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ZIMBALIST

Brahms & Sibelius Violin Concertos    

 I should not be reviewing this issue, because I was involved (for good and for ill-more later) in the production of the Sibelius, and some comments from my Fanfare 32:1 review of another recording appear in Pristine's booklet. But the story behind it is so fascinating that our editor wanted it told. Efrem Zimbalist (1899-1985) was one of the great violinists of the first half of the 20th century, but his recorded legacy is slight (much of it from the acoustic era): the Bach Double Concerto with Fritz Kreisler in 1915 (Victor 8040/1, Pearl 9996), the Brahms D-Minor Sonata with Harry Kaufman in 1930 (Columbia 67786/88 in set M-140, Doremi 7739), Beethoven's op. 40 Romance in 1935 (Columbia 68596, Pearl 0032), and Ysaÿe's First Sonata in 1939 (Victor 16194/5 in set M-669, Pearl 0032). There are also lots of discs of single movements and violin lollipops (Opus OPK-2003), many by little-known composers-Beethoven and Brahms are separated by Bethier, van Biene, Bowen, and Braga. He also accompanied his wife, Alma Gluck, in recitals and on records (Nimbus 7904), even as a pianist (Marston 52001). Zimbalist was also a composer; he recorded six of his own pieces, the Gordon String Quartet recorded his 1932 Quartet in E Minor (Schirmer 2521/4), his pupil Roy Malan recorded his Violin Sonata (Genesis GS 1070), and Leopold Stokowski led the NBC Symphony in his American Rhapsody (Guild GHCD 2361). Rimsky-Korsakov was almost a father to the young Zimbalist, who later wrote a beautiful Fantasy on Le Coq d'Or that has been recorded by many violinists. The only Zimbalist live performance of a concerto that has previously surfaced is this Brahms with Koussevitzky.

So where did the Sibelius come from? Harold G. Colt Jr. (1917-95) was the last of the Colt revolver family. Educated at M.I.T., he became one of the finest audio engineers of the monaural era; his own label, Classic Editions, was widely celebrated for its audiophile organ recordings in the 1950s. From 1939 to 1950, Colt sat at home recording music from radio broadcasts: the Metropolitan Opera, Toscanini's NBC Symphony, and the major orchestras of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Boston, and New York. The amount of music on the radio at the time was amazing; almost every night included a live major symphony orchestra concert, on Saturday both the Met and the NBC, on Sunday the Philharmonic at 3 p.m. and the Cleveland at 9. Colt recorded them all, using fine equipment and two turntables, so that nothing need be missed.

Colt died in 1995, willing his entire estate to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Thanks to a gift from its next-door neighbor, Tanglewood had just doubled in land area, so the BSO was most excited about the Kubota tractor in Colt's garage, but it also contracted me to appraise Colt's record collection and (over my objections of ineptitude) his stereo system. In the living room of his home in New Hartford, Connecticut, Colt had a $50,000 system, with a $6,400 Mark Levinson ML-3 power amplifier, $4,325 ML-7/2 preamp, and $5,640 Linn-Sondek turntable / Goldmund arm / Van den Hul cartridge combination (with two spare cartridges), plus a $3,800 Nakamichi 1000ZXL cassette deck, a $1,700 McIntosh FM tuner, and a seemingly endless supply of fancy extras. (No, I never got to hear it.) His custom-installed speaker system had 103 built-in units, with the bass reflex enclosures extending beyond the house's outer walls. The records were housed in a single room that had its own heating/air-conditioning system (separate from that of the rest of the house), automatically controlled for temperature and humidity. There were 6,120 LPs (sold to a dealer), 2,725 CDs (absorbed into the library of the Tanglewood Music Center), a few hundred 78s, and hundreds of video discs and audio tapes.

There were also 1,320 home-recorded acetate discs; however, Colt had been so busy recording that he took no time to label most of them. Sides for each piece were numbered, but there was no indication of composer, work, or performers. Which provided a lovely challenge of detective work to identify them-the last of which was solved only this month: an April 10, 1948, Fritz Reiner/Pittsburgh Symphony broadcast of Nikolai Lopatnikoff's op. 27 Sinfonietta. In those days, the Sunday New York Times provided weekly listings of broadcast concerts, and initial investigations suggested that the discs had been stored in chronological sequence. But at some point, Colt must have relocated, for the nearly chronological sequence had random breaks every 20 records or so, the breaks often occurring midwork. Such discs are extremely fragile, so I would play only the final minute of each piece, hoping that a radio announcement would be included (which happened about half the time), or at least that the work would be recognizable-thus the difficulty in identifying the Lopatnikoff.

Many unique treasures surfaced: a 1948 Das Lied von der Erde with Kathleen Ferrier, Svet Svanholm, and Bruno Walter leading the New York Philharmonic. No complete recording had been known before, so Colt's discs were used to fill out its first release, in the Philharmonic's 12-CD historical set The Mahler Broadcasts. Mahler Symphonies Nos. 3 and 8-each cut to one-hour length-from a 1942 Mahler cycle by Erno Rapee and the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra-the Eighth announced by New York's Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. (Rapee had the nerve to perform the "Resurrection" Symphony on January 25, 1942, the same day as Walter and the Philharmonic; to hear both, one had about 30 minutes to stroll from Radio City, at 50th Street, to Carnegie Hall, on 57th.) And this Sibelius Violin Concerto. The announcer said only, "Mr. Zimbalist is returning to the stage of Severance Hall"; a search of the historical New York Times-for Zimbalist and Cleveland, from 1940 to 1950-turned up a January 9, 1944, broadcast listing.

The BSO donated the discs to the appropriate performing ensembles; because of their rarity and fragility, each was hand-delivered. At the New York Philharmonic Archives, I asked archivist Barbara Haws, "Do you have all of the Philharmonic's recordings?" She replied "I don't know; what we really need is a discography." After a three-second pause, I said "I'll compile one for you," and thus began my third career, as a discographer. The Met Archives, and those of Philadelphia and Boston (the records had been in Connecticut) proved no problem; the NBC Symphony records had no home to go to, so Mortimer H. Frank was given the opportunity to take what he thought might be useful. Cleveland was an eight-hour drive each way, but it was necessary because of the Zimbalist Sibelius. Imagine my shock when the then-archivist checked her records and haughtily informed me that the Sibelius was not a Cleveland Orchestra performance. I knew she was wrong, but I kept my mouth shut (I should have brought the discs home with me). About six months later, she mailed a brief note admitting that it was a Cleveland performance (but not apologizing), saying that her computer had listed only subscription performances, and this had been a benefit concert-on January 9, 1944.

And now for that good and ill: Before going to Cleveland, I played the Sibelius once and taped it on a 15-ips reel. For these 16-inch records, I had retrieved an ancient (1950s) Rek-O-Kut turntable from the attic, oiled it, cleaned it, and let it warm up for many hours to get up to speed. There were eight sides-which I didn't attempt to join, as I have no such skills. When, years later, I passed the tape on to Mark Obert-Thorn, he found that the first side had a strange post-echo, sounding eight seconds after each note. After long consideration, he and Andrew Rose decided the recording was too important to ignore, so Mark did the best he-or anyone else-could do with that echo. Since Harold Colt was an expert engineer, I must assume that it was my taping that caused that echo, although I can't imagine how.

So I won't review this disc, except to say that Obert-Thorn's transfer of the Brahms is vastly superior to a Rococo LP and a Doremi CD, and that his result with the Sibelius is nothing short of miraculous. The Brahms comes to life, and the BSO strings are recognizable for the first time. Instead, here's a favorite Zimbalist story, gleaned from Roy Malan's Efrem Zimbalist: A Life (Amadeus Press, 2004). A lot of musicians in those days were pranksters. By 1925, Leopold Auer was growing old, no longer able to make a living playing or teaching. Zimbalist knew Auer would never accept charity, so he decided to stage a grand gala for his teacher's benefit. Auer, Kreisler, and Zimbalist played a Vivaldi three-violin concerto; Josef Hofmann played Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Liszt; Zimbalist and Ossip Gabrilowitsch played the Brahms D-Minor Sonata; Zimbalist and Jascha Heifetz played the Bach Double Concerto. Zimbalist had agreed to play the piano accompaniment in a piece written for the occasion by another Auer pupil, Joseph Achron, but, when he saw how difficult the piano part was, he became very apprehensive about appearing in public with Heifetz. Nevertheless, he practiced hard and decided to go through with it. He and Heifetz walked out onto the stage of a sold-out Carnegie Hall; as the nervous Zimbalist sat down at the piano, he glanced up at his page turner: It was Sergei Rachmaninoff.

My strong recommendation is that you read Robert Maxham's review.   

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