by Edward Tatnall Canby
Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps. London Symphony Orch., Bernstein. Columbia MQ 31520 quadraphonic $ 6.98.
Tchaikowsky: Swan Lake Ballet Suite. New York Philharmonic, Bernstein. Columbia MQ 30056, quadraphonic, $6.98.
I sometimes wonder, as I listen to matrix quadraphonic of this classical sort via Columbia's full-logic SQ (which at this moment I am giving an extended listen-to over a long period of time) whether the creative experts who combine their immense talents to put forth these discs are really able to envision the public's primitive reaction to their finished product. There is so much talk of technicalities, not to mention spirited argument and even corporate battles, that--on the inside--one can quickly bog down in quadrants, j factors, f-f and a thousand more such, quite aside from the merits of matrix vs. discrete. What the public hears, we must remember, is music. If the trumpet shrieks and the horns blat rightly in Sacre, if the sound is vivid and the liveness spacious, then who cares which quadrant they come from! It really doesn't matter.
Odd, because Columbia has produced a kind of benign contradiction here. Le Sacre, if I am right, was done as a deliberate revolutionary experiment in multi-track surround recording, à la pop music, though simultaneously performed. The conductor was in the middle, the instruments ranged in big families all around him, both front and back, and the music was taken down in eight tracks for later remix into four (and presumably two for stereo). On the other hand, Swan Lake was, if I guess correctly, done more conventionally--if I may use that term. That is, the intention, whatever the actual instrumental set-up, was to create a sense of front spread, with the sound all around, in terms of reverb (as in many live situations) but not the instruments themselves. I.e., you are supposed to hear the orchestra out in front and the concert hall all around you. Big difference.
OK--so what do we hear? What I heard first of all, on direct AB comparison, was simply a big difference in liveness. Le Sacre is recorded in one of those swimming pool or arena-type halls, an enormous resonant space in which the sound goes 'round and 'round. Swan Lake has a more conventional and lesser liveness, standard classical style.
Now I ask you, in an indoor swimming pool can you tell from which direction a joyful child's shriek comes, among dozens of others? You cannot.
Yes, I get a sense of contrasting placement in Le Sacre and it is good. But in this vast reverberation I really can't spot the quadrants! Nor do I care one way or the other. There's just enough separation of brass, strings, winds, so you hear them dramatically differentiated-but where they come from isn't important. The sound IS, however, all around you and marvelously so. You can face any old direction. You are immersed in the great orchestral battering ram, if I may mix an improbable metaphor. That's good.
I loved every minute of it. I have never heard Le Sacre with such an immediate and dramatic living-room impact.
Even though I felt that Bernstein flagged a bit towards the end; and that last little musical dribble, before the final explosion, didn't come off at all.
Low voltage.
In Swan Lake the liveness is less extreme; therefore the separation is more concrete. Yes, the music is out in front. You will do better (if you try) by facing forward than by turning around to face the rear speakers. (One is vaguely conscious of the out-of phase element in the SQ rear, which merely makes it sound more like the back of a hall. Quite proper and musical.) Yes, in normal fashion the omnipresent higher strings are off to the left and you hear them in front, though they are loud in the back speakers too, if you try separately. Yes, the hall sound is very much all around you. Not surround-instruments. Surround-hall.
Now what strikes me as significant is that, for the average well trained stereo listener, these two discs do not sound radically different. Instruments all in front? Instruments lined up around the four walls of your room? You aren't even going to notice. The visual contrast would of course be enormous just imagine it. But in pure sonic listening, it dissolves away and is no more than a contributing factor to more forward impressions.
In both recordings what you hear first of all is surround sound. Even though, of course, that impact is a product of the recording technique.
Other things follow along-liveness, clarity of the fi, instrumental balances and-bless us!-the performance and the music itself, all as primary conscious listening factors. Exact instrumental placement, I am quite certain, is last on the list. Not unimportant! But it rates as an unconscious influence, vital in the recording technique but not to be noticed as such in the listening.
In other words, an art.
Columbia doesn't say a word on the records about specific recording techniques. Right. Let the music speak 'for itself, via four loudspeakers in one living room. Let the quadraphonic experience define itself, in its own terms. Ably assisted, of course, by us record critics. How we do go on ... . I'd like to hear an alternative Le Sacre in a much drier recording place, with this same all-around instrumental placement. Then you would more consciously notice it, which would be interesting. After all, this piece isn't a classical golden oldie. It can, and should, take a harder, drier modern studio sound as an alternative to the swimming pool treatment.
Performances: B; A; Sound: A-; A
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15 (1971). Philadelphia Orchestra, Ormandy. RCA ARD1-0014, quadradisc, S 5.98.
Fifteenth! Will the man never stop? Haydn wrote more than a hundred, but his were short and precise. Shostakovich goes on and on.
This one has plenty of virtues. First, it is one of the shorter ones, relative to, say, the mammoth Seventh ( Leningrad). Second, it definitely marks a returning point, a kinship with his First, that wonderfully snazzy, dry opus that launched the very young Shostakovitch's world career back in the thirties.
This Fifteenth is a bit like Beethoven's Eighth, also a concise work that referred back to earlier styles but in a more complex and concentrated fashion. I like this aspect. I like the dry, early-thirties sound here, refreshing in Shostakovitch's always expert orchestration.
Third, curiously, this is a quote piece.
Right away we hear the Lone Ranger--that is, the theme of Rossini's familiar William Tell Overture. Then a bit from Shostakovitch's Seventh and other quotes from a whole galaxy of earlier Shostakovich works, or allusions to them. In the later stages there is a remarkable series of references to, of all composers, Wagner: more than one, including the tell-tale rising interval of the beginning of Tristan.
Fourth, this is very much a solo, or concertante symphony, sparely scored, full of small groups of instruments and solos. Excellent, especially on disc.
It's not really very short, only relatively so. Don't expect this composer to write briefly! But the length here is, shall I say, palatable. I like the music, though I do not think it is world-beating masterpiece. Bartók can say more in ten measures than S. in a thousand.
Quadradisc? Well, at least it sounds fine on standard two-channel stereo.
Also via Columbia SQ matrix decoding.
Why not! RCA has done very well in approaching conventional LP standards here, after a not very auspicious beginning in the early prototype CD-4 quadradisc demonstrators. This makes a perfectly good stereo disc, very compatible. As for discrete four-way playback, I wouldn't know. Nobody has yet told me of a decoder I might use, to listen discretely. I'm waiting. While I try one matrix decoder after another, all floating in my direction without the slightest effort on my part. Very curious-for we all would like to hear RCA's best four-way sound, you may be sure. (Maybe by the time this appears in print I will be hearing it. Who knows?)
Performance: A- Sound: B (2-channel)
Schumann: Davidsbundlertanze.
Brahms: Sonata No. 1. William Masselos, piano. RCA LSC 3291, stereo, $ 5.98.
William Masselos is one of those young pianists (he is now getting on towards middle age) who are just "around", year after year, doing excellent and workmanlike jobs but not exactly hitting the big time. It is startling, then, to find this man a real powerhouse genius on records. RCA obviously thinks so. Why isn't he "celebrated"? Probably, I would say, because there are pianists who are modest in everything but their music itself, without fancy charisma, and he is apparently one of them. Other pianists have the gift of big show and these are the ones who grab the spotlight. But on records, all is equality! Masselos comes into his own.
His Schumann is astonishingly good, and his Brahms is just as good.
Schumann is really tough for any pianist these days, not the notes but the expression. The middle generation pounds him out drily, and fails; the very young go all moony and romantic, and also fail, for Schumann is not as soft as they think. Masselos has an edge of modern hardness to him, entirely appropriate to his age and training. But his Schumann is big, dramatic, imaginative, beautifully shaped with never a false emotional tone-some feat, and few can do it.
Often, he is as suddenly powerful as Rachmaninoff himself, but with the intelligence of a Schnabel. Great man! He really grabs at you. His Brahms, that youthful, exuberant Brahms aged 19 or 20, is perfectly proportioned too, full of reckless youthful spirit and yet as disciplined as Brahms himself already was in his playing. The Schubert and Brahms go marvelously well together, and RCA's recording is as good as it always is.
Performances: A; Sound: B +
Cherubini: Missa Solemnis in D Minor. Wells, Forester, Shirley, Diaz, Chorus and Orch. the Clarion Concerts, Newell Jenkins. Vanguard VCS 10110/11, two discs, stereo, $ 7.96.
Cherubini was a remarkable figure, an Italian-born musician who became a Frenchman (like Rossini) and survived in France from before the Revolution straight through until 1842, very nearly to the Second Empire. He was a conservative in outward style--his late music still has the ring of Mozart and Haydn-but in more profound ways he was solidly up to date.
This vast Mass, composed in 1811, is even larger than the later Missa Solemnis of Beethoven and, similarly, was composed in the new manner, not on commission but simply as a work of art. It is hardly Beethoven in scope, but it has a grandeur and breadth and dignity that are very much of its day, out of the Eroica.
The Mass is a specialty of Newell Jenkins and thus it gets a fine performance here, with his own polished little orchestra and a brace of top soloists including the fabulous Maureen Forrester. The chorus is typical Jenkins-a gaggle of New York roving pro singers, all full of brassy wobbles and unblend, yet musically alive and intelligent. The orchestra, oddly, is quite different-Jenkins has imported a very Italian style of string playing to New York (he had an orchestra in Italy for some years after the war)
which features precisely the opposite, a very smooth, non-vibrato tone with exquisite blend. Too bad that Jenkins can't dig up singers who can produce the same sort of tone! They only exist, around our parts, among the amateurs, and the amateurs aren't able to learn the music fast enough for the New York pro tempo, nor with enough strength and accuracy for a big work like this.
Performance: A; Sound: B+
Robert Casadesus: Piano Sonata No. 2. Alban Berg: Sonata, Op. 1 Hanns Eisler: 4 Klavierstücke. Carol Col burn, piano. Orion ORS 7298, stereo, $ 5.98.
This young lady pianist has a most interesting repertory, and a persuasive presentation. (Her earlier Orion disc offered two very early piano works by Richard Strauss.) Robert Casadesus is one of those composers about whom everybody says, Oh, I didn't know he composed-as though it were crazy for a famous traveling virtuoso pianist to do any such thing! Others of the recent breed were Ignace Jan Paderewski (premier of revived Poland after WW I) and Arthur Schnabel. Schnabel's modern sounding music, indeed, is a shock to all who think that if he composed, it would have to be in the manner of Beethoven, now, wouldn't it? It isn't! The Casadesus Sonata-dare I say it-pleases me a lot more than the Casadesus rendering of such as Beethoven. I was not one of his big fans; I liked his colleague Gaby Casadesus better. His own music, though, is really charming and subtle in a highly French way-which perhaps explains why I did not like his (enforced) concert Beethoven and the like. He was, after all, French. This music is all shimmering harmonic color, old fashioned in a way, seemingly out of the first decade or so of the century though composed in the U.S. in 1941 and 1942. It has a lot of Ravel in it, but minus that Ravel violence that keeps peeping out from the Ravel elegance and style. This music is elegant and stylish, too. I enjoyed it.
In contrast, Alban Berg's first published work, Opus 1 of 1906, is both very much of its time and very Germanic-Austrian, a late post-Romantic piece, full of that tortured elegance that Schoenberg brought to its final phase and dissolution (Berg was a Schoenberg pupil at this time). Very modern for the date. In a way, more modern than Schoenberg himself at that early time. Like all Berg, though, it is human, persuasive and personal and, therefore, given a sympathetic performance such as this, very easy in the listening.
As for the third set of items, Eisler is the musical brother of the ill-famed Gerhard Eisler, pounced upon by the well known C. on Un-American Activities in 1947. This Eisler was a musical "fellow traveler" in that he composed music with political overtones and believed that music was a powerful force in that area, which nobody can deny. A counterpart of, perhaps, our own Charles Seeger in the same period (the "Pete Seeger" family) and, in another fashion, Kurt Weill, Gershwin and plenty more, not to mention John Lennon of a later generation. This Eisler, too, was forced to get out. The little pieces on this disc, however, date from long before and are also of the school of early Schoenberg, more dissonant than the Berg but also much mousier, less forceful. Pleasing little mystical fantasies, thoroughly atonal even though it was early for anything as systematic as the serial music (twelve-tone) of Schoenberg, which Eisler did not adopt. Pianists in search of unusual contemporary music should grab this disc. Also listeners, the same.
Performances: A, Sound: B
Las Cantigas de Santa Maria. The Waverly Consort, Jaffee. Vanguard VSD 71175, stereo, $5.98.
This imaginative and musical reconstruction of a Medieval Spanish collection of songs is based on a currently in-production "stage" show, following after the New York Pro Musica precedent with The Play of Daniel, put on a good many years ago with immense success in various New York locations. But the recorded version is an excellent media job on its own, even though the colorful costumes of the "live" show are visible only on the album cover. The collection, dating from King Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, dates from long before Christopher Columbus; this king died in He was a poet and musician and probably the actual composer/author of some of these really splendid legend songs, about the exploits of the Virgin Mary in assorted miraculous healing capacities.
The music is monodic, that is, without harmony--just a single line of melody. How awful this used to seem to us! No more. With the proper musicological aid of old instruments, in particular percussion and, here, a really beautiful set of hand bells, the ancient music comes forth with sophisticated and colorful appeal, as it obviously existed in its own time. The recorded presentation makes use of a narrator, Nicholas Kepros, who reads out each episode in the account while music plays, modern-style, in the background; then the song is sung in the original language, proto-Spanish or Latin. Excellent continuity for home listening.
What is intriguing here is that not a word (nor a note) is other than straight out of the original collection, which numbers more than 400 pieces of music altogether. The original, moreover, is itself "multi media", combining poetry, music and an exquisitely illuminated art-manuscript, still existing in a Spanish museum. The recording (and also the "live" performance) is thus a genuine transcription, or translation, of aesthetic material from one communication medium into another, and the radio-style techniques used in the recording are thus entirely authentic and defensible in terms of that media translation.
My only mild complaint is a familiar one. There are but two voices, a soprano and a tenor. They sing musically and persuasively. But the vocal sounds each makes are too often just plain modern New York. Granted that nobody knows what voices sounded like in those days--except that most assuredly they did not sound like modern New York classical. But in other countries, on other recordings, there has been a strong beginning towards at least the development of vocal styles that suit the older music and thus (a) don't sound anachronistically modern and (b) may well be like the older vocal tones, merely for being able to sing the stuff as written. No reflection on the solid efforts of our two singers here, Jan DeGaetani, mezzo, and Constantine Cassolas, tenor. They sing as well as any normal pro voices can, in this ancient other-world of the vocal art, more than seven hundred years old.
Performance: A, Sound: B +
(Audio magazine, Mar. 1973; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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