It’s been almost two weeks since I updated my website, and I’ve not posted about it here. So it’s about time for the details.

Gordon Jacob: William Byrd Suite – Coldstream Guards Band, Mackenzie-Rogan, 1925

Jacob’s arrangement of a number of keyboard pieces by William Byrd was made for Military Band in 1923 and orchestra in 1924. It is likely that this late acoustic recording was the earliest recording of these three movements. At 78rpm the record playes at A=452Hz, which was the standard pitch for British military bands at the time, slightly more than a semitone sharper than modern pitch. It wasn’t until a change to the King’s Regulations in 1927 that A=439Hz was adopted.

Brahms: Hungarian Dances Nos.1&2; Elgar: Pomp and Circumstance No.1 – Stanley Chapple and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra

Chapple (1900-1987) was music director for the Aeolian Company, and conducted frequently for them, though his recordings are hard to find now. These  Broadcast Twleve sides are badly affected by the persistent whistle which seems so common a feature of records on this label. I have done my best to alleviate this problem, so when you notice the remnants of it, bear in mind that it was originally much worse than it sounds now. As the whistle oscillates in pitch, whilst also gradually decreasing pitch and increasing amplitude until the end of the record, correcting it proved to be a major task!

Coates: London Suite, London Again; Elgar: Pomp and Circumstance No.1; Gershwin: An American in Paris – Franz André and L’ Orchestre Symphonique de la Radiodiffusion Nationale Belge, Franz André

Franz André needs no introduction for those who visit my site regularly. It’s interesting to hear him in English and American music, and the Elgar provides a nice comparison with Chapple’s version.

Richard Strauss: Tod und Verklärung – Frieder Weissmann with Philharmonic Orchestra

My first attempt at remastering this was about four years ago, before my website and blog were even born. This is a completely new transfer, in much improved sound.

Thalberg: Home Sweet Home; Ascher: Alice, Where Art Thou? – Arthur Meale, piano

Meale was the regular organist of the Queen’s Hall. He made many organ recordings in a light and popular classical vein. This record gives us the rare opportunity to hear him as a pianist, in two nineteenth century virtuoso salon pieces. For UK comedy fans, Ascher’s melody is the one that was used as the title music for the Ronnie Barker and David Jason sitcom “Open All Hours”.

The record is in very poor condition, with a serious fracture, and a noisy surface with significant distortion – it’s still a fun listen, though.

Mussorgsky: The Song of the Flea; Traditional: Drinking (In cellar cool) – Capiton Zaporojetz, bass with Orchestra

I was prompted to transfer this after seeing Zaporojetz’s name mentioned in a couple of places recently. Firstly, in the booklet notes for “Firebirds of Paris”, a Ward Marston CD of French recordings of Russian repertoire from around 1930. Zaporojetz is noted as singing Prince Yuri in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kitezh in 1926 in Paris, then in 1929 in the premiere of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. He also sang the same role in Kitezh in 1935.

A few weeks after reading this, I was reading the June 2010 issue of “The Record Collector”, and the article on Marguerite D’Alvarez mentioned a concert on 2 October 1927 in London, where Thomas Beecham conducted “An Afternoon of Grand Opera” at the Royal Albert Hall. with Austral, Burke, D’Alvarez and Zaporojetz.

Early recordings by Julie Andrews

Gounod’s Je veux vivre and Easthope Martin’s Come to the fair have appeared on my site before, but again these are new transfers. In the Martin, teenager Julie Andrews is heard in duet with her step-father Ted. Barbara, her mother, plays the piano.
The other record is of the Ah! vous dirai-je mama variations and Benedict’s The Wren.

Damian’s 78s

I hope to have more new transfers soon, including more from Franz André, and possibly some Hermann Scherchen and Henry Wood.

On the recordings side of things, there will soon be updates to my site. These will include Franz André conducting Elgar, Coates and Gershwin, and a much improved transfer of Frieder Weissmann’s recording of Rihard Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung. There will also be Elgar and Brahms from Stanley Chapple, 19th century show pieces played on the piano by organist Arthur Meale. There will also be some of the 78s recorded by the teenaged Julie Andrews. There are one or two other items that I’m considering, but that will have to wait.

I’ve still been trying to find time to keep up with CDs, including the recent Marston issue of French singers in Russian repertoire, which was a great pleasure, in impeccable transfers. I’m also attacking the Mendelssohn box from Brilliant Classics, which has given me a much wider view already of his younger works. “Legends of the Piano”  – a recent Ward Marston contribution to Naxos Historical – proved an interesting compendium of acoustically recorded pianists including Saint-Saens and Grieg.

As ever, there’s so much to listen to, and so little time

And in the week since then, I’ve transferred a Columbia 78 of vocal gems from Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl. This late 1920s recording features Miriam Licette, Francis Russell, Dennis Noble and Harry Brindle, with the chorus and orchestra conducted by Charles Prentice.

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On Saturday May 8th, we went to see “The Gift of Music: An evening with Julie Andrews” at the O2 arena here in London. It was a wonderful event, with the first half devoted to the music of Rodgers & Hammerstein, and the second half to a musical version of “Simeon’s Gift”, one of the children’s books which Dame Julie has written with her daughter. As Dame Julie acknowledges, at the age of 74, and after a disastrously botched throat operation more than a decade ago, she can no longer sing as she used to. So most of the evening’s songs were performed by a quintet of Broadway stars, including the wonderful Jubilant Sykes (who sang on Marin Alsop’s 2009 Naxos recording of Bernstein’s Mass). Dame Julie introduced parts of songs, sang parts of various songs, and got two songs entirely to herself (though with vocal lines adapted for her reduced range): My Funny Valentine and Cock-eyed optimist. Particularly nice was the sequence from “Cinderella” – as expected she sang the fairy godmother’s part in “Impossible – It’s possible!” There has been much written about disappointed fans wanting their money back, and leaving at the interval. It disappoints me to think that some people went to this performance expecting, presumably, to hear the voice that was immortalised on film more than forty years ago. If you went with your expectations tempered appropriately, then there was such a lot to enjoy. The quality of Dame Julie’s singing, despite the years and the operation is testament to the hard work she has put in to recover sufficient voice to sing as well as she did. There are numerous clips on youtube (just search for “Julie Andrews O2”.)

This hasn’t really been about 78s though. So to get back to the theme, in the run up to this concert I took the opportunity to remaster the various recordings in my collection by Lilian Stiles-Allen, one of the original sixteen singers in Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, and Dame Julie’s vocal teacher. These will be on my site within the next few days. I also have two of the 78s Julie Andrews recorded as a child, and these will be uploaded soon as well.

Once I’ve sorted out a few issues with uploading to Mediafire, my site update will be completed. This will also include Hamilton Harty’s recordings of Schubert’s Rosamunde music (including both overtures), Henry Wood’s electrical recordings of the Unfinished Symphony, from 1926 and 1933, the English winners of Columbia’s Schubert competition (Merrick’s Two Movements in Symphonic Form, a completion of the Unfinished Symphony, and John St. Anthony Johnson’s Pax Vobiscum) conducted by Stanford Robinson. There’s also a late acoustic orchestral selection from Lilac Time, with Schubert’s music arranged by Clutsam, with George W Byng conducting the Mayfair Orchestra.

www.damians78s.co.uk

It’s an accomplished piece for someone who has never written an opera before, but who loves 19th century opera in particular. Though Wainwright is a songwriter and performer of rare distinction, the demands of opera are quite different. The through-composed work did have some distinct “numbers” within it, and had some melodic and harmonic hooks which were very characteristic of Wainwright. A lot was reminiscent of Puccini, Massenet and Ravel – the French composers to be expected in the tale of an ageing diva in Paris considering a triumphant return after several years away from the stage. The prelude at the beginning of Act 1 was enchanting, but the first section of the act proper was perhaps drawn out and undramatic. Things definitely picked up when a young journalist and would-be tenor arrived to interview the diva. There was real dramatic spark between the two characters and the singers portraying them, the wonderful Janis Kelly and Colin Ainsworth. Act two was much better, working up to a touching conclusion. Rebecca Bottone as the maid, and Jonathan Summers as the diva’s butler deserve credit as well, especially Bottone’s sparkling coloratura.

I acquired another copy of the Columbia recording of the Jupiter Symphony conducted by Dan Godfrey, and have therefore produced a new restoration of this wonderful performance. There is a substantial overlap between sides 2 and 3 of the first movement, so I’ve included both an edited version of the movement as per the score, and a version including everything that Godfrey recorded.

The Lener Quartet’s Columbia recording of Eine kleine Nachtmusik is described on the record labels simply as Quartet in G major No.19 (Serenata). It’s fascinating to hear a chamber version of this work from the 1920s.

From a little later, still on Columbia, Hamilton Harty conducted four of the six movements of the Divertimento in D K334, in a performance full of his characteristic dynamism.

There is a group of three sides of excerpts from Don Giovanni, sung in English. From a 1924 HMV record, the Welsh tenor Tudor Davies sings Don Ottavio’s arias “On her contentment” (Dalla sua pace) and “To her I love” (Il mio tesoro). They are enjoyable performances, and Davies characteristically shows off his ringing high notes by ending the arias up an octave. He does however have an occasional catch to his voice. As is typical of these acoustic recordings, the music is substantially rescored, often with additional sustained notes in the woodwind. Il mio tesoro is closer to the original scoring. The other recording is from a single-sided Zonophone, recorded in 1909, of “Give me thy hand, Oh fairest” (La ci darem la mano), sung by Peter Dawson and Eleanor Jones-Hudson (in her frequent guise of “Alvena Yarrow”. The scoring is close to the original, though with the reinforced bass one expects at this period.

I’ve also transferred the contents of a French Mode Disques LP: “Petite Musique de Nuit; Marche Turque; Concerti No.2 et 3 pour piano et orchestre.” On the first side Jean Witold conducts “Ensemble Instrumental Sinfonia” in Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Pauline Aubert plays the Rondo alla turca from the A major piano sonata K331 on harpsichord. The second side contains the Piano Concertos K207 Nos.2 and 3, where Mozart composed accompaniments to piano sonatas by JC Bach. These are played by Robert Veyron-Lacroix, with Roland Douatte conducting the Collegium Musicum de Paris. These recordings (together with K207 No.1) were first issued in 1957, and the Witold recording on the first side was reviewed unfavourably in Gramophone the same year. I’ve not yet established a date for the Aubert recording. The back of the LP sleeve contains brief notes in French, followed by a rather incoherent English translation:

When in Salzburg, Mozart will be submitted to many musical tendances for his so short life. Among his travels, he met in London Jean Chrétien Bach, and got a so great wonder for him that he will  please to orchestrate his London mentor’s sonates and he composed concertos for pianos. Here are these creations.
In fact Mozart changed nothing in Jean Chrétien Bach’s text, he just added on orchestral accompaniment written in 3 parts for fiddles and violoncello.
“La petite musique”, just ended in Wien, August 10, 1787 when Mozart was 31 years old, shows in its four parts the pleasant, youthful and brilliant sade of the “Master” when he created “Divertimenti” for the fests of the Mirabel Palace in his native town.
So, and in spite of some brief periods when “his heaven was a little bit darker”, you can find  here a quite light opus.
But when with all these characteristics, we always know nothing about the first intended purpose of this “serenade” he wrote for the exclusive stringed orchestra, in form of a quatuor, with cellos in harmony. Maybe it was written for the pleasure of walkers in the Prater in Wien.
In this particular case, we could also imagine this piece interpreted in the Palais Royal gardens by musicians with powdered wigs.
“La marche turque” is the final rondo of this sonate in la, composed by Mozart, during his second trip to Paris, as crual as it is possible because  of his  desillusions, of his  mother’s death.
For ending this so important sonate, you find a kind offarce just as Mozart will know so exactly tell them in his lyrics. You can met again with the mischievous teenager who knew how to relate thousands of fancies in his letters.

Among CDs I’ve listened to recently, I finally got round to Mark Elder’s recording of Gerontius, which was highly enjoyable, though I’ll still go back to Sargent with Heddle Nash! Somm’s reissue of Boult conducting Walton’s First Symphony and Belshazzar’s Feast was a fantastic listen – I’d forgotten quite how quickly Boult takes some parts of the great choral work. Also on British vocal music, Divine Art’s reissue of 2CDs worth of 78s of works by Peter Warlock was enthralling, with Peter Dawson, Roy Henderson and Dennis Noble particularly involving.

In the LP and 78 area, my collection of recordings by Franz André continues to grow, and more of these will reach my website in the coming months. These include his recordings of works by Coates, Elgar and Gershwin, and his 1812 overture. I also got hold of a French LP of Mozart recordings on “disques vogues”. It contains Jean Witold conducting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Pauline Aubert playing the Rondo alla Turca on harpsichord, and two of the K107 Piano concertos (arrangements of JC Bach sonatas) played by Robert Veyron-Lacroix and the Collegium Musicum de Paris under Roland Douatte. The sound balance in the concerti may need some work, but the recordings are all quite interesting. The sleeve notes include an excitingly multi-coloured spectrum illustrating the full range of human hearing, as reproduced on the record, and the brief descriptions of the recordings are translated from French to rather bad English. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik contrives on sleeve and label to have its second movement split in two as “Romance” and “Andante”.

The latest update to my website will be live in the next couple of hours, and contains the following:
Fabien Sevitzky conducts the Philadelphia Chamber String Sinfonietta in Arensky’s Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky (1942)
Marie Novello plays Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 (abridged, 1921)
Thorpe Bates sings the Captain’s Song from HMS Pinafore, with chorus of Ernest Pike, Stanley Kirkby, Peter Dawson (1906)
Joseph Batten conducts “March of Victory” for the National Savings Movement, with baritones Thorpe Bates and Walter Saull (1945)
Henry Wood conducts Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music (improved transfer 1938)
Michael Zacharewitsch plays violin solos (c1920)

http://www.damians78s.co.uk

In other musical news, I purchased the Historic Masters repressing of Francesco Tamagno’s 10” recordings. These were an absolute joy to listen to, his voice ringing out clearly more than a century after the recordings were made.

I’ve also had the pleasure of the final instalment of Marston’s Conchita Supervia edition. There’s very much a Spanish focus on the recordings included, apart from some Lehar in French. Even greater joy than listening to Tamagno. In addition, the package included the latest Lagniappe disc, a bonus to subscribers. This time it was a selection of recordings by Paul Payan. This wonderful French bass displayed great flexibility and variety of colour. There were times when his timbre reminded me of Ezio Pinza.

I’ve been working through the EMI Classics 10CD Stokowski box. Of course, it includes some less familiar works, which make a great impression, but it’s when you get to the more familiar stuff that Stokowski’s choices can be frustrating. There are tweaks to the orchestration of Holst’s Planets, and his Carmina Burana cuts out middle verses of many parts of the score, and plays around with tempos and pauses outrageously. There are some tender and affecting parts, but as a whole it was disappointing.

I’ve also enjoyed Reginald Goodall’s EMI recording of Parsifal, though I think I prefer my Parsifals a little brisker than his.

There are still piles of 78s, LPs and CDs which I haven’t listened to. Among those that reached my turntable today were another National Savings promotional record, recorded just a few days before VE Day (when the outcome of the war in Europe was pretty much known) and paying tribute to all of the British armed forces and volunteers who contributed to the war effort. It’s a fascinating snapshot, with solos from baritones Thorpe Bates and Walter Saull. Joseph Batten conducts the London Symphony Orchestra. I hope to get this transferred soon. I’ve also just listened to Marie Novello’s recording of Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, somewhat abridged on two sides of a 10” Winner disc. It’s an unusual performance – it isn’t the hackneyed barnstorming approach, and is perhaps the most rhapsodic version of the rhapsody I’ve heard. I’ve also listened to the violinist Daniel Melsa (on Broadcast Twelve), Stanley Chapple conducting Brahms and Elgar (again Broadcast Twelve), Virgilio Ranzato in two violin solos (Pathé), and assorted other things that may make it to my site soon. But my half-term holiday has just finished, so it’s back to work next week, with less time for transferring recordings.

The National Savings record is probably the next item on my list for restoration, though, for its unusualness.

Damian

The first is an unusual recording by the wonderful British baritone Dennis Noble, and is not listed in the discography of Noble which appeared in The Record Collector in 2004. The record label is a private EMI pressing made to promote the National Savings scheme. The songs on one side are a “Silver Lining Medley”, and on the other “Look for the Silver Lining.” These were presumably chosen to tie in with the film “Look for the Silver Lining”, a 1949 biopic of Marilyn Miller. In the medley, Noble sings two songs, and C Wright (a very English tenor crooner) sings another. A fourth is assigned to the chorus. The second side has Noble singing with the chorus. Both sides are introduced by actor Norman Shelley (“Hello everyone! Are you a national saver?”).

Around the same time, Eugene Goossens was conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and can be heard in Delius’s The Walk to the Paradise Garden.

Some decades before, a Russian conductor made recordings in the US – Vassily Andreyev took his Balalaika Orchestra on tour there in 1911. One of the sides he made cropped up as a filler side for Landon Ronald’s abridged recording of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The recordings this time are from a Victrola 78.

An altogether different sound comes from an early single-side Zonophone of Fucik’s “Entry of the Gladiators”, recorded a little before it acquired its circus connotations. The “Zonophone Military Band” credited on the label is actually the Band of H.M. Colstream Guards, conducted by John Mackenzie-Rogan.

Maintaining the Czech theme, Dvorak’s New World Symphony receives a compelling performance from Jascha Horenstein on a Vox LP. The tempi are occasionally slower than one might expect, but the conductor’s attention to detail makes for a highly satisfying account.

And finally, Dean Dixon makes a long overdue appearance on my site. He claimed he could divide his career into three phases, where he was respectively “the black conductor Dean Dixon”, “the American conductor Dean Dixon”, and then after success in Europe, simply “the conductor Dean Dixon.” He recorded extensively in Europe, through to the 1970s, and indeed I have more recordings by him than can appear on my site, as many are still in copyright. The three LPs I’ve uploaded this time include Schumann’s 3rd and 4th Symphonies, Schubert’s 4th and 5th Symphonies, and Schubert’s Rosamunde music. All were recorded in the 1950s.

I listened to yesterday to the new Naxos Historical issue of Bartok’s American recordings – highly enjoyable, and in excellent sound. The excerpts from Mikrokosmos were a particular delight. Last weekend I finally found time to listen to the Gobbi/Christoff/de los Angeles recording of Simon Boccanegra, also reissued on Naxos Historical, with the vocal score to hand. It’s a fascinating work, and hearing Gobbi heading the cast makes me curious to hear quite what Placido Domingo does with the title role – I understand there will be a live BBC relay of one of his Covent Garden performances later this year.

On the website side of things, there are several new items, which will be appearing within the next few days, including symphonies conducted by Dean Dixon and Jascha Horenstein, an early “Entry of the Gladiators” nominally by the “Zonophone Military Band”, but actually John Mackenzie-Rogan and the Coldstream Guards Band. There will also be a balalaika orchestra, and one of Eugene Goossens recordings for Victor.

There will be also be a late 1940s 78 featuring Dennis Noble, but one which the baritone’s discography in The Record Collector doesn’t include. It was a private issue by EMI promoting the National Savings scheme. Noble gets a few brief solos, as does a C Wright, presumably a singer of lighter fare, whose first name I have been unable to track down.