Pristine Newsletter - 4 October 2013  
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Beethoven Centenary Vol. 2

Symphonies
3 and 4 

New Queen's Hall Orchestra/Wood

Hall� Orchestra/Harty

New review: 3 Oct. 
by
Jonathan Woolf

Save
20%!
on all downloads of this album until 10 October

"This Pristine transfer effortlessly and embarrassingly outclasses the competition" 
 

    


English Columbia marked the centenary of Beethoven's death with a first-ever electrically recorded symphonic cycle, adding some chamber works and concertos. This is the sequence of recordings now being released by Pristine Audio under the title 'The Columbia Beethoven Centennial Symphony Series', of which this is volume two. The first four symphonies, as noted by Mark Obert-Thorn, went to British or British-resident conductors - George Henschel (naturalised) who directed the First - once on Past Masters LP - Beecham, who had an erratic way with No.2 - and then the subjects of this release, Henry Wood and Hamilton Harty in the Eroica and No.4 respectively. The remainder went to that colossus of rectitudinous symphonic conducting, Felix Weingartner.
 
Wood and Columbia had received a bit of a critical drubbing for their earlier significantly cut acoustic recording of the Eroica. Made in 1922 on six 78 sides - the electric took 14 sides. This isn't something that the notes go into in any depth, invariably, since they're concerned with the recordings under discussion, though Obert-Thorn rightly refers to that earlier recording in passing. It was, in fact, the first substantial recording of the Eroica; following it we find Oskar Fried (on 12 sides) in 1924 on Polydor, Frieder Weissmann on Odeon in 1924-25. Individual movements came from a few diverse sources, notably one of Fritz Busch's first studio recordings made when he was director of the W�rttemberg Opera House Orchestra.
 
Wood's acoustic effort was disparaged not for what remained of the score, which was played with his characteristically robust, direct, musically intelligent flair, but for what was missing. At a time when Columbia was beginning to release substantially uncut chamber music, and when other companies were experimenting with the symphonic repertoire in large-scale recordings - notably Wood's British contemporary Landon Ronald for HMV - the 1922 Eroica seemed retrogressive in principle and self-defeating musically in practice. No such problems attended to this late 1926 recording. In days of yore, when the corpus of Wood's recordings had not been reissued or, if they had, people tended to listen with their eyes and not their ears, this recording would have elicited the critical epithet 'bluff'. As in bluff, muscular, no-nonsense - with a hint that they really meant unsubtle. In point of fact, Wood was an eminently sane conductor whose raft of recordings shows a strongly directional musicality. This symphony recording is no exception. There are no expressive exaggerations, the slow movement maintaining a noble straightforwardness and rhythmic steadiness. The only curiosity - and it must be intentional - occurs in the use of a large quotient of slides in rapid succession at around 11:40 in the slow movement. It's unusual in the context of the symphony as a whole, where Wood doesn't encourage the strings of his New Queen's Hall Orchestra to do the same. The orchestra is well drilled - doubtless the conductor had recourse to his famous tuning fork - and performs splendidly.
 
I once had a long correspondence with a man who assured me that he had seen test pressings of another of Wood's Beethoven centennial recordings, that of the Violin Concerto with Albert Sammons but that set, along with another eyeball-popping collaboration of Wood and Ignaz Friedman in the Emperor concerto, was never issued. For what it's worth the set was apparently last seen in Manchester in the 1960s. That city's local orchestra, the Hall�, was recorded in the Fourth Symphony with their conductor Hamilton Harty. There was no pioneering to be done in this case. Hans Pfitzner had beaten English Columbia to it in Berlin in 1924, followed soon after by the semi-ubiquitous Weissmann (what about a Weissmann series?) and then the youthful George Szell and the Grosses Symphonie-Orchester in 1925.
 
I only know of one other CD transfer of the Harty - though doubtless there are already 300 Japanese transfers - and that's an indifferent effort on Phonographe PH5015 coupled with Solomon's recording of the Tchaikovsky Concerto. This Pristine transfer effortlessly and embarrassingly outclasses that one. It captures all the subtle nuances enshrined in Harty's romanticised manipulation of tempi and string tone. The Hall� strings slide much more consistently and slowly than Wood's NQHO and thus there's more overt expressivity, corporately speaking, and perhaps more character, not least from the Hall�'s famous wind principals. There are some unusual tempi on display - the finale is especially motoric - but it's all well sustained and ensemble is in no way imperilled.
 
The remainder of this series will be devoted to the Weingartner recordings, but let me send an enthusiastic plea for people to scour attics and basements, and studies and cobwebbed drawing rooms, to see if that elusive Violin Concerto can yet be found.


PASC 386 (73:45)

All FLAC and MP3 downloads of this recording will be offered with a 20% price reduction from 4 -10 October. This does not affect any other promotions or discounts you may be entitled to.

 

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CONTENTS
This Week  Tchaikovsky memories come flooding back
Accounts   A "new website" refresher on logging in 
Mravinsky  Tchaikovsky Symphonies 4, 5 & 6
PADA           New service imminent - watch this space!

Mravinsky's outstanding Tchaikovsky Symphonies 4-6

Ahh, those Russians... 



This week's new release

The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, on a tour of western Europe in 1960 under maestro Yevgeny Mravinsky, recorded three Tchaikovsky symphonies for DGG. They're still regarded today as among the best recorded performances ever...
Yevgeny Mravinsky

Once upon an evening, some time in the early 1980s, an impressionable teenager was taken to Birmingham Town Hall to hear a concert to be given by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra - one of the few concerts he'd ever heard there (indeed, at that time, anywhere) not given by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

The fact that I was seeing not just another orchestra, but one from the other side of the Iron Curtain, added a sense of occasion and novelty - did the delay in the appearance of the conductor mean he'd defected? (And if he'd chosen to do so, what was the attraction of 1980s Birmingham, of all places!?!) Didn't one of the double bass players look a bit like Boris Karloff? How many members of the West Midlands audience were really undercover KGB operatives, possibly using unconvincing Black Country accents to cement their unlikely disguises?

(A completely irrelevant digression: I went to YouTube to try and find a good example of a Black Country accent for those who might be unfamiliar with it and its distance from a Russian accent, and found my former schoolmate and BBC colleague Adrian Chiles, now a well-known British TV presenter and proud West Midlander, discussing how he was once almost recruited as a British spy - told in his inimitable Black Country brogue here.)

But anyway, pre-concert Cold War joking soon gave way to open-mouthed astonishment and, by the end of the concert, possibly the most enthusiastic and rapturous standing ovation I've ever participated in. (Some of us even jumped the gun a movement early, so carried away were we...)

The main item on the programme that night, or at least the only one that I still remember thirty years later (I can find no details of the tour online, nor am I sure who conducted it, as regular conductor Svetlanov doesn't appear to have been in the UK at the right time to have been the man), was a storming performance of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony - and of course we can't have been the first to be caught out by the end of the 3rd movement of that particular work!

I recall, at a time and age when I, like all my peers, was mainly interested in rock music, going back to high school the next day and waxing lyrical about the concert - much to the surprise and disbelief of my friends, who couldn't quite believe that classical music could be of such interest and invoke such a passionate response in anyone in their early teens.

Of such moments are powerful memories forged, and musical interests kindled. Why a Russian orchestra should be so powerful in the music of Tchaikovsky I probably didn't really stop to consider at the time - I probably assumed they were simply the best orchestra from a very big country so they should, by rights, be pretty good anyway! Yet of all the music they played that night, only the Tchaikovsky stayed with me...

Working on this week's release, with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Mravinsky recorded on tour some twenty-something years earlier in London and Vienna, brought those memories flooding back, invoking some of the same power I'd experienced in the USSR SO's Tchaikovsky myself. There's something in the passion and commitment to the music, when played like this, that's utterly irresistible. However well you think you know the symphonies, here they're truly something else.

This remastering begins with a set of good original recordings and lifts them into a different league. I've not yet heard Mravinsky's earlier mono recordings referred to in the Gramophone reviews we've exhumed for this release, but reading between the lines I wonder whether the sound quality of DGG's original LPs was at least partly letting down the perception of these performances. There was a slightly wooden sonic acoustic around them, and at time they were missing real depth - a depth that I've managed to find and bring out here. As is often the case I've also managed to lift a veil from the treble and clarify a little inner-voice confusion. I do hope you like the results - for me they're a really fabulous listening experience! This is a recording I'll definitely be returning to, on a very regular basis.





Pristine accounts and online log-ins

Every week I receive a number of e-mails from long-standing customers who're confused by our new website's requirement that they log in. They enter their e-mail address but have no password, so they request one - being a long-standing customer they must surely have had one once? But one never arrives, so they send me an e-mail...

A lot of people reading this will already be au fait with this, but for those who aren't I'll repeat here what I've written before (while everyone was on holiday!).

1. Pristine Classical website accounts are a new thing - an essential component of our new website, which came into being on 30th July 2013.

2. Existing PADA accounts are not connected to Pristine Classical website accounts - the two systems are entirely separate and incompatibly (which is why we're working hard on a PADA replacement...).

3. A Pristine Account holds no financial information. It records your name and address (so we can charge you the correct amount and send you the right items to the right addresses), and gives you a personal space where your downloads are always available. There's nothing more to it than that!


You'll find more information about how to use our new website, including the requirement to set up an account, here:

http://www.pristineclassical.com/start-here

 
 


Andrew Rose
4 October 2013  

Go Digital

Mravinsky's legendary 1960 Tchaikovsky Late Symphonies
 
Stereo DGG recordings in stunning new 32-bit XR remasters

 

  

  
Tchaikovsky  
Symphony No. 4 

Symphony No. 5
Symphony No. 6, 'Path�tique'   


Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra
Yevgeny Mravinsky, conductor

    

Recorded in London & Vienna in stereo, 1960

                                                         

Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Andrew Rose

Website page: PASC 396     

  

  

Producer's note 


Yevgeny Mravinsky made these recordings with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra for DGG whilst on a tour of western Europe in the autumn of 1960 in sessions which took place in London (Symphony No. 4) and Vienna (Symphonies 5 & 6). Although regarded still today as pillars of the recorded canon, reviews both upon release in 1961 and, quoted here, upon reissue in the 1970s, found something lacking sonically. Likewise contemporary reviews of the currently-available DGG CDs.

My aim in carrying out a 32-bit XR remastering of the recordings was to see whether a harmonic rebalancing of the recordings might serve to eliminate these reservations, and I'm pleased to report that substantial improvements have been possible. The sound of the originals was unusually boxy for 1960, with a rather constricted top end and a lack of real depth in the bass. All three of these shortcomings have been resolved here, bringing an even greater sense of immediacy and realism to these fabulous performances.

 

Andrew Rose

  

  

MP3 Sample
Finale, Symphony No. 5: Download and listen  




Historic Reviews - excerpts    


1. "Turning to the Mravinsky performances one is in another world. They tingle with the excitement and electricity that a great live performance generates. His record of No. 4 has tremendous personality even if it is not without idiosyncratic touches. Although the brass in the Leningrad orchestra has a tendency to blare at times, the fact remains that the refinement and imagination that informs the string playing and the beauty of their phrasing puts them in a class of their own. Mravinsky's approach is carefully thought out and his shaping of the architecture, though at times personal, has the merit of greater organic logic. Some of the dynamic markings are not scrupulously observed but microphone placing may account for some of this..."

2. "Mravinsky's accounts of the late Tchaikovsky symphonies have tremendous tension and virtuosity, a sense of spiritual commitment and emotional power that are quite out of the ordinary. Even when, as happens at one point in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, he ignoes the dynamic markings he does so with such conviction that you are left with the feeling that he is right. These transfers seem to me as every bit as good as the originals that I played relatively recently (I have only sampled these copies) and although my allegiance to Mravinsky's earlier record-now deleted-with the Leningrad Philharmonic of the Pathetique remains unshaken (DGM18334, 2/57), this later version is still one of the most moving and thrilling accounts of the work committed to record. These performances radiate a tremendous power, a sense of truth and authenticity of experience and they remain for me at any rate among the classics of the gramophone."


R.L., The Gramophone Excerpts: 1. November 1973 (from box set reissue), 2. December 1974 (from individual LP reissues)