The Complete Rachmaninoff, Vol. 2. (mono electric piano
solos). RCA ARM3
0261 (3 discs), $17.96.
Sergei Rachmaninoff plays Concert III. (misc. piano solos). Klavier KS 123, stereo, $5.98.
Two notable series, both sparked by the 100th anniversary of the pianist's birth, and the two together make more than either by itself. RCA's recordings, of course, are direct disc, via the old 78 system, first acoustic, then later (as in this volume) the electrical method. Klavier has become rather coy, I should say, as to the origins of their recordings. In very small type, back bottom, we read "Recorded from Mason-Hamlin Ampico reproducing piano." Not a word anywhere in the notes. True, the player piano mechanism got itself a tarnished reputation in the old days of front parlor wang-bang uprights--mostly used by the kids of the family for lots of fun. But the really good systems, Welte, Ampico, Duo Art, achieved an almost miraculous fidelity to the original performance at a time when the disc-type recorder and its reproducer produced tiny, tinny noises at best (much as we all loved them).
Yes, there are a number of different works by Rachmaninoff that appear in both of these albums! Very first thing I looked for. But what a curious comparison, odd to inexplicability! We can assume that the piano-roll versions are earlier than the electrical versions. Even so, they are utterly different in each case-so different that the differing machinery could not possibly account for it all. Different tempi, but more important, radically different details in the ever-present rubato (artistically uneven rhythm, a hallmark of Rachmaninoffs type of playing). Curiously, the RCA versions are invariably much faster. In the same key (except for one) and so it isn't a mis-copying of the 78 rpm master. But where one flows liquidly, the other hops along manneredly. Several times I could scarcely believe it was the same piece, and went back again to be sure. The Polka de V.R. (W.R.) for instance. Incredibly different!
I have always been fascinated by these automatic piano recordings, because it is so difficult, at least at a distance, to pin down the variables that define the degree of accuracy. On the spot, with a highly trained mechanic and a thorough investigation of each mechanism, one could come out fairly sure. Tempo, maybe, is variable in the whole. (Did they have any way of fixing the speed rigidly?) But details of rhythm, punched into paper, are surely accurate. Loud and soft tones, for each individual note, were recorded-but are they to scale? Or can the range of loud-to-soft be varied? I question some of the violent shifts from loud to soft in this Klavier job. In this case, my ear tends to blame the piano, which is hard-voiced and percussively recorded, a twangy, unpleasant sound that has nothing to do with R.'s own sound. Rachmaninoff played a Steinway, and--if the "real" recordings are any evidence-he played it smoothly, with a mellifluous gradation of tone, even up to the loudest poundings. The Mason-Hamlin instrument is utterly different in sound, even allowing for the vast difference in recording technique. Wide-range stereo today and no-highs mono back then, blunting the transients.
RCA's Volume 2 contains a wealth of short pieces by R. himself and this is much the best material, so intelligently and poetically played, so completely understood. The Rachmaninoff versions of various other works now seem pretty strange and old fashioned in styling; his transcriptions for piano, from Gluck and Bach through Schubert and Rimsky Korsakoff (that Bumble Bee) are positively 19th century. Klavier's miscellany of short pieces covers similar interesting ground, but the hard toned bangy recording does not help. Klavier, why not listen to RCA (and to other similar disc originals) for some hints as to the "live" sound of the pianists on paper rolls? True, the "live" recordings are themselves pretty forced and artificial-even, perhaps, to the tempo, fast in order to get through in time. Not to mention the prevailing stone-dead acoustics of the old re cording days. Nevertheless, it would be good if there were a better correlation between these two series. There was, after all, only One Original! RCA has a Vol. 3, the orchestral works with Rachmaninoff as solo, and a Vol. 1, the acoustic recordings. Klavier has two other LPs of their material, as recorded by Rachmaninoff for the reproducing piano.
Piano Music by George Gershwin. William Bolcom. Nonesuch Quadra disc HQ 1284, $3.98. (Also stereo, H 71284.)
A terrific recording! This pianist, out of Seattle, who looks like a prep school English teacher with his drooping pipe and turtleneck sweater, is about as unlike Gershwin himself as you can imagine but he has the Gershwin feel.
His playing is exactly right, ever so musical, easily fluent (like Gershwin himself), expertly projected, yet not in the least pretentious or mannered. No self-conscious classical here! And a wonder, too, considering what, has happened to such as Scott Joplin, the black rag-time man, who has been elevated to super highbrow state and now sounds like hot house Chopin or something. Gershwin was a more complex individual than Joplin, of course, but he, too, can be ruined by pretentious playing and often is. Not here. It's wonderful.
Not that Mr. Bolcom uses a tinny piano as an "authentic" prop, or any other show biz sort of musical tricks.
Not a bit. He plays on an impeccable grand, by the sound of it, and in the most sophisticated fashion-but then, Gershwin in his own medium was highly sophisticated, if never highbrow. This is the way he ought to sound. The music is entirely little tidbits, short tunes, many less than a minute long, taken from dozens of Gershwin shows and "transcribed" for fabulous fingers by the master himself. He did a million more, ad lib, without ever writing them down. Couldn't stop.
Performances: A, Sound: B
Edgard Varèse: Offrandes, Intégrales, Octandre, Ecuatorial. The Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, Jan deGaetani, mezzo, Thomas Paul, Bass, dir, Weisberg. Nonesuch Quadradisc HQ-1269, $ 3.98. (Also H-71269, stereo, $ 2.98.)
This was Nonesuch/Elektra's main entry in the early CD-4 sweepstakes on the classical side, and it is a splendid beginning. Amiable old Verèse, who lived for years in New York's Greenwich Village, was the grandaddy and patron saint of electronic music, a man who composed "electronic" sounds for live instruments long before those sounds even existed. Somehow, genius does see ahead--or steer things ahead, anyhow. These four ruggedly acid pieces are his major work before he went into actual electronic music in the mid-50s after the war; these all date from the 1920s, composed for standard musical instruments, except for the pioneer Ondes Martenot, a wailing electronic affair tuned by the capacitance of a hand held near an upright metal element. (Have I got the right instrument? In any case, it definitely wails and it is ever so electronic, especially two of them.) What lovely sounds, at least for our ears! They were unthinkable, and rarely performed, in the 1920s. Even so, they persisted through sheer ruggedness and I have known all but Ecuatorial already for decades, in various live and recorded performances. The striking thing, today, is how well suited this harsh, rigorous chamber-type ensemble is to the recorded art. Perfect, in size, in clarity of detail and in variety of tone color--though the music dates from before that art existed in its modern form. That is how things work.
Two soloists assist with soprano and bass lines in Offrandes and Ecuatorial.
They just sing, quite reasonably; this is not the time when singers were asked to do anything else, like shout or talk or groan or stand on their heads. Maybe they were lucky, though they probably didn't think so then.
Performances: A, Sound: A
Kurt Weill: Kleine Dreigroschenmusik (Suite from the Threepenny Opera). Darius Milhaud: La Création du Monde. The Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, Arthur Weisberg. Nonesuch Quadradisc HQ 1281, $3.98. (Also stereo, H-71281).
Here is the companion quadradisc to the excellent Varèse recording, the two together the major "classical" element in Nonesuch's first quadraphonic release. Same artists, same fine performance and good sound. Two of my long time favorite pieces from the Twenties! I have the original 78 rpm shellac recording of La Création which was Milhaud's big try at classical jazz and Afro-American folklore-it was a ballet, with décor by Fernand Léger. As for Kurt Weill, his familiar Three-penny Opera music was beautifully rendered into this snazzy little Suite for small orchestra and the performance here has all the instrumentation and flavor of the original sound, pure 1920s. The two pieces, with Varese's four, give a splendid sonic picture of what was going on in those heady days, when the European composers came over and visited Harlem, got to know Gershwin and generally reveled in Afro-American sounds, which they took back home with them to titillate the Parisians, who never had it so great. Or, like Varèse, settled in the New World for good and made pictures of a skyscraper society in music that sounded just the way things looked. It's all there in these two records.
Performances: A, Sound: A
Luciano Berio: Recital I (For Cathy). Cathy Berberian; London Sinfonietta, Berio. RCA ARLI 0036, stereo, $5.98.
Luciano Berio is one of our most talented international operators in music, ever so Italian in his outlook, even so, and one of the most original and humorous constructors of sonic art forms today. Phew! Just try this. You'll laugh. If you don't scream. It's fun.
What the man asks his people to do, and Cathy to do! They all do it willingly for him. Awhile back it was the famed Swingle Singers in Sinfonia ( Columbia), who made every noise a human throat can produce and a lot you didn't know about. Now it's Cathy Berberian's turn--she is an excellent pro soprano and a favorite with many composers, a special favorite of Berio's. She goes to town.
It's a recital, all right. The works, including the music and all of Cathy's thoughts, emotions and what--not, produced in groans, speeches, everything.
The music is Berio's special kind, an incredible melange of familiar bits from the repertoire of a recital singer all mixed into a matrix of total modernity via the orchestra. Cathy acts the whole thing out, alternating between music and talking, shouting, hysteria, anything and everything. She begins most sedately with a bit of a Monteverdi aria, then a lovely bit of the same composer's Lamento della Ninfa, which stops with a loud 00F, right in the middle of a note. She is furious because her pianist is late. More side remarks, to modern noises in the orchestra, and more bits of music--you really should know your soprano repertory if you want to love this thing! Such a mixture. By side 2, things get very raucous--a solo instrumental quintet is playing rings around bits of her songs, she waxes ecstatic, then pompous, there are rude shouts and blats, twisty bits of tape-ish music, a tantalizing quote by Cathy from Richard Strauss ("I'm so tired!") and then a serious and quiet lyric coda. It's all an incredible hodge-podge; and yet it is Berio's genius to weld the helter-skelter bits into something that, you will begin to perceive, exists for itself. Amazing.
Good party piece, too.
Performance: A, Sound: B
René Kollo Sings Wagner. Staatskapelle Berlin, Otmar Suitner. Columbia MG 32302, stereo, $5.98.
A new Heldentenor! They are indeed ultra-rare, those golden-brazen tenors with vocal cords of tempered steel, who can outsing 100 orchestral players and do it for hours on end. We haven't had much of a Heldentenor ("hero-tenor") since the great Lauritz Melchior, who, fortunately, is well preserved on records for all of us to hear, the man who dominated the big Wagnerian roles for a whole generation of great opera singing.
His successors have been vocally weak in comparison and, all too often, musically enfeebled as well.
Two whole LP records, four sides, on the Columbia label. Somebody' must think this young singer is good. (He obviously does himself; just study that pose on the album cover.) And indeed he has the right type of voice, one in a thousand. It is in fact all chrome steel, powerful, with an edge that cuts unmercifully and a volume that doesn't need any close-up mics to build its presence. Definitely, a Heldentenor type, at last.
Ah youth. This Kollo, who is 36, they say, is only a calf-like Heldentenor.
Much of his singing is superb in color, in diction, in pitch. But he is unstable.
When he is bad he is awful. Like so many German tenors, he projects that curious sense of impending disaster, as though the voice were going to break, or collapse, or slide off pitch or just squawk-but it doesn't. Not in any way comparable to the great Melchior, who could flat very effectively and often did, but never, never sounded unstable. Moreover, this man mostly just sings. He hasn't much subtlety. In the earlier Wagner he does best, where the subtlety is less. In Die Meistersinger, where Wagner's late and marvelous sense of changing inner thoughts comes through so beautifully, Kollo is lost. The Prize Song is just so much sounding brass. The man has a lyric, gentle voice projection, but he hasn't learned to use it. Maybe he doesn't think he needs to. He'll learn-we hope.
The local Berlin orchestra, in contrast, does a rather nice job with the Wagnerian expression and, indeed, carries Herr Kollo along on the grand wave as often as he carries it. It's not a great orchestra but it knows its business. So do the recording engineers. The credit goes to VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, Berlin.
Performances: B, Sound: B +
People Past and Present. Thomas Hardy; John Donne, the Duke of Wellington; Queen Victoria. Recorded in association with the National Gallery, London. Argo ZPL 1164; 1167; 1158; 1159, stereo, $5.95 ea. (Many others).
Argo in England has long specialized (let's spell it in English) in speech recordings, but not so much the solo variety, as with our Caedmon, as in various types of ensemble, and/or dramatics, often including music. Some of their readings of poetry, alternating several voices, are superb examples of the recorded art form at its best. Some Argo offerings suffer from a certain British stiffness, including the two--at least-of this series that I have listened to, Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington.
The originals were live programs, done before an audience in the National Gallery, and the recording is live, with audience in place. The technique is simple enough. Two or three actor voices and a "narrator" share the running script, divided up between them as a sort of half-play. A stage reading, in other words, though whether with costume or no I could not say.
On records, the thing works only moderately well. The fault is not in the very British accents, which are entirely to be expected! Nor in the material, which is well organized if awfully quick and spotty. What bothered me mainly was the acting, which is done strictly in stage style with all the projection and exaggeration required for that challenging medium. Before the close-up mics, this styling very soon grates on the ear.
Too forced, too projected, too highly colored. You can see the sonic make-up.
You are much, much too close. The rapid-fire survey of the continuity, with the quoted excerpts invariably no more than a few words long, gives a hop-skip and-jump quality to the show, which is not good on records, either.
I enjoyed the records and found the shows informative and entertaining, within the above reservations. Argo, as you see, has lots of them-and hundreds of other speech records, also music, all of which I'd like to review if we had vast quantities of space.
(Audio magazine, Jan. 1974; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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