the British Library website (as can the recording itself...but not for us poor Americans!).

Beethoven via Saint-Saëns, Bartlett and Robertson

Camille Saint-Saëns, c. 1875

Beethoven's birthday is upon us again (Dec. 16), and, to celebrate, I present the finest set of variations known to me on one of his themes by someone other than Beethoven himself.  This is Saint-Saëns' 1874 set of variations for two pianos, based on the Trio of the Menuetto from the Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-Flat, Op. 31, No. 3 - and notice how Saint-Saëns works in, at the very beginning of this piece, a sly reference to another great sonata from the same opus, the "Tempest" Sonata, with his arpeggios running up the keyboard in different keys!  The performance here is another gem by Bartlett and Robertson, from their all-too-meager series of recordings for HMV from the early 30s:

Saint-Saëns: Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, Op. 35
Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, duo-pianists
Recorded July 22, 1932
HMV C 2483 and C 2484, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 42.31 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 25.38 MB)

I am aware of only three recordings of these Variations made during the 78-rpm era; this is the second.  The first was by Georges Bertram and Karol Szreter for French Odeon in 1927, and the last was a Victor set by Pierre Luboshutz and Genia Nemenoff issued in 1940.