The Fabulous Philadelphia Sound Series. Philadelphia Orchestra, Ormandy.
Columbia, stereo, discs, $ 5.98 ea.
The above will have to stand for a veritable flood of good looking, good sounding recordings that Columbia has let loose, one on the heels of another, over many months' time-all of them, if I once more am right, actually made several years and more ago, before RCA took over the orchestra. RCA's newer recordings of the Philadelphia Orchestra seem scarcely a trickle in comparison. A strange situation! It is one more example of that curious timelessness which is a quality of recording, and so much a part of our communications age in many other ways. As soon as Lyndon B. Johnson was dead, his voice began to flood our air waves as it had not for years-he was back. So it is with extinct recording contracts. No sooner departed than revivified. With no orchestra to work with, Columbia seems to be dominating the Philadelphia Orchestra as never before.
The product is good, always, but predictable. Performances are as faultless as is ever likely in a first quality orchestra, interpretations are impeccably standard, for an old fashioned standard repertory, neither outstanding nor in any way under par. The emotions, the excitements, are well simulated and conveyed, one can often believe that they are genuine, on Mr. Ormandy's part as on that of the players. And yet--such a polished blandness. I find myself groaning every time still another Philadelphia recording turns up. There is so little I can find to say. Mr. Ormandy is the perfect headwaiter and maitre d' of an ineffable musical eatery. But Michelin, in France, would not give him four stars. That is for the totally all-out, dedicated maitre, with passion.
Performances: B, Sound: B+
Rossini: Sonatas for Strings Nos. 1-4. I Musici. Philips 6500 243, stereo, $ 6.98.
Mendelsohn: Die Frühen Symphonien (The Early Symphonies). Amsterdam Kammerorchester, Voorberg. Telefunken SKB-25074-T/1-4, 4 discs, stereo, $23.94.
Here is a five-disc bonanza of youthful string music by two well known composers, though the works, composed by both in their early teens, are not exactly well known. (The Rossini Sonatas turned up in, of all places, Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, the Mendelssohn early Symphonies are still not all published, these recordings having been made in part from direct copies of the manuscripts.
They are in major respects remarkably of a similar "school", one Italian, the other German; the two men were outstanding natural technicians and stylists who could write perfectly tailored and proportioned music from their first beginnings. That is the clear message of all these many gems of gorgeously idiomatic string writing.
The Rossini Sonatas, dating from 1804 (and his twelfth year) are brilliant, brittle, showy little pieces, all post-Mozartean (as we would say, though not as the Italians might put it), already clearly Rossini in manner, almost operatic in the scintillating first violin parts and the constant subordination of the fluent lower strings into a lively accompaniment. There is nothing of the Romantically profound here nor any very radical individuality-why should there be? Like all good young geniuses, Rossini was busy absorbing and mastering the musical language he found at hand. Best to play two or three at a time, no more. Too much alike.
The Mendelssohn Symphonies are on a somewhat larger scale though not much just thicker and more Germanic to a degree. In practice, that means an inevitable, and attractive, degree of interesting counterpoint, so that the first violins do not do all the work here; second, it means a German songfulness of the most grateful nature, if always elegant and aristocratic. Third, and even more Germanic, is a striving for profundity in outward expression; these are by no means just brilliant little entertainments. And indeed they get longer and longer from the first to the thirteenth. Composed mainly around 1823, when Mendelssohn was about 14, they are no less than extraordinarily advanced and mature, easily rivaling the work of Mozart but--age for age--perhaps even more profound, at least in the outward expression.
Maybe the comparison is not fair; for Mozart at 14 lived in a very different musical world. Even so, 14 against 14, Mendelssohn could win the honors in prognosis for future potential. That he did not live up to Mozart, in his equally abbreviated life, is one of the personal tragedies of German music.
It is interesting that neither of these two sequences of string works, composed squarely in the midst of the great Beethoven years, shows so much as a trace of Beethoven influence. All the works are essentially out of the older elegant, aristocratic tradition though Mendelssohn's more passionately extended expression shows that he was very much aware of new directions in music. As you listen here, note that the Beethoven Ninth Symphony was performed only months later and the Seventh had been public property in Vienna for ten years. You'd never know it.
The pure blending tones of the small I Musici string group are ideal for the Rossini, and the Dutch string performers, a similar small group, play the Mendelssohn with an equal expertise and liveliness, a somewhat richer body of sound. Both performances are just about perfect.
Performances: A, A; Sound: B+, B
Wanda Landowska--Bach: The Well Tempered Clavier, Books I, II. RCA VCM 6203, 6204, 3 discs each, mono, $17.94 ea. Book.
Wanda Landowska, the pioneer modern harpsichordist, began operations back around the turn of the century. She made notable 78 recordings in Paris between the Wars, many of which are now available on LP; they are generally her very, best, in her late prime, and include uniquely powerful interpretations of the Bach Goldberg Variations, albums of French harpsichord music-Couperin-and a splendid set of Scarlatti sonatas. For years, these recordings so far surpassed any few others in, shall I say, sheer charisma on the harpsichord, that Landowska was that instrument. She had such a sense of drama, such marvelous feel for rhythm, for color in registration, plus a then astonishing grasp of the older ways of ornamentation, only now generally observed by musicians (and still by few pianists!). I grew up on Landowska. She was a phonographic paragon in a class all her own.
RCA caught Mme. L. in this country in her last years, when she settled in Lakeville, Connecticut (a few miles from my own home). The RCA recordings were made there, after the grand old lady had given up an active concert life. This was, if I remember, in the early fifties, alas before stereo but, luckily, after tape. And so RCA can still transfer the originals with improved disc quality into these up to date sets the entire "forty-eight" preludes and fugues in interpretations that still to this day are arresting, original and wholly creative. Pianists who haven't heard her may well be shocked out of their black-key-white-key complacency! Other harpsichordists (and harpsichord listeners) will merely be amazed, though most will understand that Landowska plays as of her own time, in a remarkably Romantic fashion with unusually thick registration, lots of doubling (more than most harpsichordists use today) and a freedom from rigid tempi that is no less than astonishing.
The harpsichord sound will strike most listeners as inexplicably wiry and thin. This is not by any means entirely the recording, though the signal is not as clean as it might be today if newly done over. The explanation is in part the mic placement but much more the French type of harpsichord which Landowska always used, a modern instrument with just this relatively wiry sound, very brilliant in the highs.
I heard Landowska once in Carnegie Hall, solo. The stage was dark, the audience late. Dramatic tension!--no Landowska. No lights. Suddenly, a perfectly huge single pink lamp on a tall stand on stage went on all by itself, virtually the only light in the hall.
Electric! And then the great lady appeared. It was a show worthy of the Rolling Stones. During the (unamplit'ied) soft passages not a sound could be heard in the high upper balconies.
Neither was there the ghost of a sound from the packed audience. Absolutely weird just that super-dramatic crouching figure, far down below, with the classic forward nose, sharp as a razor, the startling black hair and the erupting "pony tail" bun jutting rearwards. And total silence. Up close, via the recording mics, you will find the same drama but a hundred times louder. It's an experience, I assure you.
Performances: A, A; Sound: B
Scarlatti: 23 Sonatas. Anthony di Bonaventura, piano. Connoisseur Society CS 2044, 2 discs, stereo, $11.96.
All these sonatas by Scarlatti, two whole LPs, on the piano? As almost every listener knows, these brilliant little sonatas, one movement each, in two repeated halves, were composed for the harpsichord and in fact are the harpsichord's most prized music, exploiting every aspect of that instrument's varied tone colors. Since the harpsichord returned to favor, after more than a century of total eclipse by the piano, the Sonatas have become increasing favorites for their easy, tuneful brilliance, as well as their frequent colorful suggestions of Spanish guitar music-they were composed in Spain in the early Eighteenth century.
Yes, pianists still play them. They always have had a selected few in their repertory of "old" music. But normally they are, for pianists, no more than delicate (and wrongly delicate) little antiques, to show how beautifully the piano thunderer can do miniatures, on the tiny points of his fingers. Not generous towards poor Scarlatti, who was a major musician, and the practice is happily declining, I am glad to note.
This album is altogether another kettle of, er . . . sonatas. No pianist merely going in for flashy programming would do twenty-three of the works! Instead, this is a major translation of the Scarlatti repertory into piano terms, and an honest one, with every respect due to an important composer. I have not heard piano Scarlatti for years that so earnestly and accurately redefines the musical marvels of these little works into terms of piano tone, so different from harpsichord. I highly recommend the album, for just plain listening and perhaps for comparison, too, with equivalent harpsichord recordings.
Performances: A, Sound: B+
Frans Bruggen--17 Recorders (17 Blockfloten). Solo and with Accompaniment. Telefupken SMA 5703-T/ 1-3, stereo, 3 discs, $17.94.
Frans Brüggen is young enough to sport very long hair-and to consider the recording art equal to that of the concert; he goes in for both, plus extensive teaching. The man is the first modern genius of the recorder. With that plain old "chair leg" of an instrument, minus keys, furnished merely with finger holes, he plays music that is just beyond belief. Especially if you are one of the millions who have tried that "easy" instrument. Easy to blow like a whistle, yes! But very difficult to play well. After all, the modern improvements are mainly towards easier playing in such parallel instruments as the flute and oboe.
But most astonishing of all is the fact that every note of these often incredibly difficult works was composed hundreds of years back and committed to paper.
That implies, of course, that there were in fact recorder geniuises back then too, who could produce these same notes.
I often wonder what happens to the potential geniuses of this and that--tennis, chess, relativity, piano, automobile mechanics, anything you can name--who were born before their time. Or after it, like the non-existent recorder geniuses of the Nineteenth century. No doubt about it, it takes the gift and the right moment to produce a functioning genius. Here is one.
In these recordings Brüggen plays seventeen different recorders, both old and new. The art of building the instrument has, of course, also found its modern geniuses. One recorder, here, was made in the year of Bach's birth, 1685 in Amsterdam. The music ranges far and wide over the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries; perhaps the most remarkable works are the virtuoso Fantasies for solo recorder, a half dozen scattered through the six sides. If you play recorder, you simply will not believe them.
Performances: A, Sound: A-
(Audio magazine, Apr. 1973; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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