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Beethoven
Quartet No. 13
Grosse Fuge
Hollywood String Quartet
Last week we gave away the Grosse Fuge as a high quality sample - this week hear the whole of the 13th Quartet it originally completed!
Recorded in 1957
NB. Disc 2 only of the 3CD release
Download it now - for one week only - it's only free from our Cover Page!
"UPGRADE" to full quality lossless 16-bit or 24-bit FLAC downloads with notes here:
PACM 082
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LATEST REVIEW
| MusicWeb International
15 May 2012
KARAJAN'S FLEDERMAUS
By Ralph Moore
"A dashing performance with breathless, heady excitement. "
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This is a pioneering stereo recording done by some of the best sound engineers in the business. The fifty-one year old recording was already a sonic marvel which could only be improved by Andrew Rose giving it the usual Pristine XR re-mastering treatment. It remains my favourite version despite some stiff competition from Krauss, again with Gueden in 1950, and Karajan with Schwarzkopf in 1955. There is here a joie de vivre from a matchless ensemble which is all the more apparent in its new incarnation. About this Rose writes that it has "more immediacy, vibrancy and sense of dimension [and] really does breathe new life into a classic." It's a dashing performance with a breathless, heady excitement about it that convinces me afresh that this is the most tuneful music ever written.
Gueden is foxy charm itself. She sings enticingly with sparkling �lan; K�th is a winning soubrette, witty and sharp; Kmentt, Berry, W�chter and Zampieri are all Vienna regulars with lovely voices. They are happy to camp it up just a little to bring out the full, farcical fun. Resnik is a rich-voiced and rather butch, convincing Orlovsky. Erich Kunz's ludicrous, echt-Viennese accent and drunken clowning as Frosch are the best on record.
Pristine here omits the ballet music and Gala concert (with contributions from Renata Tebaldi, Fernando Corena, Birgit Nilsson, Mario del Monaco, Teresa Berganza, Joan Sutherland, Jussi Bj�rling, Leontyne Price, Giulietta Simionato, Ettore Bastianini and Ljuba Welitsch) although these are available on a separate Pristine disc with four other Johann Strauss II overtures and waltzes from the early 1940s as a bonus. Pristine chose to do so on the grounds that although that music was on the original premium-price opera label issue then being launched, it was omitted from the 1962 SXL set. As the "Gramophone" critic noted in 1960, for some listeners its inclusion would surely constitute "a very considerable disruption of the kind of mood so far established".
Timings are very slightly faster than the Decca Originals issue as, in Andrew Rose's words, "Viennese tunings traditionally tend to be slightly sharper than the standard A4=440Hz. The recording came off the Decca LPs at A=449.24, but close analysis of residual electrical hum suggested an original tuning of A=445.67, and my restoration therefore adopts this pitch."
If you already own, as I do, that Decca Originals set with the Gala music and a physical libretto and are resistant to being required to download, I wouldn't rush off to buy this Pristine issue. That said, the improvement in the quality of sound certainly justifies the extra expense if you want to buy this recording for the first time. Links to further notes, information on the score and a libretto may be found on the Pristine website.
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LATEST REVIEW
| MusicWeb International
17 May, 2012
BRUNO WALTER ACOUSTICS 2
by Christopher Howell
"Completists' interest will be strengthened by the fact that, of all the pieces here, the conductor made later studio recordings of only the Beethoven"
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Bruno Walter was one of several artists whose career stretched into the stereo era, with the result that listeners and record companies alike have taken the easy option of judging them by their late work. The general opinion seems to be that Walter is better known by his New York recordings from the early post-war years and his 78s from the 1930s with the Vienna Philharmonic.
According to John Holmes (Conductors, Gollancz 1988), Walter made his first record in Berlin in 1900. This information is also repeated in Wikipedia. If true, the recording in question would predate by a few years the earliest known (and surviving) orchestral recording. The assertion derives, it would seem, from a very late interview in which Walter was asked when he made his first recording. He hesitated a moment, then replied "1900, in Berlin. Music from Carmen". Walter did actually hold a conducting appointment in Berlin in 1900, so it is very faintly possible that he conducted some sort of experimental recording, long since lost. However, since the 1923 Berlin sessions represented here - his earliest recordings known to us - also included Carmen extracts, it is infinitely more likely that the elderly maestro was just confusing times and places.
The Berlin series begun in 1923 is therefore assumed to mark the start of Walter's recording career. By this time he was in his late forties and already had almost thirty years' conducting experience behind him.
Transferred and re-mastered by Ward Marston, these recordings sound about as good here as they ever will, but an hour's worth of such shallow, husky sound inevitably tires the ear. So what do they tell us about Walter?
Compared with his later image of saintliness and humane patience, he is here a pretty volatile conductor, whipping things up to a frenzy when the music gives him half an opportunity. As far as one can tell, he evokes potent atmospheres in the slow introductions to the Cherubini and Schumann pieces.
This is all to the good, but his vagaries of pulse can be disconcerting. After a good, forceful start, the second theme of Coriolan is introduced by a whacking ritardando and the theme itself proceeds rather lugubriously. The Mendelssohn overture might seem more amenable to this sort of treatment, but somehow it appears to have one climax too many if the overall shape is not kept in sight. This seems to me a rather different matter from Furtw�ngler's flexible pulse which nevertheless derives from a firm control with the result that the listener - or most listeners - can flex back and forward with it.
In a 1939 review of Walter's London concerts, Neville Cardus recalled that "A few years ago a performance of Zauberfl�te, conducted by Walter in Salzburg, was so sentimental and flaccid in rhythm that I was obliged to leave it half-way through, with many others" (Cardus: The Delights of Music, Gollancz 1966). By 1939, Cardus noted, he had "hardened or disciplined his romanticism".
It would be unfair to describe the present performances as "sentimental and flaccid", but the Beethoven and to some extent the Mendelssohn do point up the difference between a flexible pulse � la Furtw�ngler and a pulse that gets lost in the trees. As I suggested at the beginning, Walter seems to have found the ideal combination of tough driving and yielding romanticism in the period from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.
A disc for Walter completists, really. Their interest will be strengthened by the fact that, of all the pieces here, the conductor made later studio recordings of only the Beethoven, though live recordings seem to survive, some in private hands, of all but the Cherubini. Something of a curiosity is the Berlioz, lively and songful but so lacking in Berliozian extravaganza as to sound rather like Leh�r.
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LATEST REVIEW
| Audiophile Audition
13 May, 2012
PIERO COPPOLA
by Gary Lemco
"Piero Coppola leads fiery renditions of Schumann from London and Paris; but the grimly sensational music of Strauss may impel the collector to audition this excellent restoration"
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Italian maestro Piero Coppola (1888-1971) retains a strong reputation for his willingness to champion new and audacious scores of the first third of the 20th Century. His athletic style and rhythmic vigor set him in a rank quite high, if not on a plane competitive with Arturo Toscanini. Producer and restoration engineer Mark Obert-Thorn has resuscitated several of Coppola's excursions (rec. 1933-1946) into Romantic repertory, particularly the Schumann scores upon which Coppola lavished considerable affection.
While the Schumann 1841 "Spring" Symphony (rec. 11-12 July 1946 in Kingsway Hall, London) has enjoyed prior issue via the Dutton label, this Pristine incarnation proves exceptionally strong, vibrantly alive with the conceits of Spring and the joyful energies that inform Schumann's paean to rebirth in nature as well as to the early conjugal days of his recent marriage to Clara Wieck. Coppola treats the opening trumpet "summons to life" as the prime mover in the entire first movement, the pacing and sonic definition quite the model for the Leonard Bernstein inscription with the New York Philharmonic some twenty years later. As the songful Larghetto proceeds, we can already hear intimations of the famous slow movement of the C Major Symphony. Coppola's execution of the wily Scherzo and its two trios proves extremely deft, and he takes a lovely breath in the midst of the concluding Allegro animato e grazioso finale to allow the flute its poignant solo. The music trips lightly and lovingly, its exuberant flourishes regaining the spirit of invocation in the opening Andante's fanfare. The coda pulsates with brilliant, erotic energy, a fine testament to the natural sympathy between composer and interpreter.
The Schumann 1850 "Rhenish" Symphony (rec. 7-8 November 1933) sets a high standard for efficient and controlled virtuosity. The sense of pageant manifests itself throughout the first movement Lebhaft, the often contrapuntal energies layered with meticulous clarity despite the blazing tempos, the luminous figures more than not indebted to Beethoven's Eroica. So often, the drooping figures in Schumann's melodies point quite immodestly to the Brahms Third Symphony opening. I find the acoustic of the Salle Rameau in Paris rather dry, but the grand scale and muscularity of the playing well compensates for the cramped resonance. The ensemble may occasionally betray the nasality typical of French instrumentalists, but the conception runs a nice balance between Italian fleetness and German depth, not far from a Carl Schuricht reading of the score. The ensuing Scherzo enjoys a fluid motion tinged with a hint of solemnity, a combination that will swell with massive dignity in the Feierlich movement that invokes the Cologne Cathedral. The Nicht schnell movement basks as a bucolic interlude before three trombones set the tone of the mighty slow movement in E-flat Minor. The glorious finale Lebhaft in E-flat Major moves with sudden flights of fanciful running figures, the trumpet work adept and lithe. The sheer hustle of the movement indeed means to rival Toscanini for precision and fluid elegance of execution; with the reappearance of the "cathedral" motif the scale of sound increases in texture and intensity most impressively, and the coda resounds with spiritual victory.
Coppola recorded the Parsifal orchestral excerpts 6 November 1933 also a Salle Rameau, Paris. The Paris Conservatory Orchestra seems pinched in sound as a Wagner ensemble, but the devotional ethos of the music strides forth, beginning with the Act I Transformation Music. Other than Coppola, I could not easily name potent Paris conductors of Wagner in this era, unless Eugene Bigot, Roger Desormiere, and Albert Wolff contributed substantially to the genre, of which I am unaware. Coppola's Introduction to Act II certainly conveys a mysterious atmosphere. Thin and reedy strings rather enervate the effect of the Act III Prelude, though the melodic line remains taut, and the brass work redeems the effort. The final sequence of Transformation Music affords us some fascinating harmonies, at times they point to Debussy's Martyrdom of St. Sebastien.
Coppola inscribed two convulsive excerpts from the Richard Strauss Salome 20 March 1934, each section having been devoted to the attempt by Salome to seduce John the Baptist, his rejection of her, and his subsequent consignment into the cistern-cell. Elements of Wagnerian harmony sneak into the seduction scene, grotesquely erotic on its own terms; what Joseph Conrad might have deemed "the fascination of the abomination." These last two sides certainly warrant the price of admission, if confident and stylish versions of Schumann were not motivation enough to pursue this fine restoration.
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CONTENTS
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Editorial On Furtw�ngler, paper sizes & music software
Furtw�ngler the best ever Brahms Symphony No. 1?
Elman rare and wonderful recordings
PADA Constant Lambert conducts Tchaikovsky
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A nice surprise - remastering Furtw�ngler's Brahms
Plus: a question or two of formats, both old and new Sometimes in life, love and, yes, the workplace, things sometimes just seem to come together of their own accord to produce perfect results. Last week I was happy to celebrate, quietly and privately, a certain anniversary relating to the second on this list of three. This week it's the third. (One might argue that the first was settled when we decided as a young family to move ourselves to France and start Pristine Classical.) Anyway, of interest this week is the happy marriage of Wilhelm Furtw�ngler's 1952 live recording of Brahms' Symphony No. 1 and the processes of XR remastering. Sometimes I'm blown away by what a difference the latter makes to the sound of a recording, but, with one or two exceptions, it's probably true to say it can't make what initially sounds like a bad performance into a good one. Fortunately the nature of what I do means that one can sift through the lesser performances and pick out some of the best. But it's a rare event to find a performance as superlative as this particular Brahms 1, by happy accident, and to find that it's in an almost perfect condition to benefit from XR remastering. If I had to nominate today a single recording from our catalogue which demonstrated my work at it's best, I'm pretty certain this would be the one.  | | Wilhelm Furtw�ngler |
Of course, many people reading this will already know, or know of, the recording in question. The recording was made in the Gro�er Musikvereinssaal in Vienna on the 27th January, 1952 as part of a live concert which included other works by Brahms, notably the Double Concerto, with Willi Boskovsky and Emanuel Brabec, and the Haydn Variations - the Variations are also to be heard on this week's release. For reasons which may now be lost to history the latter two recordings didn't see a commercial issue until 1979, and the Symphony No. 1 from the same concert had to wait a further five years for EMI to issue it on LP (and, one assumes by then, also on CD) in 1984. The sleevenotes to that LP, written by Felix Aprahamian (a charming man whose lifetime collection of musical memorabilia and paraphernalia at his houose in north London was the most astonishing I've ever seen), give nothing away - indeed, to read them one might think Felix had not actually heard the recording in question when he set pen to paper. Certainly there's no reference to the actual performance beyond noting its existence, in a potted history of both composition and conductor. Yet a short time later the critic at Gramophone was to proclaim it the greatest recording of the work then available, stating that comparisons with other recordings were rendered pointless - so good was the Furtw�ngler! This I discovered later. Having spent a day wrestling unhappily with some of Cortot's Schumann, I decided to put this to one side and grab something from a pile of discs which had recently been donated. Aware that Furtw�ngler's Brahms was one of a number of rather big holes in our catalogue I decided to give this a spin on the turntable. With two recordings of the First Symphony to choose from, and with one eye on the clock, I decided on the more recent (the other was his 1947 Vienna studio recording for EMI), purely on the grounds that, if I was lucky, it might need less picking through after remastering to pull out annoying little leftovers and undesirables, and thus save a few hours of restoration time already lost to Cortot. After cleaning the LP and placing it on the turntable I initially wondered whether my deck was running slow. No - the pitch was fine - but the beginning seemed heavy and almost leaden. I carried on listening as I transferred the LP to my digital workstation, and realised I was simply hearing it as I'd never heard it played before, and also hearing it make perfect musical sense. As the man from Gramophone wrote "I confess I know no performance of this symphony which more strikingly illuminates those points where this symphony is palpably at its greatest." This was a good start - though I didn't know about the Gramophone review until quite a while after I'd finished working on the recording and come to my own conclusions. What happened next was one of those rare moments when you think things can't get any better - and then they do! Ostensibly the EMI sound seemed good. Certainly for a live recording in 1952 it was pretty well made, and of course there should be nothing much to worry about when transferring from a mint 1984 LP pressing. But after the basic procedures of de-clicking and setting the pitch for equalisation (these days I use a standard A=440 and then repitch later if required, as here, in order to represent properly an orchestra's sound if I can be sure I know what pitch they played at), I started the process of analysing the frequency content of the recording and then realigning it with a modern equivalent of the same piece - the process at the heart of XR which aims to do away with tonal inconsistencies introduced by older recording equipment. Then comes the moment, of course, when you press play and hear the result of this for the first time. Rarely at first play does it sound so glorious and so transformed as it did here that I have to switch the effect off and back on to make sure I am working on the right original recording! Not only did I have an amazing performance on my hands, but I had fabulous sound quality just waiting to be heard. It's now a true gem in our catalogue, the completion of the remastering having gone as swiftly and well as I could possibly have hoped. There's more from that concert on this week's release - the Haydn Variations are included here, together with some earlier Hungarian Dances (one of which seems to have been mis-numbered for the past 63 years!) - and more to come next week as well: the Double Concerto is shaping up very nicely too... On formats old and new - 1. Paper
My e-mail correspondence this week has kept me busy on two very different fronts regarding - at the heart of it all - the difficulties of different formats and their use and compatibility around the world. I'll begin with a very olde worlde issue - that of paper sizing. When I was a boy in England, paper generally came in a different size to the standard today. From memory the most common size for a sheet of paper I might come across was probably quarto, which was 9"x11" in size, but, as Wikipedia points out, "these sizes are no longer commonly used since the UK switched to ISO sizes". Ah, yes, ISO sizes, which in this case means A4, originally a German paper size, adopted internationally in 1975. It's the standard size we use for our cover designs, because we print onto A4 card stock, which is just about all we can get hold of here in France. Unfortunately my correspondent was based in the US and trying to print onto US stock, which is a different size again (will you guys ever go metric?!?). To make matters worse, he had a stack of pre-formatted and perforated card, and of course the perforations didn't match where the pictures were on our PDFs. Furthermore, because the paper size was different, Adobe Reader was helpfully re-sizing the images to fit - thus making them all the wrong size for a CD case anyway. And why don't our PDF covers fit the perforations? Could it be because our CD cover software lists some 57 different possible template designs, each with their perforations in different places?... Without a single global standard, both in paper and in CD cover design, it simply isn't possible to cater for all known (and unknown) possible combinations of paper size and image positioning. Your best bet is a piece of stiff white paper or card and a pair of scissors, or better still, a small guillotine. And remember to turn off the resizing option before you print! I should add as a postscript that this is also why we don't offer artwork to print directly onto CDs, or printable CD labels. The latter causes as much of the same trouble as above, the former is even more complicated, because where printers do print directly onto discs, they all seem to have their own set-up and no one printer model, even from the same manufacturer, seems to print out in the same place as another. I know of at least ten possible set-ups for Canon printers alone! So we've never gone there, and only our CD customers know how lovely our printed labels can be. On formats old and new - 2. Music ReplayMeanwhile the pianist Peter Ritzen has been struggling in Beijing, not with his piano (I hope!) but with the XBMC software we recommend for playing our music.  | Poster for Peter Ritzen's Beijing Liszt recital, 2011
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He was offering to demonstrate on Chinese radio the wonders of Pristine's remastering, but struggling to make XBMC work for him in order to render our FLAC downloads to the music-lovers of the People's Republic. As we all know, FLAC is a standard which has emerged recently for the storage and replay of recordings subjected to lossless compression, a form of clever data manipulation that, unlike MP3, doesn't lose any actual information when squashing a digital music file into a smaller storage space. Don't ask me how it works - but it does, and the file format, which is supposed to be free of patents and rights, has become increasingly popular as our Internet connections have speeded up and our hard drives expanded in size. More and more consumer electronic devices now support FLAC, but still the likes of Apple and Microsoft want you to use their own, proprietary formats, and support for FLAC is either limited, blocked or non-existent for many users of these companies' products. XBMC is designed, among other things, to play just about everything, be it video or audio, and it's available free for Mac, Windows PC, Linux and other operating systems. This seemed like a safe recommendation for a worldwide audience on a vast variety of different computing machines. But it's not ideal - the interface is one designed for a home theatre type system. It's complex and there's a steep learning curve when you get started with it. It's been put together by enthusiasts as a non-commercial offering - which means there's no real technical support as such, and a mish-mash of online documentation that at times seems to require a PhD in computer science to wade through. But it's one of the few cross-platform options that I know works - if you can get it to work yourself, that is. After much tearing of hair and beard, Peter couldn't make XBMC work. Happily he found something that would, quickly and easily, take the pain away and play all our FLACs on a Mac or a PC - and again it's free. The software is called "Songbird" ( http://getsongbird.com/), and is something I looked at a long time ago when it was in a stage of development too early for it to be recommended (I have versions0.2 and 0.4.5 on my system). Now it's up and running properly and you can download it for free. You can also get it for your Android phone and, should you have one, install it on your Facebook page. In operation it seems to sit well alongside other similar players, such as iTunes and MediaMonkey (PC only, and recommended) in that it will handle your iPod/'iPad/iPhone music transfers for you as well as work as a standalone music player. And like MediaMonkey, but unlike iTunes, it's very happy to play FLAC files. It was quick to catalogue the 71,088 music tracks in my collection, and although I've not let it loose on them yet, seems like it would also handle my video files too. Formats and format wars have I'm sure been ongoing since even before people had to choose between cylinders and 78s or A4 and Quarto, and they're not going to go away in a hurry. What computers ought to be able to do is make these distinctions invisible to the user. But this relies on the computer companies not having their own vested interests, axes to grind, and prejudices. Unfortunately a number of them do - but not all. It's just finding the best examples of those who don't that's not always as straightforward as you might like. So if you've wrestled with XBMC and lost, or struggled with iTunes and come out listening literally to the Sound of Silence, why not give Songbird a test flight? As a certain fruity computer company's late founder was wont to say of his own products (even when iTunes palpably doesn't in this instance), "it just works". Andrew Rose
11 May 2012
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"The performance is incomparable" - and now, so too is the sound quality
BRAHMS Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68
Furtw�ngler's finest Brahms 1 has never sounded
as superb as this!
 FURTWANGLER
conducts Brahms
Recorded 1952/49
Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Andrew Rose
BRAHMS Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 BRAHMS Haydn Variations, Op. 56a
BRAHMS Hungarian Dances Nos. 1, 2, 10
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Wilhelm Furtw�ngler conductor
Web page: PASC 340 Short notes "The performance is incomparable ... for the moment I confess I know no performance of this symphony which more strikingly illuminates those points where this symphony is palpably at its greatest."
- Gramophone, 1985
Gramophone's critic couldn't praise Furtw�ngler's live recording of Brahms' First Symphony, performed on 27 January 1952 with the Vienna Philharmonic, highly enough. It is indeed an incredible performance.
Sound-wise it wasn't too bad either. But wait until you hear what Pristine's 32-bit XR remastering has done to it! There can be few recordings of this era which come so close to perfection in so many different ways. This is surely one, and one of the finest we've had the pleasure to release.
Notes On this recording If I could nominate whole of this album as a showcase not only for superlative historic performances but also for the astounding sound quality occasionally to be found lurking in the gloomy grooves of older recordings then I would. The tone of the Vienna Philharmonic both in the live 1952 concert recordings and the earlier studio recordings, after Pristine's 32-bit XR remastering, is finer than I could have believed possible when I started the project.
The live recordings do have the edge over the older Hungarian Dances, which retained a degree of 78rpm crackle that was tricky to remove. It's also interesting that most discographies and reissues have followed the error in the original release and titled one of them as Hungarian Dance No. 3 in F - it's not, it's No. 10 in F.
Analysis of the pitches and residual electrical hum in each of the recordings, from three separate sources, consistently pointed to a tuning used by the VPO at the time of around A4=446.4Hz. I have accurately pitched each recording to this to give the most accurate picture possible of both the sound and pace of these performances. Andrew Rose Review Symphony No. 1 Previously unpublished, this recording qualifies under house rules for consideration alongside some selected comparisons. If I append none it is because, so far as the current catalogue is concerned, the performance is incomparable. Such comparisons as can be made concern other Furtwangler recordings of the symphony: the 1947 VPO performance, a rather cool affair by Furtwangler's standards, recorded with no great immediacy, and transferred noisily to LP (EMI Electrola/Conifer mono IC 149 53420/6, 12/80), and a fine Berlin performance (DG mono 2535 162, 5/76-nla) recorded live in the Titania-Palast on February 10th, 1952. Interestingly, the present recording was made in Vienna just a fortnight before. As a reading it is very similar, contradicting those who would have us believe that most Furtwngler performances were spur-of-themoment, random affairs. What is different is the response of the two orchestras, with the VPO, their strings in particular, playing with a singing intensity which rather puts the Berliners in the shade. To some extent, they are helped by the EMI recording which, though rather rusty-sound ing in places, does provide a real sense of presence and (an over-prominent flute apart) perspective. But it is the performance as a whole which is the thing, a marvellous example of Furtwangler's combined skills: as a conductor capable of drawing glorious playing from the VPO, as an interpreter capable of understanding the indissoluble links between musical structure and communicable feeling, and as a performer capable of turning a concert into an event.
Take, for instance, the moment of recapitulation in the slow movement. We are already in alien territory. After the exhausted close of the tragic first movement we are shipped into the distant key of E major. The oboe's song, if it is anything at all, is a song of exile and, not surprisingly, it becomes increasingly troubled and yet more tonally bewildered, something stressed by Furtwangler who tends to underwrite the music's daemonic elements in a way which Brahmsians of a settled taste may find disturbing. The recapitulation, Furtwdngler already movingly implies, is bound to be a thing of great moment; and, indeed, we know as much since Brahms's preparation for it-the quiet drum roll (the drum's first appearance in the movement), the anticipatory silence and the addition of trumpets to the eventual quiet E major chord-all indicate as much. In Berlin the realization was to be perfunctory, the chording sloppy but in the Vienna performance Furtwangler's recognition and realization of the moment is utterly spell-binding, a superb piece of concert-hall theatre, as well as a moving realization of Brahms's mood.
The reading is full of such insights. Nothing is wasted, not even the Allegretto e grazioso third movement which Furtwangler treats as a microcosm of the symphony, a movement of great equanimity which becomes grand, tense, and troubled before dropping us down into the dark well of the finale's opening phrases. Above all, the difficult first movement is superbly shaped. The opening is magnificent and yet finely proportioned. True, the orchestra is not together at the start but before we begin our niggling we should note that Furtwangler belonged to a school which often liked to build chords strategically. There's nothing very strategic about the opening chord, but there are some strikingly successful examples later on in the movement. What is remarkable about the opening, apart from the glorious sostenuto sound of the high-lying violin line, the perfect, ominous flow of the rhythm and the judicious regulation of the drum, is that it is all, in retrospect, germane to what is to follow. You need no sleeve or text-book analysis to follow the organic nature of Brahms's arguments as Furtwangler unfolds them for us, whether we are thinking in terms of tonal structures, the canonic treatment of key motifs or, simply, the huge mass and disjunctive force of the development's end. No conductor today, except perhaps Giulini, seems able to exert so much downward pressure on chords, fully, amply sounded and yet sustain a singing line and a forward-moving rhythm. Certainly, it is tempting, faced with a performance like this, to write a jeremiad on the state of conducting in the postFurtw�ngler age. To do so would, however, be unproductive. Furtw�ngler's is not the only way with Brahms's music, as Sir Adrian Boult, among others, has admirably demonstrated. For the moment, though, I confess I know no performance of this symphony which more strikingly illuminates those points where this symphony is palpably at its greatest. R.O., Gramophone, March 1985 MP3 Sample Symphony No. 1 , 1st mvt Listen Download purchase links: Ambient Stereo MP3 Mono 16-bit FLAC Ambient Stereo 16-bit FLAC Ambient Stereo 24-bit FLAC CD purchase links and all other information: PASC 340 - webpage at Pristine Classical
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Rare recordings by Mischa Elman
in new Obert-Thorn transfers
First digital outings for Elman's recordings
of Vivaldi, Beethoven and Paganini
 MISCHA ELMAN
Recordings 1931-51
Recorded 1931-51
Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Mark Obert-Thorn
VIVALDI (arr. Nachez) Violin Concerto in G minor
New Symphony Orchestra
Lawrance Collingwood conductor
BEETHOVEN Romance No. 1 in G major
BEETHOVEN Romance No. 2 in F major
Orchestra
Lawrance Collingwood conductor
MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto in E minor
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Desir� Defauw conductor
PAGANINI (arr. Elman) Caprice in A minor, Op. 1, No. 24
Wolfgang Ros� piano
Web page: PASC 339 Short notes Mischa Elman came into prominence as a star violinist just as the recording industry began at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, his earlier recordings were second only to those of the legendary Fritz Kreisler in popularity at the time. But as economic slump and the Great Depression hit in the late 20s and 1930s, his recording output lessened - though he did live to perform and record well into the era of stereo, with a discography that spans the years 1906-1967, and sales of several million discs. In this release Mark Obert-Thorn has trawled the archives for four rare and superlative recordings made by Elman in Britain and the United States between 1931 and 1951. From standard classics like the Mendelssohn Concerto to a rare 45rpm recording of his own arrangement and variations on Paganini's 24th Caprice, this is a treasure trove of musical history waiting to be opened. Notes on this recording The sources for the present transfers were American Victor "Z" pressings for the Vivaldi; British HMV shellacs for the Beethoven Romances; a Japanese LP transferred from the original wide-range lacquer masters for the Mendelssohn; and 45 rpm vinyls for the Paganini. This last item, as the timing would suggest, is not merely another violin-and-piano arrangement of the original Caprice but rather an elaborate set of variations composed by Elman. The original recording is rare and has never previously appeared on CD, as have neither the Vivaldi nor the Beethoven Romance in F. Some swish is inherent in the master of the second side of the Vivaldi, and there are occasional gritty patches on the lacquers that were used for the Mendelssohn concerto's LP transfer. Mark Obert-Thorn Portrait 1912 Elman was born at Talnoi, Russia, January 21, 1891. He studied at the Royal Music School in Odessa under Fiedelman, first appearing in public in 1899. Professor Leopold Auer was a member of the audience, and at his suggestion Elman went eventually to St. Petersburg in 1901. He came under the personal supervision of Auer and made immediate progress. Elman's d�but was made in Berlin, 1904, and his success was immediate, bringing many engagements all over Germany. The following year he appeared in London, and the success he had already achieved in Germany was repeated in England. His first tour of America took place in 1908, and American audiences at once endorsed the opinions of Europe. Few musicians have achieved so fine a reputation at such an early age, and there appears to be little doubt that Elman's future career will be as successful as that of his prodigy days. At first his style of playing naturally showed the influence of his brilliant teacher, but latterly he has developed a style of his own which marks him out as an artist of great individual attainments. His repertory includes all the great violin concertos and solos. The violin which Mischa Elman used as a boy was a small Nicolas Amati; latterly, however, he has used a Stradivarius, dated 1727. This instrument is in a fine state of preservation. The Etude, June 1912 Portrait 1989 Mischa Elman (1891-1967) studied with Leopold Auer as a young child and made his debut at the age of 13. He recorded a prodigious number of acoustic Victor records, some with his own string quartet, and some with such artists as Caruso and Frances Alda. He was in the same celebrity class as Kreisler, and second only to him as a gramophone bestseller. Then his career perhaps started to shine a little less in comparison with some superlative contemporary violinists, and it was only partly due to the depression that he made fewer records in the late 1920s and 1930s. After the war he made a handful of mono LPs for Decca, and then one or two stereo recordings for Vanguard and Philips. Gramophone, December 1989
MP3 Sample Beethoven Romance No. 2 Listen
Download purchase links: Mono MP3 Mono 16-bit FLAC CD purchase links and all other information: PASC 339 - webpage at Pristine Classical
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Recorded at 15 May 1946
Issued as Columbia DX1281/2
Matrix Nos. CAX 9524-7
Transfer from Columbia LP ML-4136
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