Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 (Ormandy)

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss

The Ormandy series continues with what Columbia proudly hailed in its liner notes for this set as "the first recording of a Tchaikovsky symphony that Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra have made for Columbia Masterworks" - the Fourth.  (Of course, they had already recorded the Fifth and Sixth - but that was for Victor.)  This is the first of four recordings the Fabulous Philadelphians were to make of Tchaikovsky's "Fate" symphony (the others were in 1953, 1963 and 1973):

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36
Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Recorded December 3-4, 1947
Columbia Masterworks set MM-736, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 112.24 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 53.86 MB)

Maggie Teyte in 18th-Century Arias

Cover design by Henry Stahlhut

The great British-born soprano Maggie Teyte, née Margaret Tate (1888-1976) made her reputation as an interpreter of French art songs, especially those of Debussy, who actually coached her for the role of Mélisande in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande when she replaced its originator, Mary Garden.  As the vast majority of her discography is of music written after 1850, it is something of a surprise to hear her in music that is mostly from a century earlier, as in this rather rare album:

French Operatic Arias

1. Pergolesi: La Servante Maîtresse - Air de Zerbina

2. Monsigny: Rose et Colas - Le Sagesse est un trésor

3. Grétry: Zémire et Azor - Rose chérie

4. Dourlen: Les Oies de Frère Philippe - Je sais attacher des rubans

5. Monsigny: Le Déserteur - Adieu. chère Louise

6. Grétry: Le Tableau Parlant - Vous étiez, ce que vous n'êtes plus

Maggie Teyte, soprano, with orchestra conducted by Jean Paul Morel

Recorded September 21 and 23, 1946

RCA Victor set MO-1169, three ten-inch 78-rpm records

Link (FLAC files, 51.97 MB)

Link (MP3 files, 27.1 MB)

Actually, of course, Pergolesi wasn't French, but as the liner notes to this set make clear, his opera La Serva Padrona (which Teyte here sings an aria from, in French) was a big influence on French opera, and, by extension, on Mozart.

As I was working on this transfer, I found myself thinking of one of my earliest record-collecting influences, William P. (Bill) Brooks, who was a big fan of Maggie Teyte.  Mr. Brooks was a kindly old gentleman in his 70s when I first knew him (I was 11) with a little white mustache that reminded me of Arthur Fiedler; he himself had been collecting records since his teen years, and that was when Caruso was an active recording artist!  His house in the Virginia-Highlands neighborhood of Atlanta was crammed with records of all speeds and sizes, and he would invite me over and sell me 78s cheaply to encourage my own budding hobby.  Through records I got from him I discovered the genius of Koussevitzky, Albert Coates, Vaclav Talich, Schnabel, Gieseking, the Flonzaley Quartet and countless others; he even introduced me to the delights of Florence Foster Jenkins!

His musical tastes were idiosyncratic, to say the least.  He disliked Bach, my favorite composer, and I would rib him about this mercilessly, which he took with his usual good nature. On the other hand, he liked Handel, and preferred Haydn to Mozart.  His favorite composer was Berlioz, and he admired Mahler long before Mahler was fashionable; he had long owned the Bruno Walter 78 sets of "Das Lied von der Erde" and the Ninth Symphony.

Not one to sit around the house after his retirement, Mr. Brooks worked until the end of his life, manning the exit desk four hours per day at the library at Emory University, where I often would go and chat with him.  Mr. Brooks passed away in 1986, aged 86, when I was 23, and I feel privileged to have known him.  His birthday, I discovered through a Google search, was August 18, so I am putting this Maggie Teyte set up today in his honor.  Happy birthday, Bill Brooks, wherever you may be.

Bill Brooks at his library post, c. 1978
(talking to my little brother, Gregory)

Walton by the Hollywood String Quartet

The Hollywood String Quartet

The legendary Hollywood String Quartet (Felix Slatkin and Paul Shure, violins; Paul Robyn, viola; Eleanor Aller Slatkin, cello) has been well-served on CD, with most of their Capitol Records output from 1949-1958 having appeared on the Testament label.  Their performance of the Walton string quartet, the work's first-issued recording (a 1948 version by the Philharmonia Quartet for English Columbia was apparently made, but never issued) also appears on the Testament lists, but there's a slight difference between that version and the one I present here.  The original recording omitted the repeat in the Scherzo (second movement), for the players felt that the repeat detracted from the excitement of the piece.  The composer didn't agree, so he asked that it be re-recorded - and it was, a year later; this is what you hear on the Testament release.  The original recording sans repeat is here:

Walton: String Quartet in A Minor (1947)
The Hollywood String Quartet
Recorded November 2 and 3, 1949
Capitol set KCM-8058, three 45-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 70.72 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 35.78 MB)

On a personal note, this set represents my first-ever purchase on eBay some 15 years ago.  It was part of a lot of some 50 Capitol classical 45 sets, all in mint condition; if I remember correctly, they had previously belonged to a Capitol employee at their factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the eBay seller, whose main focus is pottery and jewelry and who appears to still be going strong as a "power seller" in Scranton, had somehow fallen heir to them.  There was some good stuff in that lot but this Walton quartet, for me, is the cream of the crop. Many of the sets had a brochure advertising Capitol's then-new classical series, and I've added scans of this to the download.  For several months they made a great ballyhoo about offering classical records at all three speeds, but when it became obvious that LP was going to win they quietly withdrew the 45 and 78 sets.  I don't think the re-recording of the Walton quartet's Scherzo made it to either short-play format.

Brahms: Hungarian Dances (Harry Horlick)

Harry Horlick

According to Wikipedia, the Tiflis-born violinist Harry Horlick (1896-1970) learned Gypsy music while traveling with Gypsy bands in Istanbul, before coming to America and achieving success as a radio conductor with a program featuring light orchestral music, "The A&P Gypsies" (sponsored by the grocery store chain), which ran from 1924 to 1936.  Thus, one imagines, his interpretations of Brahms' Hungarian Dances have a certain ring of authenticity to them:

Brahms: Hungarian Dances Nos. 1-7 and 17
Decca Concert Orchestra conducted by Harry Horlick
Recorded September 5, 1939
Decca Album 89, four 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 74.97 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 30.69 MB)

After his radio stint was over, Horlick signed with Decca and from 1938 to 1942 made some two dozen albums with eponymous light orchestras, both for the cheaper blue label (35 cents) and, as here, for the slightly more prestigious red label series.  This review of the Brahms set makes it seem as though Decca was intent on encroaching upon the classical territory dominated at the time by Victor and Columbia; as it turned out, of course, Decca did not develop a serious classical presence in the USA until the days of LP, other than through imports of English Decca and Parlophone matrices which had already been ongoing at the time this set was released!  In Decca's defence, however, neither Victor nor Columbia had a whole album devoted to the Brahms Hungarian Dances at the time.

Horlick later (in the late 40s and early 50s) made a few albums for MGM, and in the late 50s made a couple of LPs for Pickwick's Design label.

Szell and the Budapest Quartet

George Szell

George Szell (1897-1970) made his international reputation as the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra via his recordings for American Columbia (and through their subsidiary, Epic), but, at the time the recording I present here was made, that was all in the future.  His career with American Columbia actually began as a pianist, with members of the Budapest Quartet, in the two piano quartets by Mozart, of which this was the first to be released:

Mozart: Quartet No. 2 in E-Flat Major, K. 493

George Szell, piano, with members of the Budapest String Quartet

Recorded July 20, 1946, in Hollywood

Columbia Masterworks set MM-493, three 78-rpm records

Link (FLAC files, 56.95 MB)

Link (MP3 files, 29.12 MB)

By the time this release appeared, early in 1947, Szell had already begun making recordings with the Cleveland Orchestra, two of which were actually issued before the other Mozart piano quartet was.

Sorry to be away for so long, but most of my free time this month has been spent glorying in the new Mercury Living Presence CD box which I decided to spring for earlier this summer.  It's also given me a couple of ideas for future transfers...

Hanson and Piston by Hanson

Just in time for the Fourth of July, a couple of Pulitzer Prize-winning symphonies which are utterly different from each other, and therefore complement each other nicely.  Piston's, which received the 1948 Pulitzer, is yet another of those "Great American Third Symphonies" (a phenomenon started by Roy Harris, and continued by William Schuman and Aaron Copland) and seems to me one of the finest of his eight, with a spiky scherzo that makes one regret he didn't write more symphonies with scherzos (only Nos. 4 and 6 also have them), which fits into an overall slow-fast-slow-fast four movement pattern of the type that had been recently been popularized by Shostakovich and Prokofiev in their Fifth Symphonies.  Hanson's Fourth, the 1944 Pulitzer winner, has the exact opposite pattern, and is cast as an orchestral Requiem "In Memory of my beloved Father." (Had he taken the idea from Britten's "Sinfonia da Requiem"?)  The Sibelian echoes are very strong here, but even so this strikes me as the finest of Hanson's symphonies among those that I've heard (which is all of them except Nos. 5 and 7), and of course the performance is authoritative.

Piston: Symphony No. 3 (1947)
Hanson: Symphony No. 4 (1943)
Eastman Rochester Orchestra conducted by Howard Hanson
Recorded May 11, 1954 (Piston) and May 11-13, 1953 (Hanson)
Mercury Golden Imports SRI-75107, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 141.32 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 64.8 MB)

This LP is a reissue from the late 1970s, one of about 150 reissues pressed by Philips in the Netherlands of Mercury Living Presence material.  It was, unfortunately, "enhanced" with fake stereo, even though this had become passé by the 70s, and naturally I have "monoed" it back again in this transfer.  As far as I am aware, neither of these recordings has ever appeared on CD; they were not part of the slew of Mercury Living Presence CD reissues produced in the 1990s, although they certainly should have been.

Columbia's Educational Sets

A couple of weeks ago, when I discovered Sam Hopper's marvelous Columbia Masterworks 78rpm Album Discography, I was perusing his page devoted to Columbia's "E" series of sets - a little-known series that, as far as I can tell, was limited to eleven sets, all released in 1941-42 - when I remembered that I actually had one of them!  And while this set, devoted to readings of speeches and prose writings by American political figures, will probably only be of documentary interest to most people, it is at least appropriate to the upcoming Independence Day holiday, and contains a reverently subdued reading of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to recommend it.  (And I didn't remember until after doing the transfer that the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg is this week!  Serendipity?)  Here are the details:

Masterpieces of Literature, Vol. 2 ("Our American Heritage")
1a. The Mayflower Compact
1b. The Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges - excerpt
2. The Declaration of Independence
3. Washington's Farewell Address - selections
4. Jefferson's First Inaugural Address - excerpt
5. Daniel Webster: Sacred Obligations - excerpt
6. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
7. Edward Everett: The History of Liberty - excerpt
8. Lyman Abbott: Patriotism
9. Elihu Root: A Pan-American Policy - excerpt
10. Theodore Roosevelt: Our Responsibilities as a Nation - excerpt
11. Woodrow Wilson: Americans of Foreign Birth - excerpt
12. Mary Antin: The Promised Land - excerpt
Wesley Addy, reader
Recorded May 5-8, 1941
Columbia set E-6, six 10" 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 107.58 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 61.40 MB)

A teacher's manual is included with the set, which has been reproduced as a PDF file.

As I said, there were eleven of these Educational sets, of which two of the others were also under the "Masterpieces of Literature" rubric.  Both of these contained six records of poetry, one volume read by Norman Corwin, the other by Basil Rathbone.  "Our American Heritage" is further described as "Prose Album I" which suggests that further prose volumes were intended, but they never materialized.  The other eight sets were collectively entitled "Student Music Library Series" and contained four sets of Piano Literature, played by Sergius Kagen, two of Violin Literature, played by Alexander Cores, and two of Cello Literature, played by a young Bernard Greenhouse.  Each of these volumes contained three records.  I imagine they are quite rare.

Wesley Addy

I had never heard of Wesley Addy (1913-1996), the reader on these records, before acquiring this set, but he seems to have been a highly regarded character actor for dramatic roles in film and TV.  But at the time this recording was made, all that was years in the future and his reputation was based solely on stage work, particularly Shakespeare.  He appeared opposite Orson Welles and Maurice Evans, both of whom had made Shakespeare recordings for Columbia.

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)

Morton Gould and Menotti

It's been a while since I've offered anything by Morton Gould, whose centennial year we are in (he was born Dec, 10, 1913), so I make partial amends with a work that he himself, according to his biographer Peter Goodman, considered one of his most important pieces.  This is the Dance Variations, a concerto for two pianos written in 1953 on commission by Arthur Whittemore and Jack Lowe, who premiered the score with Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic in October of that year, and, one month later, also made this first recording.  (As far as I am aware, the work has received only one other recording, by Joshua Pierce and Dorothy Jonas, about twenty years ago for Koch International Classics, no longer available on CD but only as an MP3 download.)  I concur with the composer's assessment and that of Goodman, who calls it "a score of depth and complexity" - it is a major addition to the all-too-meager repertoire of two-piano concertos and its neglect is unjustified.

Gould: Dance Variations, for two pianos and orchestra (1953)
Arthur Whittemore and Jack Lowe, pianists
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski
Recorded November 22, 1953
Side 1 of RCA Victor LM-1858, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 57.72 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 27.93 MB)

With the other work on this LP, we are in slightly more familiar territory, although Gian-Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) is best remembered as an operatic composer.  His ballet Sebastian was written in 1944, before the operas that brought him his greatest fame, The Medium, The Consul, and Amahl and the Night Visitors.  This recording of the ballet's Suite by Stokowski was actually also made in stereo, but not issued as such until 24 years later, with a different coupling.  Here is the original mono version:

Menotti: Sebastian - Ballet Suite
NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski
Recorded September 28, 1954
Side 2 of RCA Victor LM-1858, one LP record
Link (FLAC file, 60.44 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 30.87 MB)

LM-1858 was issued with two different covers; the one I have (pictured above) is the second one, from 1958.  I've seen the original cover at a local college library but remember none of the details; in particular, I can't remember whether the Gould or the Menotti was credited first.