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Paul Paray 

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PASC 240 - Paray  

A disc of Fritz Reiner "rarities" brings surprising contrasts of repertoire and performance. The great Hungarian conductor was not known for his sense of humour, and a 1954 recording of Mozart's A Musical Joke with the NBC Symphony Orchestra is played absolutely straight, to the work's advantage. There follows a 1950 account of Brahms's Alto Rhapsody which does not show the contralto Marian Anderson in good light, for her intonation is very poor. Here Reiner conducts members of the Robert Shaw Chorale and the "RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra". It's back to the NBC SO for the Debussy/Biisser Petite Suite, which Reiner directs with a degree of tenderness and charm that one would not have thought possible from the gruff Hungarian. The final item is in very good 1954 stereo, with Reiner conducting his Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra in Rolf Liebermann's Concerto for jazz band and symphony orchestra. Does a set of variations based on a 12-note row, scored for this combination of ensembles, really work? I think not in this case (PASC294, 67mins).

Staying with American repertoire, Pristine have issued a disc of two rare 78rpm piano sets. One is of MacDowell's Marionettes Suite, Op. 38, recorded c.1944 for US Decca by the Busoni pupil and dedicatee of Ravel's "Scarbo", Rudolf Ganz. The other is a collection entitled "Piano Music by American Composers", recorded for Victor in 1941 by the Josef Hofmann pupil Jeanne Behrend. The MacDowell suite is a series of eight unpretentious short pieces bearing such titles as "Sweetheart" and "Villain", while Behrend's collection of 25 short pieces has examples of the work of a dozen composers such as Carpenter, Guion, Thompson, Dett and Beach. Gershwin's Three Preludes seem to tower over everything else (PAKM044,46mins).

Also pretty obscure is a collection entitled "Genesis Suite", conceived by Nathaniel Shilkret, who commissioned seven composers to write works to accompany readings of the Biblical text. Stravinsky's Babel and Schoenberg's Prelude to Genesis were the most significant end results, and contributions by Tansman, Milhaud, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Toch and Shilkret himself were on a lesser level and tended to sound like film music. Moreover, an error in the original 78rpm pressings ensured that the second part of Castelnuovo's "Noah's Ark" was lost and replaced by a reprise of the Schoenberg (the missing sequence as originally recorded by Werner Janssen and his orchestra can be heard in a reproduction of a Capitol LP transfer on YouTube, though with a different narrator dubbed in). A more straightforward proposition is the second work on this disc - Piston's Second Symphony, in a live recording of the second performance given in 1944 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under one G. Wallace Woodworth, who obtains what sounds to be a very committed performance. There is some distortion in an otherwise acceptable sound picture (PASC306).

Piston's Third Symphony appears in a three-volume series of American music played by the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra under Howard Hanson. This material is taken from Mercury LPs recorded between 1952 and 1955 in generally very good mono sound. These issues really do need good supporting notes on the music, since it will be unfamiliar to most listeners, but each volume has the same note on Hanson, reproduced from Wikipedia, and details of how the transfers were made. It is however true that some further information can be found on Pristine's website, but even this is not always particularly helpful. Hanson was a sure-footed conductor in this repertoire (especially in his own music, of course), and he gets what seem to be authoritative performances of Carter's Minotaur Ballet Suite, Riegger's New Dance and MacDowell's Indian Suite No. 2 (PASC302, 64mins), and Piston's Third Symphony with Cowell's Symphony No. 4 and Loeffler's Poem for Orchestra (PASC295,70mins). Hanson's own Symphony No. 4 and Songs from Drumtaps are coupled with Loeffler's Memories of my Childhood and Thompson's The Testament of Freedom (PASC292, 72mins). Loeffler's late-Romantic style is intriguingly individual and Cowell's straightforwardly expressed, sometimes jolly symphony is also particularly worth investigation.
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A 1922 HMV acoustic recording of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony with just 35 players doesn't seem very appealing on the face of it - except that here the conductor is Albert Coates, who somehow manages to get a performance of tremendous character and vitality out of the primitive sound medium. The playing of "The Symphony Orchestra" sounds fresh and the phrasing seems to be completely spontaneous, which it could hardly have been in the prevailing studio conditions. Coates's 1924 recording of Francesca da Rimini is also exciting, but has some small cuts, and only a part of Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances" from Prince Igor were recorded in 1923 on a single disc, though a chorus of eight singers participated. Ironically (here and elsewhere in Pristine's transfers) the better the sound extracted from the 78rpm grooves the more apparent is the presence of tubas which were employed to reinforce the bass lines ( PASC297; 68mins).

In another Coates issue with "The Symphony Orchestra" Pristine offer an enjoyably fast and furious account of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from 1921, with the third and fourth movements abridged to fit one 78rpm side each. HMV evidently had second thoughts, since a year later they re-recorded these two movements complete on four sides, and Pristine have added these as an appendix. In the re-make the Scherzo is played faster than before, but the trio is much slower. Brisk tempi also characterise a 1923 recording of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, but as in the Beethoven the result is exhilarating rather than seeming 'wrong', such is Coates's energy and conviction ( PASC298; 70mins).

Pristine's third offering of acoustic HMV Coates recordings shows the process in a less favourable light. The 1911 suite (with small cuts) from Stravinsky's Firebird sounds pretty odd and unconvincing - no wonder a contemporary reviewer in The Gramophone was puzzled - and in the confines of the small recording studio the exquisite delicacies of Ravel's Ma mere I'oye Suite (1922) fail to materialise. The more extrovert content and scoring of Rimsky-Korsakov's Coq d'or Suite do come alive in Coates's hands, very much so, and short pieces by Glinka, Rimsky, Liadov and a galumphing "Gollowog's Cakewalk" from Debussy's Children's Corner (taken from Caplet's orchestration?), make up the programme (PASC303, 70mins). Though Coates rerecorded several of the above works electrically (though not the Tchaikovsky symphony) the acoustic versions have their own particular interest.

At the beginning of 1927, HMV started to publish Coates recordings with the orchestra named as "London Symphony Orchestra", though it's a fair bet that the earlier recordings largely comprised LSO players. Electric recording was now in full swing, and Coates's 1926 account of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony is adorned by a quite realistic sound quality, though the engineers clearly felt that they couldn't yet abandon bass reinforcements. As one would expect, Coates's performance is highly dramatic, with sharp contrasts and risks taken which nearly always come off - he made the LSO play better than anybody else at this time, recorded evidence suggests. A stirring Marche slave (1930) and a fiery and emotional Romeo and Juliet are also included on this disc, completed by a Glinka Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture (1928) which is even faster than the acoustic version contained in the collection discussed above (PASC301).

Pristine's Fourth Coates offering is largely taken up by a 1926 recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with members of the Philharmonic Choir and soloists Elsie Suddaby, Nellie Walker, Walter Widdop and Stuart Robinson, all singing an English version of Schiller's text, alas. Fast tempi dominate throughout the work, to the extent that the first two movements do sound rather rushed, though energy and excitement are present to a high degree. The flowing basic tempo for the third movement sounds ideal now, ironically, 85 years after the event, and Coates's variations of pulse are imaginatively expressive. Suddaby sings beautifully in the finale, but all the vocal contributions are good, and the early electric recording copes pretty well with Coates's dynamism. The disc is completed by a swift Prometheus Overture (1927), what is described as Beethoven's "Gratulations Menuett", and Elgar's orchestration of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue, BWV537 (1928) , played in very spirited fashion by the LSO (PASC296,78mins).