Conducting Wagner at Bayreuth

This week we reach the second of this year's numerical milestones for Pristine with our 100th vocal music release. It's taken us literally a decade to get this far: our first vocal release was a recording made by Clemens Krauss with the same orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, in 1950 - this transfer was given to me on a couple of CDs by way of introduction on the day I met Peter Harrison for the first time at the end of 2003, a couple of months before I moved from England to France in early 2004. A year later it was to become our first vocal release at Pristine Classical - Die Fledermaus.

Today of course it's Wagner, not Strauss, but we're back in the Vienna Musikvereinssaal - and we're back with another conductor whose early and unexpected death robbed us of who knows what untold gems. (Krauss was also, of course, the other provider of a Ring cycle here on Pristine, with his 1953 Bayrueth recording).

When I realised we were heading towards this 100th issue I realised it would be worth pulling the stops out and putting together something both special and fitting, something that would be both popular (I hope!), would reflect our recent output (Furtwangler's 1950 Ring), and would also be of wider significance. At the end of this 200th birthday year, it had to be Wagner. I'd also received a request for this specific recording by e-mail - the writer making it perfectly clear that he was deeply dissatisfied with EMI's CD release.

So the 1954 Die Walk�re it was. I assembled my materials and got to work. I'm never quite sure in advance what XR remastering (which has a new logo today, too!) is about to achieve when I start working on a recording. Sometimes it seems to lift a veil from the sound, sometimes it opens a rather nasty can of worms.

Here it was more like lifting a heavy blanket from the recording to reveal something rather wonderful hidden underneath - with all the clarity, warmth and depth you'd hope to find in a later recording, and remarkably few flaws beyond tape hiss to contend with. (By comparison, I'm working on a 1948 Soviet opera recording right now for next month which is perhaps a perfect example of how not to do it!)

Earlier in the week I posted a couple of excerpts from this recording on our Facebook page, via rather static videos on our new YouTube channel, to enthusiastic responses. It really is a great-sounding recording now, and one can only wonder "what if"? Recording was completed on 8th October 1954. Furtw�ngler died on 30th November that same year (coincidentally, 14 years to the day before I was born). Furtw�ngler had elected to begin his studio Ring with the second of the four operas - we can only guess how the whole might have turned out. It would have been the first full Ring on record; instead that accolade went to Solti.

Writing in 1989, the great critic Alan Blyth had no doubt that Furtw�ngler would have been the ideal man for the task, as evidenced by his studio Walk�re:

"It is one of the sadnesses of recorded history that Furtw�ngler died before he was able to complete his studio recording of the Ring begun so auspiciously with this set of Die Walk�re in 1954. At that time Furtw�ngler's interpretation of the cycle, matured over more than a quarter of a century's experience of the work, was acknowledged to be the most profound of its day. We are lucky enough to have his 1953 recording of the whole cycle emanating from Rome Radio but, valuable as those performances are, the orchestral playing and sound quality leave something to be desired. As we can hear in this performance, the conductor's gifts as a Wagnerian were very special. He managed to combine a natural spontaneity of expression with a profound, metaphysical knowledge of the music's and text's inner meaning. Within a broad freedom over tempi and dynamics, Furtw�ngler held a secure grip on the long paragraphs of Wagner's writing. That command was based above all on the firm, rich, intense sound he encouraged from his cellos and double basses. No detail was overlooked in his readings yet it was his skill to correlate these details with his total view of the work in hand. A master of transition, he was able to encompass the sweep of a whole act. Nobody before or since has quite managed to convey the tragic force of Wagner's writing - listen to the close of Wotan's Narration - with such unerring conviction and inevitability. The sheer incandescence allied to truthfulness of his approach brooks no denial."

Take a listen to it now - it really is quite remarkable, in every respect.



A fortuitous anniversary for Pristine Streaming Exclusives

I was preparing Dr. John Duffy's transfer of Samuel Barber conducting his Second Symphony for Decca yesterday when I stumbled across the recording date in my Decca discography and realised it was exactly 63 years ago to the day - 13 December 1950 - that Barber made the recording. I hope subscribers to Pristine Streaming will seek it out and enjoy it to the full!

We've added a new annual-subscription model to Pristine Streaming, which essentially means you get two months free when you sign up for a year. See here for more details.

A Christmas Gift For You!

Charlie Parker

Last Sunday morning I was listening to the radio whilst shaving when a jazz-tinged Christmas song came on. To be honest it sounded pretty awful - the sound quality, not the performance - but as I wiped my face clean a tiny niggling idea was worming its way into my mind.

I remembered a rather poor Miles Davis compilation LP this was very loosely sold as a Christmas issue and wondered what was on it and when it was recorded. Admittedly I hadn't seen it in my collection for a good few years, and after a search, gave up on finding it. So I turned instead to my Charlie Parker collection, figuring that the sound quality I'd heard on the radio indicated something more of his vintage than Davis's.

After much digging - in which nothing even vaguely seasonal was found - I came across three tunes released by Savoy from a live broadcast on Christmas Day 1948 from The Royal Roost. Now I'm guessing when the announcer, "Symphony Sid" Torin, refers to it being Christmas morning, that this is actually the small hours following on from the evening of Christmas Eve, and we're playing deep into the night.

Anyway, what's special here is a unique (as far as I can tell) rendition of White Christmas by Parker, with Kenny Dorham (who'd just replaced Miles Davis) on trumpet, and Parker regulars Al Haig (piano), Tommy Potter (bass) and Max Roach (drums).

The sound quality on the Savoy issue is pretty abysmal, but again XR remastering has made a massive difference. It's not going to find the unrecorded frequencies above 8kHz, and just trying to bring up those upper buried harmonics that are there was very tricky indeed, but it was worth the effort.

I worked on the three recordings Savoy released from this broadcast - Half Nelson, White Christmas, and a Davis number, Little Willie Leaps. I've put them together for you as a 16-bit Ambient Stereo FLAC download, available only from this newsletter:

If you're still not sure what to do with a FLAC here's the perfect time to learn. First unzip the download into three FLAC files. Then either play directly (forget iTunes for this - Apple still won't support the Internet's most popular lossless format) using something free like Songbird or XBMC, or burn to CD using one of the excellent commercial packages from the likes of Nero or Roxio.

Either way, enjoy the music - and seasons greetings to you from all at Pristine.

We'll have one more release for you this year - next Friday, 20th December - thereafter I'll leave you to enjoy Christmas (if you're celebrating it) and we'll be back in 2014.